I can't find any source for social program spending by year that covers the same period.
That's all you have to say. You of all people should know this:
CORRELATION =/= CAUSATION
By your logic and single cherry picked broad graph, we could blame crime rates on skirt length or even more plausibly, the population explosion of the post-war Baby Boom. All you've proven is that when you remove enough context, you can make statistics say whatever you want.
If your hypothesis had
any credibility at all, then it should be reproducible across segments of society and at multiple points in time, not just in a single broad stroke... say for instance during the New Deal era or within other industrialized countries throughout the world. As it has been repeatedly pointed out by others, that's impossible to do even within the United States. The fact of the matter is, both sides to this argument can be "proven" with sufficient statistical slight of hand... which means that whatever eggheads you're banking on to prove your point is demonstrating a hard bias in floating a theory that at best, only holds true to tiny pockets of people, not society on a whole.
As an aside, James? It's a real shame you decided to throw away over 20 years of scientific research on the whole lead poisoning thing because I linked a single article from Mother Jones that honestly had one of the best write-ups on the studies without much of any bias. Come out of your ivory tower, you might learn something new.As for Reepekg's linked study (thank you for actually trying to bring some academic study to the discussion instead of broad speculation, by the way), I think the study suffers a bias itself in that it takes a corollary event to prove a pre-supposed conclusion: the rise of social program spending in our society that happened to coincide in a reactionary manner with the increase of crime and decrease in cognitive functionality within the population as a result of tetraethyl lead usage within the population, and spins it into a defense of increased spending on social programs as an effective means to reduce crime. Personally, I don't have a problem with the idea that social spending can help lower overall crime rates... after all, if a beggar doesn't have to steal his food, he won't. However, to say that social program spending has anything more than a tertiary impact on overall violence and crime rates within society is missing the entire point of violent crime and its resulting tolerance within society, and to the exclusion of that end and logic, we could just as easily claim that heavily medicating half the population with SSRIs these past couple decades is equally responsible towards decreasing that violence in society. The reality is, both are just bandages dancing around the real problem of our society's culture and the devaluation of our fellow man. It's just as absurd as blaming
or defending gun use in society for these same statistics... they're just another tool that can be used for good
or evil.