Category: Poverty & income gap
-
Sorry, NYTimes, the South Is a Land of Opportunity
Americans believe the United States is a land of opportunity, a country where people who work hard enough can get ahead. The faith in one’s ability to improve one’s economic circumstances is especially strong in the South. Ironically, contends Patricia Cohen with the New York Times, nowhere is the gap between perception and reality greater…
-
Universities as Engines of Income Redistribution
An article in the Wall Street Journal today explains how middle-class American families are finding themselves swamped with debt. Consumer debt (not including mortgages) has climbed to $4 trillion, higher than it has ever been, even counting for inflation. The major sources of that debt: credit cards, car loans and… student loans, which now exceed…
-
An Education Where Students Have Skin in the Game
The Cristo Rey Network, a chain of Catholic schools, has enrolled its first class of 105 students on the former campus of Benedictine High School in Richmond, creating an affordable private-school alternative for dozens of low-income black and Hispanic youth. What makes Cristo Rey unique is the degree to which students and their families put…
-
The Most Cost-Effective Anti-Poverty Program Known to Man: Contraception
Back to exploring “root causes” of poverty… This chart shows vividly how poverty is a demography-driven phenomenon. Poor people have more children than the not-poor do, and they have children at a younger age. The consequence of this “disparity” in fertility rates is that the percentage of children raised in poverty is vastly higher than…
-
Teen Births and Violent Crime — a Weak Connection
I’ll be the first to admit, giving me an Excel spreadsheet is the intellectual equivalent of handing a chimp a machine gun. What I don’t know about statistics would, well… it would fill a statistics textbook. But I abuse statistics less than most journalists, commentators, and politicians, who, to paraphrase renowned economist Ronald H. Coase,…
-
Thousands of Virginians Getting their Licenses Reinstated
Some 37,700 Virginians who couldn’t drive yesterday can drive today, thanks to a budget amendment to Virginia’s Fiscal 2020 budget, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. More than 600,000 drivers have suspended licenses because a failure to pay court fines and costs, creating a Catch 22 situation for thousands: People can’t repay their fines if they can’t…
-
Pious Platitudes about Poverty and Crime
The City of Petersburg has the highest homicide rate in Virginia, with 53.5 killings per 100,000 residents since 2013 — exceeding Virginia’s other homicide hot spots of Danville, Hopewell, Richmond, and Portsmouth. So reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch in a recent article. In talking to the RTD, Petersburg Police Chief Kenneth Miller was reluctant to blame…
-
Unpaid Bills, Debt Collection, and Hospital Profits
Carlos Ortiz underwent tests last year at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg for dizziness stemming from an inner-ear problem. When the 65-year-old uninsured gardener couldn’t pay his $15,000 bill, the nonprofit institution took him to court. Mary Washington was suing so many patients that day that the circuit court had cleared the docket to hear…
-
How Crime-Prone Students Worsen Educational Outcomes for Everyone
Exposure to crime-prone students in school has “large and significant” effects on test scores, school discipline and even adult criminal behavior, finds a new study by Stephen B. Billings and Mark Hoekstra published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Exposure to crime-prone peers in the same neighborhood also has an effect, but the negative influence…
-
A Nonprofit Insider’s View on Child Nutrition
Last week I asked the question how, given our nation’s’ extensive social safety net, it is possible that children in Virginia go hungry and suffer from malnutrition. Are government support payments deficient? Are food deserts to blame? Do people squander their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) stipends? Is something else going on? The explanations we…
-
If Kids Are Going Hungry, Does Anyone Care Why?
No one wants to see children go hungry, so one’s natural instinct is to sympathize with a new initiative like No Kid Hungry, which is helping parents and caregivers locate free meals in their communities with a simple text message. But a Richmond Times-Dispatch article profiling the program makes a startling statement: The school year…
-
As Arlington Housing Prices Soar, Supply Is Unresponsive
The worst fears of Amazon critics are coming true. Housing prices are becoming increasingly unaffordable — even before Amazon sets up shop at its HQ2 facility in Arlington and floods the region with 25,000 employees. The average home price in Arlington County jumped 7% in the past year to $713,000, as investors poured into the…
-
The Crux of Arlington’s Affordable Housing Crisis: $350,000 Per Unit
Amazon will donate $3 million to support affordable housing in Arlington County, the company has announced. While government officials and charities welcomed the donation, reports the Washington Post, critics contend that the sum is sufficient to build only a handful of units. According to the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance, new housing in the Virginia…
-
Promoting Social Mobility via STEM Education
Job openings outnumber job seekers by a record gap, the Wall Street Journal reports today. There were a seasonally adjusted 7.45 million unfilled jobs at the end of April compared to 6.2 million Americans looking for work. With workers so much in demand, there exists a never-seen-before-in-our-lifetimes opportunity to increase social mobility. Here in Virginia,…
-
Want More Affordable Housing? Try Free Markets.
Exclusionary regulation at the local level is the root cause of unaffordable housing, and a rollback of exclusionary regulation is the best long-term solution, argue Salim Furth and Emily Hamilton, research fellows at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “Contemporary American land use law embodies the bad idea that private land ought to be publicly planned.…