correlation between Divorce rates and Government spending

[things make sense]

Thomas Sowell has previously made claims about welfare state destroying the black family. 

There is a YT video that I watched which suggests that Divorce rates and government spending are not correlated at all.

There seems to be a contradiction here. 

Please watch https://youtu.be/4wpca1ZDIRQ?t=20m13s and let me know your thoughts. 

[webdever]

It is a good video but I don't think he actually refutes the claim that the welfare state doesn't affect divorce, instead he tries to refute something which I don't think I've ever heard anybody argue, that "government largesse caused the increase in divorce", and shows a graph of total government spending as a percentage of the GDP.

 

I don't really know what the actual data is here, but a quick google search pulled up this: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/?_r=0 , which shows the rate of entitlement spending vs total government spending. I don't know why the author of the video chose to use statistics on "government largesse" and then try to make the case that cutting social spending won't affect divorce but it does seem misleading.

[Guest Gee]

I came to a very similar conclusion as webdever.

 

The video author claims to correlates total spending in time, not entitlement or welfare spending.

 

I found it suspect that the author included the 1930 to 1950 government spending data points and I found it suspect that the author refers to libertarian arguments as conspiratorial whispers.

 

More importantly when one correlates two variables, is not the procedure to plot them against each other on linear or log axis? 

 

I would of liked to see a graph of total spending vs log single motherhood, it would clearly be a strongly positively correlated.

 

I think he is deliberately obfuscating.

[Frosty]

You guys might like this video on government vs divorce