Minority Babies Now the Majority

Time to celebrate!

The Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

Cool! Are there any potential downsides to this momentous achievement? Sure - but you know whose fault that is:

The contrast raises important policy questions. The United States has a spotty record educating minority youth; will older Americans balk at paying to educate a younger generation that looks less like themselves?

For older Americans, the obvious solution to the problem of having so many young people who "don't look like us" is to encourage them to start looking like us - stop having Hispanics identified as "minority" and join the majority; encourage mixed-race people to identify with the majority. The only reason for a latino to resist the "white" label is that there are all kinds of goodies to be had with the "Hispanic" label.

Still, there are serious challenges ahead in particular with the low level of college degrees among current Hispanics (13% vs 31% of whites). "But there are bright spots" the article notes. You'd think that statement might lead into a description of, say, efforts by Hispanic business leaders to start pushing education and changing the Latino culture that's so dismissive of education. But then you'd be forgetting whose fault this is.

Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said the immigration debate of recent years has raised the political consciousness of young Latinos and he is hopeful that more will become politically active as a result. “We have an opportunity here with this current generation,” Mr. Vargas said. About 50,000 Latinos turn 18 every month, he said.

I'm feeling better already.

Rather Predictable

It's not even ironic that in the wake of a massive financial crisis driven by the Federal government's relentless pressure on lenders to relax lending standards and make more home loans to minorities, one of the few actions Eric Holder's Justice Department has taken in this sphere is to charge a bank with unfair lending practices to minorities. And not just any bank, of course, but the Typhoid Mary of minority-outreach lending, Countrywide. I'm not surprised - are you? No, I didn't think so - saw it coming a mile away.

The specific allegation - that Countrywide "steered" black and Hispanic customers to higher-fee, higher-rate loans compared to whites (with allegedly equivalent qualifications), is not entirely implausible. Given Countrywide's "$Trillion Pledge," some serious recruitment of minority candidates was needed. To really ramp up minority lending, you can't just sit behind a desk and wait for the customers to line up. You've got to go out and find them, convince them that they could indeed get a loan, and assure them that that dishwasher's salary won't be a problem, trust me. These recruits need a little heftier commissions to get the job done, so it's hardly shocking they might just convince the prospective borrower to pay a bit more in interest and a bit higher fees than a customer who comes knocking on your door with LendingTree data in hand.

Yet, despite a plausible scenario to explain it, I seriously doubt the allegations are backed up by the data. Typically these "equivalent qualifications" fail to take into account borrower's net worth. And more important, is there any data showing that minority borrowers performed better with subprime loans than white borrowers? I doubt it - if there were such data, it would have been revealed long ago. In fact, the Federal Reserve has carefully guarded any such data, leading me to believe the exact opposite is true - that minority performance was actually worse. Bank of America - which owns Countrywide - settled the complaint without a fight, of course.

Illegal? There was Nothing Illegal!

Obama has received characteristically little grief for his claim that the fraud that drove the Wall St. debacle wasn't illegal. For Obama and the left, such quaint, common-law legal concepts like "fraud" are irrelevant in a modern state. Regulations are the way to go - the government establishes detailed regulations and legions of regulators micro-manage firms actions. Fraud - a charge that requires detective work, witnesses, forensic accounting, etc. - is just too messy, too unpredictable to bother work.

Regulations, on the other hand, could prevent these bad actions before they occur, plus direct commercial activity towards achieving policy goals, such as financing for favored projects. Of course that was all tried before - the S&L crisis, the Enron scandal (which begat Sarbanes Oxley, arguably the most burdensome regulatory regime ever) - and it happened anyway.

Fraud prosecutions in this scandal might not have been all that difficult. You start with the borrowers who lied on their applications, and then go right up the chain to the brokers, their managers, the financiers who put together the CDO's and on up to the top. Sarbanes-Oxley itself, which effectively criminalizes incorrect earnings statements, should have been able to bag a few CEO's all by itself. But apparently no one in the Justice Department has found this massive web of fraud anything but an impenetrable morass.

I must confess, though, to having some sympathy for the banksters. Though I have no doubt they engaged in out-and-out fraud, I'm also convinced they're behavior was essentially foisted upon them by the government's minority-lending mandates. Starting early in the Clinton administration and then amped up by W. himself, banks faced the choice of stagnating or aggressively pursuing minority lending. But of course at the same time they are being pressured by the government to take on less profitable business (less profitable because the loans are riskier), the banks are under tremendous pressure by shareholders to be more-and-more profitable.

Well the only way to avoid losses on riskier assets is to increase leverage. So they appealed to the authorities for relaxed leverage rules, requests which the authorities all too willingly accommodated since it was towards a noble cause. But as we all know now, pumping up leverage is like being a mule-skinner transporting nitroglycerine - the pay's good but one bump and it's all over. The CDO's were an effort to share the risk - like paying the other wagons to each take a bottle or two of nitro - but then what happens of course is that when one blows, all the other wagons go up with it.

On the other hand, the banks could have showed some courage and fought back, insisting that no business model could withstand this kind of debasement of best practices. They could have insisted that bank lending is too fundamentally critical to the nation's economic health to be subject to politically correct mandates. But such courage is nowhere to be found in the business world. Indeed, the Diversity Doctrine is so deeply entrenched in corporate culture that almost certainly those in charge actually believe it.

Asymmetric Political Warfare

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Texas' appeal of a judicially imposed apportionment plan and issued a stay against the plan's implementation. The Justice Department claims that Texas's reapportionment discriminates against Hispanic voters by reducing their representation. But what this case really comes down to - and how I think the 5 conservative justices will decide - is the Justice Department attempting to dictate to states the partisan makeup of their delegations, which is clearly a violation of state sovereignty.

Back in the early days of the voting rights act, which imposes onerous restrictions on jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory voting rules, the question was whether you'd have a white Democrat or a black Democrat in the legislature or in Congress. Now that whites in the South have pretty much made a complete party switch, enforcing the Voting Rights act means mandating more Democrats than the legislature would prefer. But it is the right of state legislatures, going back to the early days of the Republic, to maximize their party's representation via apportionment.

States dominated by Democrats, however, have no such concerns - they can apportion their voters as they see fit (granted, California voters decided to implement a non-partisan apportionment scheme, but that's their choice). So how is it a level political playing field if one party is forced by the courts to give up seats while the other can operate without restrictions? It isn't, of course, which is why I think the 5 'good guys' on the court will overturn it. The question is how weasily will they do so?

This imbalanced political landscape is not just restricted to the Voting Rights Act. The Republican Party is basically the party of white America, but of course such an entity as "white America" cannot be acknowledged in mainstream outlets (except of course as a source of some evil). A Republican legislator cannot complain that his constituents are being forced to move because their schools are becoming disabled by excessive numbers of non-English speakers or poorly behaved minorities. So instead he must complain about "illegal" immigration in the vaguest of terms and express displeasure with the failure of schools by blaming teacher-unions (bastions of anti-Republican rhetoric). A Democrat, on the other hand, can freely rile up his constituents by denouncing "discrimination" and favoritism, regardless of the facts.

Similarly, any Democrat politician, black or white, can make unlimited hay over alleged racial profiling among the police or "institutional racism" in the law enforcement. But no Republican politician would dare court white voters by defending the police, pointing out, for example, the disproportionately high levels of criminal behavior in the black community. When it was recently revealed that some NYPD officers had the nerve to complain on a facebook page about having to work during the West-Indian Day parade which annually features gun-fire and police injuries, who came to their defense, pointing out that people who engage in gunfights during a parade deserve to be called 'animals'?

The essence of this asymmetry in political combat is that Democrats are free to rabble-rouse and demagogue their positions without penalty - indeed, often with great showers of media attention for doing so - while Republicans must rouse their constituents only obliquely through proxies - religious faith, gun rights, opposition to gay marriage, and of course "No New Taxes". Even then, we often hear pundits denounce the "Three G's" - Gays, Guns and Gods - so even their proxies are derided.

But this leads to dumb policies - or at least failure to enact sensible policies. We can't have sensible gun laws, because Republicans have to prove that they sympathize with white-Americans' anxiety over the baneful impacts of minorities on their neighborhoods not by addressing that issue directly but by supporting unrestricted gun rights. Gay marriage is stupid - but the real problem is the insidious "Diversity" mentality that so offends the white middle class, but instead of fighting that, Republicans must single out Gay marriage (and even that fight is being rapidly lost). And Religion leads to unnecessary constitutional battles, while it is just a proxy of course for the desire of white Americans to keep America the way it is - not a banana republic, not a dysfunctional, balkanized economic zone, as it is on its way to becoming.

Wishful-Politik

U.S. foreign policy continues to be in safe hands. In a speech she gave a few weeks ago (but that I only just heard about tonight in a gushing report on NPR), Hillary attempted to explain the unexplainable - our Mideast policy. She gave a little FAQ apparently, including this Q&A:

What will the United States do if democracy brings anti-U.S. governments to power? "The suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous, and wrong. They do it in this country every day," Clinton said. "Parties committed to democracy must reject violence; they must abide by the rule of law and respect the freedoms of speech, association, and assembly; they must respect the rights of women and minorities; they must let go of power if defeated at the polls; and, in a region with deep divisions within and between religions, they cannot be the spark that starts a conflagration. In other words, what parties call themselves is less important than what they do."

I love that - "The suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous, and wrong." What she means of course is "the suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting - and therefore dangerous and wrong." There's a lot of "musts" in there too - none of which have ever been followed in any MidEast Islamist state - ever. So is the plan to bomb these new governments when they ultimately fall short? No, they not. While it's silly to imagine that the administration has any particular goals in mind in stumbling upon its foreign policy, one theme can be expected to act as a guiding force: no government which professes an animus against the West - in particular those openly hostile to American interests - need fear our intervention. Thus Syria, Iran, Cuba, Korea, Venezuela - completely safe from our interference. Of course that's only right - no government, friend or foe, should fear our intervention provided they do not threaten or attack us. But it would be ideal if governments that are actually friendly towards us should feel safe as well.

The Gap Continues to Shrink

The 2011 NAEP results have just been released. Last year I provided some graphs on a declining trend in the Black/White gap in grade school scores. It appears that this trend is continuing - and not starting to flatten out. Here are the Math gaps:

This represents a very small narrowing that if continued at the pace of the last 6 years would not eliminate the gap within the lifetimes of anyone reading this now. Reading results are also narrowing at a similarly slow pace:

Now as to whether these very meager victories in the war against The Gap are worth the billions of dollars and public resources that have been mobilized to fight it - that's another question entirely. But it would be really depressing if the gap were actually widening. Another depressing thought is whether the kind of widespread cheating we have seen in Atlanta and New York City could be behind this improvement as well.

More Diversity to Celebrate

Note the relaxed, uninhibited, even jocular manner with which the amiable Brazilian fishermen deal with the annoying dolphins that insist on getting caught in their nets, as shown in this video. Isn't the internet great how it provides us opportunities to challenge the rigidity of our cultural norms. (Via Drudge).

Related:
Dolphins Not So Smart?
Japanese Hunt Dolphins for Fertilizer