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Dr. Walter E. Williams in a recent column blamed government for the breakdown in black families.

Government welfare programs have taken the place of a father in homes, which used to rely on Dad to earn the living, or at least a considerable portion of it.

Williams cited the sharp increase in single-parent families among all people but black citizens in particular with the increase in federal welfare spending.

Williams can get away with this kind of “racist” talk because he’s black. He is also a highly respected George Mason University economics professor, not to mention an esteemed, syndicated national columnist.

Williams uses this scenario to explain the lack of educational achievement in the black community, noting that when the breadwinner-father is not in the home, there is another problem,  a breakdown of discipline and motivation to succeed.

He also comments frequently about the disturbing trend of lack of discipline in schools and the need for armed policemen in schools in largely black cities.

Making Work More Attractive Than Welfare

Rhode Island Center for Prosperity determined that Rhode Island residents can earn the equivalent of $20.83 an hour by not working and being on welfare.

Rhode Island’s minimum wage recently rose to $9 an hour and there’s a push by Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10.

The conservative think tank reported: “RI should make working more attractive than welfare! Common welfare programs give income of $43,330 or $20.83 an hour.”

Politifact, a “fact checker,” jumped all over the report, not denying the figures but claiming that an individual who received that amount would have to claim benefits from every available program to get that amount of money and most recipients don’t.

A release on Politifact’s website said it contacted RI Center for Prosperity’s CEO Mike Stenhouse to challenge the report.

The source for the claim, said Stenhouse, is a report from the libertarian Cato Institute called “The Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off: 2013.” It examined the value of various welfare programs by state.

The Rhode Island total comes from starting with the $6,648 a year in cash welfare that a single parent with two children could receive, which is the only unrestricted cash that recipients would see. (It’s also 34 percent less than what recipients got in 1995, adjusted for inflation, according to Cato.)

Then you add in $6,249 per year in food stamps (now called the SNAP program), $12,702 in housing subsidies, $11,302 as the cost of buying health care coverage comparable to Medicaid, $275 in heating assistance, $300 a year under the Emergency Food Assistance program (TEFAP), and $1,156 in food under the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program for pregnant women, new mothers and children up to age 5.

The total -- $38,632 -- is equivalent to what a single parent with two children would get to keep after taxes if the parent earned $43,330 a year, or $20.83 an hour for a 40-hour work week, Cato said.

“Many welfare recipients, even those receiving the highest level of benefits, are doing everything they can to find employment and leave the welfare system,” the Cato report concluded. “Still, it is undeniable that for many recipients – especially long-term dependents – welfare pays more than the type of entry-level job that a typical welfare recipient can expect to find. As long as this is true, many recipients are likely to choose welfare over work.”

Politifact continued to rebut the report and finally concluded that it is “mostly false.”

You can look up the report for all its arguments against RI for Prosperity’s report on @politifact.com.

We can’t imagine anyone who wants to see children going without food, healthcare and shelter, but the fact such benefits are available leads to the destruction of the family unit (Dads in the house) and disintegration of American values, such as a strong work ethic, as a whole. We recall an earlier Williams column in which he pointed out that black families’ earnings power was growing faster before the welfare state was instituted.

No doubt there will always be disparities in income. Only about 1 percent hit the top-earning tier, but if opportunity exists for improvement through one’s own merit, doesn’t that explain why the ancestors of millions of Americans immigrated here in the first place?

Effects of Raising Minimum Wage

The Rhode Island Center for Prosperity in another report said raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024 would lift wages for 41 million Americans.

It added:

“The federal minimum wage was established in 1938, as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), to help ensure that all work would be fairly rewarded and that regular employment would provide a decent quality of life. In theory, Congress makes periodic amendments to the FLSA to increase the federal minimum wage to ensure that even the lowest-paid workers benefited from broader improvements in wage and living standards.

Yet for decades, lawmakers have let the value of the minimum wage erode, allowing inflation to gradually reduce the buying power of a minimum wage income. When the minimum wage has been raised, the increases have been too small to undo the decline in value that has occurred since the 1960s. In 2016, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 was worth 10 percent less than when it was last raised in 2009, after adjusting for inflation, and 25 percent below its peak value in 1968.

We can’t help wondering if the government couldn’t serve its citizens better by just getting out of the way and not attempting to run the entire economy.

Higher minimum wages reduce the opportunity of young people to break into the labor market and learn valuable skills at a wage that companies, smaller ones in particular, can afford.

A one-size-fits-all law seldom, if ever, works correctly.

Individuals working in an industry can make better business solutions than elitist lawmakers sitting a thousand miles away.

Most laws, it seems, are written to benefit one type of business over another – picking winners and losers. That’s not a proper government function.