News stories have been filled with statistics about police shootings. Although many of these statistics seem contradictory, they are remarkably consistent when you dig deeper.

Let’s start with facts that everyone can agree on: there is a statistical disparity. African-Americans represent 13 percent of the American population, but 26 percent of the people killed by police are black. Many political candidates and even members of Black Lives Matter often just stop with that statistic, and don’t consider a more relevant baseline.

Heather MacDonald in her new book, The War on Cops, reminded my radio audience that according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults (in the largest U.S. counties). Another group we should consider is cop-killers. These are men who present a lethal threat to police. According to FBI data, about 43 percent are black. In fact, law enforcement officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.

Consider the study done by Dr. Roland Fryer (Harvard professor of economics). As an African-American, he said he was angry after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray and decided to collect data to understand what was happening in the streets of America. He and his research team examined 1,332 shootings.

He found no evidence of racial bias when it came to lethal force. If anything, he found that blacks were slightly less likely to be killed. Roland Fryer admitted that this conclusion “is the most surprising result of my career.”

For example, when looking at the issue of “shoot or don’t shoot,” he found that officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot suspects if the suspect was black. It is worth noting that he did find evidence of bias when it came to nonlethal force.

These latest statistics illustrate that many of the slogans used in protests simply are not true.

Globalization has benefited most everyone on this planet except for the middle class and especially people in the working class. A chart posted by Timothy Carney shows how the global population has fared economically over the last twenty years. I have included the graph with the transcript of this commentary so you can see it for yourself.

On the far left the poorest of the poor are still as poor as they were. But almost everyone else is doing better economically. This includes the global lower-middle class all the way to the global upper class. But the chart dips down dramatically for one segment that can be identified as the middle class and working class in wealthy countries like the United States.

In the past, the working class and middle class benefited from being born in America. They had access to resources and materials they could exchange in a free market. Also, they were shielded from competition and industries using workers with lower wages. Globalization opened America’s working class to competition from other parts of the global workforce.

This chart has appeared in other articles and has often been referred to as the globalization “elephant chart.” In other words, globalization is often the “elephant in the room” that nobody is talking about. Now, to be fair many politicians have talked about the fact that wages of the middle class have declined. Some have suggested trade barriers and all sorts of political and economic solutions.

The problem in finding solutions can be seen in the graph that shows how well the wealthy have done. The political and economic elite have benefitted greatly from open borders, free trade, and globalization. How motivated do you think they might be to make economic changes that might benefit the working class when it might have a negative impact on their earning potential?

When elites in this country and other wealthy countries are getting richer from globalization, I think they won’t be very motivated to help the working class.

On various television sitcoms, a Dad acts like a buffoon every 3.24 minutes. That was the conclusion of a small study with the title “Daddies or Dummies” done by Savannah Keenan at Brigham Young University after watching popular TV programs.

Don’t dismiss this study merely because a student conducted it. Her study was the winner of the college’s Fulton Conference. And Naomi Schaefer Riley, writing in the New York Post, reminds us that the student’s research matches other academic studies. For example, a study by Erica Scharrer in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media found that the number of times a mother told a joke at the father’s expense increased dramatically from the 1950s to 1990.

Savannah Keenan’s study also looked at the reaction of the children onscreen to their father’s stupidity or cluelessness. At least half the time, children reacted negatively by rolling their eyes, making fun of Dad, criticizing him, or walking away while he was talking to them.

We should be concerned about the message this is sending to children. America is already facing a crisis because of its fatherlessness. Fathers are often seen as insignificant and unimportant. These programs are reinforcing the negative stereotype that fathers are incompetent and uninformed.

I realize that on past television sitcoms Dads were sometimes the butt of jokes. Their mistakes made them human. Sometimes they even had to apologize to their kids. Sometimes the children were able to trick them and sneak out of the house undetected.

But in these past sitcoms, it was still obvious that Dad was in control. He was an authority figure in the home. There were consequences to disobedience. Now Dad is someone to ignore. He isn’t very competent and certainly isn’t someone to obey and respect. We aren’t helping families when TV sitcoms turn Daddies into Dummies.

America may be a divided country politically, but there are some issues where there is near universal agreement. That would certainly be the case with corporate welfare, or what many call “crony capitalism.” Progressives and conservatives are against it because the government favors some companies over other companies and because taxpayers are on the hook to help large corporations.

Brent Gardner argues in an op-ed column that it is time to end “the corporate welfare circus.” Not only is this a problem at the federal level (with tax loopholes, tax cuts, and carve outs), it has become an issue at the state level.

Boeing assembles jetliners in the world’s largest building in Everett, Washington. It announced a few years ago that it was looking for a location to build its new 777 plane. In order to keep Boeing from leaving, the state of Washington had to put together a $8.7 billion package, which is the largest such giveaway in American history.

There are many other examples. North Carolina sent $320 million to Apple and $250 million to Google so they would build data servers in the Tar Heel State. Kentucky gave $500 million in tax breaks and subsidies for Toyota and Ford auto plants. Nevada delivered $1.3 billion to Tesla Motors to build an electric-car-battery plant.

Akash Chougule (Americans for Prosperity) was on my radio program and made a good point. If a tax break was a good thing for one company, then it should also be good for all companies. Essentially, these state governments are making the case for cutting the tax rate and reducing intrusive regulation that prevents job growth.

Unfortunately, state governments seem all too willing to play favorites and pay certain companies so they will stay within their state borders or be enticed to relocate to their state. This is crony capitalism at its worst.

You may have noticed that the contentious issues in the culture war seem to be coming faster and with more intensity. In a recent commentary, Kevin Williamson validates that observation.

He begins by reminding us how long it took for homosexuality to become mainstream. The decision by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual took place in 1973. But homosexual acts were still listed as criminal for an additional 30 years until the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas overturned laws on homosexual sodomy. He then reminds us that even after ruling, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ran as candidates in 2008 opposing same-sex marriage. By contrast, he says “transgenderism took a shorter and much more direct path.”

Both the speed and intensity have been greater on the transgender issue. We can look at what the Obama administration threatened in North Carolina when the state legislature offered what most would think would be a reasonable accommodation. We can look to New York City where the mayor threatened nonconforming businesses and other establishments with huge fines if they did not adjust to transgender demands.

Kevin Williamson shared his own experience when the Chicago Sun Times reprinted his essay from National Review that raised important questions about surgical attempts to change a person’s sexual organs. The firestorm of reaction illustrates one point. Another point comes from the fact that he quoted from Dr. Paul McHugh who has been critical of sex-reassignment surgery. A number of studies show that, “Such surgery often is harmful, or produces harmful results.” Kevin Williamson wonders, though, if someone like Dr. McHugh would even be allowed to publish such an essay today.

This is the result of an aggressive transgender culture war.

For more than 200 years, candidates have been running for election in districts that were gerrymandered. The term comes from the name of the governor in Massachusetts. In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that changed the district lines for candidates. One of those contorted districts in the Boston area resembled the shape of a salamander. Thus the term “gerrymander” was born.

Recently I learned that gerrymandering goes all the way back to the first congressional elections and involved two of the founders. One of them was James Madison, architect of the Constitution. The other was James Monroe. Both went on to become the fourth and fifth presidents of the United States.

In the summer of 1788, Virginia became the 11th state to ratify the Constitution. Governor Patrick Henry called for elections and worked to prevent James Madison from serving in the Senate or the House of Representatives. First, he worked with members of the Virginia legislature to deny Madison a Senate seat. Back in those days, the legislature selected the U.S. Senators.

Next he worked to deny Madison a seat in the House of Representatives. Patrick Henry convinced the Virginia Legislature to draw the Fifth District lines so they included both Madison’s home and Monroe’s home. The two friends were forced to compete against each other.

During the election, they traveled together and debated each other at various gatherings. Through hard and smart campaigning, Madison managed to defeat Monroe and then serve in Congress.

There is a bright side to all of this. During the debates with Monroe, Madison realized how important a Bill of Rights would be. Some of the voters wanted such protections. So he made a campaign promise that he would support a Bill of Rights when elected to Congress. This is one campaign promise that was kept. Within six months, Madison pushed through the Bill of Rights which were later ratified.

I suppose you can say that good things sometimes do come from districts that have been gerrymandered.

Nicholas Kristof stirred the political waters when we wrote an op-ed with the title “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance.” The response to his piece led to a second one with the title “The Liberal Blind Spot.”

He began his first piece by acknowledging that, “We progressives believe in diversity, and want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — so long as they aren’t conservatives.” He concludes that liberals are fine with people who don’t look like them as long as they think like them.

He quotes from Professor George Yancey, who is a sociologist who is a black evangelical. Yancey, who has been on my radio program, says that he faced some problems as a black outside of academia but faced many more problems inside academia because he was a Christian.

Nicholas Kristof seems appalled at the response to his first op-ed, hence the reason for his second commentary. Liberals have written that, “Much of the conservative worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false.” Another asks facetiously, “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots.”

Although he gives good examples of outstanding people in various fields that are evangelicals, his liberal friends will have none of it. That is why he is calling on his readers to begin to tackle their liberal blind spot. He cites a survey that shows that a majority of academics in some fields would discriminate against a job seeker that was an evangelical. He says that feels like bigotry.

Part of the problem may be that liberals are isolated and don’t know any evangelicals. He reminds us of surveys that show that Americans have negative views of Muslims when they don’t know any. He says that he suspects that “many liberals disdain evangelicals in part because they don’t have any evangelical friends.”

I applaud Nicholas Kristof for his observations. Sadly, I doubt it will have much of an impact on the millions of closed-minded liberals.

A third of all young adults are single, broke, and living in their parent’s home. That’s how some are describing the latest results from the Pew Research Center study of the millennial generation.

More young adults are now living with their parents than with a spouse or a partner. This is a tipping point for the first time in modern history. About 32 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are living in their parents’ homes compared with 31 percent who are married or living with a partner in their own household. The remaining 36 percent live alone, are single parents, or live in dorms or with other relatives.

One researcher explained that this was a much different transition from previous generations. In the past, setting up new families was more typical than what we find today. In many ways this shows a postponement of marriage. This is likely due to both lifestyle choices and economics. It is worth noting that some of these trends were taking place before the economic downturn nine years ago.

But economics is another obvious reason for more young people living at home. They face a difficult labor market and therefore are unable to living independently. That is why fewer and fewer of them are married or even living with someone.

These economic realities are even worse for men without a college degree and for people of color. The highest percentage (36%) of men living with parents is black and Hispanic men. The lowest percentage (19%) is men with college degrees. Wages for all men have stagnated over the last few decades, and the labor participation rate has dropped significantly.

None of this is helping improve the housing market or other aspects of the economy. If you don’t own home, you aren’t likely to be spending money on appliances, furniture, or other household items.

All of this merely demonstrates that the image of a millennial living in his or her parents’ home isn’t just a stereotype: it’s reality.

Neal Gabler, writing in The Atlantic, begins his essay with this disturbing statistic from a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Board. The survey asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. They found that 47 percent of respondents said they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something. In other words, they could not come up with the $400 any other way.

Gabler asks: Who knew? He then answers that he knew, because he is one of that 47 percent. He said he knows what it is like to swallow his pride and constantly dun people to pay him so he can pay others. He knows what it is like to dread going to the mailbox because it usually has more new bills and rarely a check to pay for them. He knows what it is like to tell his daughter that he may not be able to pay for her wedding.

His point is you wouldn’t know this by looking at him. You could look at his resume as a writer and conclude he was doing fine. He is in the middle-class (even upper middle class) with five books and hundreds of articles to his name. That is why he wrote about what he calls, “the secret shame of middle-class Americans.”

One financial psychologist says that you are “more likely to hear from your buddy that he is on Viagra than that he has credit-card problems.” To struggle financially is a source of shame. The only protection is silence.

Another study concluded that nearly half of American adults are “financially fragile” and are “living close to the financial edge.” And it is worth mentioning that this is not just a liquidity problem, that they don’t have enough ready cash in their checking and savings account. Median net worth has dropped significantly.

The lesson here for everyone from politicians to employers is this. When we say that American workers are hurting, it is actually much worse then we might suspect.