Inexperienced, very liberal politician files papers to run for President

You guys could go back and forth in that fashion all evening. I don't think NYC could affect the national numbers that much.



D&D. Numbers can be Cold.

 

Strike that. I'm not sure which figures Major is referring to.

 

None - it was pretty much across the board, nationwide.

 

Of course it wouldn't, it only had 3-4% of the nations population, accordingly its impact on national crime indices is miminal as a simple arithmetic matter.

 

Sam, I was trying to be polite!



D&D. The Artic is in Austin!

 

I don't think enough is being made of how liberal (or Progressive, as the cool people are calling it) Obama is. The quote from people I know from Chicago was that he never met a spending bill he didn't like. He voted heavily in favor of both social and corporate welfare at every opportunity. It could be that he was just pandering to his district, but much of his writing shows otherwise.

He is a very smart and charismatic liberal, and that will carry him far, but I still think he's too far left to win in the national election. 70+% of the population says they're tired of big government Presidents. I know this sounds like the rhetoric that Obama wants to avoid, but it is a true pattern.

'Tis a shame that Evan Bayh dropped out, he would make an excellent President.

 

There are probably racists who would get up to vote should the media report the Southern Black voters "voting in droves". It'll be tricky for him to shake Black voters out of their apathy while not inflaming other voters who might feel slighted.

Ultimately, it'll depend on the issues Obama will stand for and whether it presents an aggressive threat to the values the South holds (states rights, culturally "Christian" policies, gun control and civil rights).

 

can you please give me a link? to these stats?

Dinkins had no interest in stopping a riot in Crown Heights, nor did he have any interest in protecting Asian grocers. His entire administration was marred by his indecisiveness especially when it came to crime. If I see Dinkins as soft, you'll have to forgive me, I can't see how anyone who lived through the Dinkins era could ever say otherwise.

 

The theory brought up in freakonomics was this. In the late 1980's/early 90's, economists and social scientists across the board thought crime would go through the roof over the coming decade. You'll remember that in the 1992 Clinton/Bush campaign, crime was one of the hot-button issues. As it turned out, there was an across-the-board decline and no one could figure out why. Lots of people credited the Clinton 100,000 police and assault-weapons bans. Statistics showed little correlation though. Many people credited NYC-type crime fighting programs - same result, limited correlation.

However, there was one thing that DID have correlation. It's ugly, and it is not in defense of the policy, but the correlation was very strong. It was about 20 years after abortion was made legal. The theory is this: the majority of babies aborted likely would have gone to bad homes or been unwanted. Those types of kids are the most likely group to become criminals. Around 18-25 yrs old is the height of a criminal's activity. Thus, there were millions fewer high-risk-of-being-criminal people coming into prime criminal age at that point. Suddenly, your pool of criminals just simply shrunk. Sounds a bit quirky, I know, but the logic does work. They also looked at states that had legalized abortion earlier and those states saw this across-the-board drop earlier. If I recall correctly (I don't have the book in front of me), the correlation was pretty strong.

Like I said, controversial theory and certainly not a justification of abortion policy, but maybe a very real side effect of it.

 

Of all the talk about his experience, his being black, etc - this is the part that's been forgotten. He's kind of looked at as a moderate because he doesn't act as childishly partisan, etc. But he's been pretty far left in his limited time in government. It remains to be seen how this will translate to a Presidential run. I'd like to find out, though!

I think someone else said it best on TV - he is basically an empty vessel right now where everyone can project what they hope and want into him. Over the next year, we'll see how much of it he lives up to.

 

Whoever came up with that theory just advocated Eugenics for poor people. The less poor people there are, the lower the crime rate.

 

can you please give me a link? to these stats?

http://samoa.istat.it/Eventi/sicurezza/relazioni/Langan_rel.pdf

I get it it's personal. But that doesn't change facts, and the facts are that Dinkins DID experience a dramatic drop of the crime rate (reversing all-time highs) durning his tenure - it was just too late to get him re-elected, and that you are way over-hyping Giuliani's accomplishments here.

 

It wasn't a political book, and he made clear he wasn't advocating the policy. He was just stating the ugly truth. They looked for tons of different causes, and this is the only one that fit the data. That doesn't mean you SHOULD do something, just that it happened that way.

It's actually a fantastic and very funny book (covers all sorts of different crazy topics - how children's names travel through society, this crime issue, the economics of drugdealers, etc). Basically, he tries to tackle questions no one else wants to or cares to.

 

I was hoping for a government link, not a report that I have to sort through. I'm lazy, sorry.

Guess it was personal to a lot of people then since he lost the re-election. and yes Iknow he only lost by like 2 or 3%. More than 90% of his vote came from the black vote, so basically anyone who wasn't black found something wrong with Dinkins.

 

How do you feel about the other book the Bell Curve? or stats that show the high percentage of blacks who turn to crime? Those are uncomfortable things which supposedly only show the truth also. before we get any further though, do you subscribe to his theory?

 

I haven't read the Bell Curve, so I'm not sure how that was all derived. I agree that a high percentage of blacks turn to crime - I think that's fairly obvious and needs to be dealt with (better schools, etc). I think the abortion theory has some logic on the surface, though as I mentioned earlier, it's controversial and I haven't analyzed the statistics to really say how much I would believe it. If you do a search for "Freakanomics abortion" on Google, you'll find people who argue with the work as well the author's own responses (there were some data errors in the original analysis; some say it has a material impact on the results, others say it doesn't).

By the way, from a political perspective, the abortion theory doesn't necessarily promote abortion even if you agree with it. For one, you could easily argue that abortion is the worse of two evils (with higher crime being the other) and it doesn't justify abortion. That's no different than stating that capital punishment for speeders would eliminate speeding, but it's not a logical or reasonable solution to the problem. The theory does say that unwanted kids are likely going to become criminals as adults. In reality, many of those unwanted kids were aborted. But if you're pro-life, alternatives include promoting stronger families, more abstinence, more contraception, better education, etc - any number of things that would reduce the "unwanted" part rather than the "children" part.

Anyway, before we go too far off topic, the reason I bring it up is as an alternative hypothesis to this idea that Rudy was responsible for this crime drop. Regardless of your thoughts on the abortion theory, it does bring out a lot of data that crime dropped substantially everywhere at the same time as it dropped in NYC. Which really undercuts the idea that the drop was due to anything unique that happened in NYC.

 

Uh....it's a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. I don't care if you read it or not. The fact is you're wrong about Dinkins and crime.

Utterly irrelevant, but I get that you don't like black people at this point, thanks.

 

yes, but you can't see it with his shirt tucked in...