Philip B. Richardson, whose Twitter profile identifies himself as a New York Times employee, posted a tweet at 8:12 PM yesterday that was as ignorant as it was vulgar:

NRO’s The Corner posted the tweet, which is perhaps why the tweet was subsequently deleted, though it lives on in the web archive.  NRO provides the video that provoked this outburst.

Mr. Richardson evidently does not know that prior to the Great Society, African-Americans had intact families at roughly the same rate as whites.  It was only when single motherhood became subsidized that the crisis of fatherless black families started building, something the late Daniel Moynihan pointed out and was scourged for doing.  Since the denunciations of Moynihan, the rate of fatherlessness has almost tripled in the black community, and upward mobility has declined.

I read Richardson as part of the movement to deny any connection between personal behavior and poverty, something Bill O’Reilly has been featuring on his Fox News program of late.  For them, prosperity is the natural state of life, and poverty must be explained by racism, not by any personal behavior.

As Thomas Sowell and others have pointed out, poverty is in fact the natural state of everyone.  Prosperity is the historical exception, the result of effort, ability, and opportunity put to use.  The question is not why are people in poverty, but rather how some people are able to escape that state.