Poll: Young People Reject Defunding the Police

 

A new poll by the Pew Research Center shows solid support for more funding for the police among young people.  The poll, taken in September 2021, found that 36 percent of Americans aged 18-49 support more funding for the police and another 40 percent support maintaining current funding levels.  Less than one in four—23 percent—want funding reduced.

Older Americans are overwhelming supportive of more funding with 59 percent supporting more funding and only 7 percent supporting less.

Americans of all races, ethnicities and political leanings all reject defunding.  Only one in four Democrats wants funding reduced.  Details from Pew appear below.

The unfortunate truth is that the defund the police movement has been terrible for young Americans.

Young people are more likely to live in urban areas than are older Americans and therefore more likely to be in cities like New York, Chicago, Portland, or Boston where funding for the police has been cut by progressive left-wing Democratic mayors. 

The toll on young people from the murder and mayhem resulting from police cutbacks has been enormous. 

Take the case of Chicago.  In 2019 Chicago elected a mayor who backs the defund the police movement.  Since that time the number of homicides involving young Chicagoans has skyrocketed.

In 2019, 365 Chicagoans under the age of 36 we killed.  In 2020, 570 Chicagoans between the ages of 0 and 35 were killed (including 101 teenagers and 14 that were younger than thirteen).  Chicago is on pace to beat 2020.  So far in 2021, 509 young Chicagoans have been murdered. 

The additional deaths of 400 young Chicagoans over the past two years provides stark evidence of the harms caused by the defund the police movement.   

The same trends are evident in Portland, Seattle, New York City, and Minneapolis—all cites with mayors and city councils that have defunded the police. 

Perhaps it is direct experience or that of friends or family with rising crime that is turning young people off to the defund the police movement.  In any event, the newfound appreciation for the police and law and order among young Americans is good news indeed.   

Senator Scott Explains What's Wrong with the Federal Reserve

This blog has been highlighting how Federal Reserve policy hurts young people:

• How negative interest rates harm young people by making it very difficult to accumulate wealth as inflation erodes the value of savings.
• How QE and low interest rates pump up asset prices forcing young investors to buy into overvalued asset markets and exposing young people to losses from asset price crashes.
• How low interest rate policies lead to the accumulation of government debt the burden of which will be borne by future taxpayers.
• How the accumulation of debt by government leads to greater risk of economic downturns and how these downturns harm the long-run prospects of young people that come of age in bad economic times.

Recently Florida Senator sent Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell a letter outlining his concerns.  The letter addresses many of the above topics albeit without specific reference to the impact on young Americans.

The Scott letter deserves a close read.  Follow this link to Senator Scott's letter.

 

This Blog Stands Against Censorship

 

The Truth About Free College

Democrats claim that free college would be a panacea for young people.  But what does free college really mean?  Generally, free education means poor quality education. 

Germany provides a great example. While German universities are free or at low cost (tuition is generally less than 1000 euros) the quality of education they provide is poor.  I can attest to that.  It is very rare to encounter a faculty member at a German university at a research conference.  No German university ranks in the top 50 worldwide whereas there are 8 in the United Kingdom.  

An excellent review of the state of higher education in Germany and the problems with tuition-free higher education is provided by Andrew Hempel in Quillette.   

"Yet the tuition-free system also has disadvantages. The first difference an American will notice is that most German universities look dingy and threadbare. Many were erected hastily in the 1960s and 1970s to house new students brought in by liberalizing reforms, and these cheap, poorly maintained structures are notoriously ugly (a German magazine recently ran a feature on “German Universities Ranked by Ugliness”). Most classrooms still feature rigid wooden or metal desks bolted into rows. Wireless coverage, library stocks, laboratory gear and classroom A/V equipment lag far behind the average American state university. It’s still possible to arrive to give a lecture and find an overhead projector awaiting your transparencies. Professors’ salaries are much lower than in the United States, and Germany’s problem with “adjunctification” and precarious conditions for aspiring scholars (known by the German neologism Prekarisierung) is becoming as urgent as it is in the United States.

This bare-bones regime also dominates student life and counseling. German universities are sink-or-swim: if you have scholarly or personal problems while studying, help will come only from overburdened counselors with hundreds of cases, or from student volunteers. Along with lax admissions standards, this fact helps explain the high dropout rates; one-third of all students who enroll in German universities never finish. A recent OECD study found that only 28.6 percent of Germans aged between 25 and 64 had a tertiary education degree, as compared to 46.4 percent of Americans (although classification issues mean these numbers must be handled with care). This chronic lack of resources—in addition to the understandable fact that many outstanding German scholars publish in German—also helps explain why German universities punch below their weight in international rankings, a topic of obsessive concern to German politicians.

Eliminating tuition also means that universities become more like primary schools, or public utilities. This changes the dynamic in subtle ways. Universities will become more vulnerable to funding decisions by agencies, leading to more intrusive control and bureaucracy. Gather any group of German professors, and talk will immediately turn to the burgeoning bureaucracy which distracts them from teaching and research. This changed dynamic also makes it harder to get funding from alumni and third parties. Would you donate to the local sewage treatment plant? Hardly; these things should be funded from tax revenue and, of course, user fees. Making universities fully state-supported also raises a host of issues under competition and public-utilities law. For this reason (among others) naming buildings or professorships after private donors is still fairly uncommon at German public universities, and “executive education” or outreach courses may be banned or regulated to prevent unfair competition with private-sector offerings."

German Election Results Show Young People Are Sick of Establishment Politicians

 

In September, young Germans voted overwhelmingly for change by rejecting the two establishment parties.  Are young Americans also ready to change politics in the United States? 

Unlike the United States, Germany has several major political parties though two, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Socialists (SPD), have run the country since WWII.  In the September national election young Germans rejected both parties.  Instead, the top voter getters among young people were the libertarian Free Democrats (FDP) and the progressive Greens each with 23 percent of the youth vote.  That may not sound like a lot by US standards.  But consider that the CDU and SPD combined gathered just 25 percent of the vote among voters between the ages of 18 and 22.

The concerns that led young people to reject the CDU and SPD sound a lot like the concerns of young people in the United States. 

Young Germans voted for change because they were sick of the government’s COVID restrictions. Reuters reports:   

Many young voters saw the FDP as a defender of their liberties and freedoms during the pandemic, Schnetzer said, when the government closed schools and universities, restaurants and fitness studios while keeping factories open to safeguard the economy.  School closures amounted to around 30 weeks since March last year compared to just 11 in France, U.N. data shows. The FDP was against blanket closures and wanted to give schools more power to decide if and when to close. Young voters "believe their well-being and interests were low on the government's priorities list during the crisis", Schnetzer said.

The other is that the establishment parties were out of touch with issues of interest to young voters including the soaring costs of Germany’s equivalent to the U.S. social security system.  From the Wall Street Journal:

Simon Schnetzer, a researcher who studies youth culture, says how the young voted partly reflects their sense that the big parties have been too focused on serving the older voters that are the bulk of their electorate, thus neglecting long-term issues from combating climate change to fixing education, promoting digitization, and plugging the pension system’s funding gap.

The CDU is like the George W. Bush wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. and the SPD like the old-time labor Democrats.  Both are in sharp decline in the United States especially among young people.  Like young Germans, young Americans are looking for new solutions.    

Will young Americans find a pro-opportunity, pro-freedom message like that of the FDP as appealing as young Germans do?  I hope so.  

The purpose of this blog is to point out to young Americans how the establishments of both parties in the United States and their special interest clienteles are shafting young people.  I will continue to do so in the future.