Polls continue to show a significant shift in concern from fiscal to social deficits.
In spite of its economic greatness, America is increasingly embarrassed in the eyes of the world for its social conditions. It is humbling for the world's richest industrial nation to have a poverty rate twice that of any other industrial nation and to be singled out by international agencies as a world leader in child poverty and youth homicides. Moreover, as pointed out recently on this page, the rate of growth in white illegitimacy is now higher than that of blacks. Then take crime. When family type is taken into account the relationship between race and crime and low income and crime almost disappears.