Category: Poverty & income gap
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EITC Grants Do Nothing for Middle Class
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) proposal that Virginia Democrats are pushing for passage in the 2019 General Assembly is being sold as a major financial boon for the middle class, but is it? “Our working families making $54,000 a year or less are not going to see a big benefit from these federal tax…
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Northam Plans to Curtail License Suspensions
A huge victory for the drive-to-work movement: Governor Ralph Northam has announced plans to halt the practice of suspending driver’s licenses as a way to collect unpaid court fines and fees, reports the Washington Post. In Virginia more than 276,000 licenses were suspended in 2017 alone. The practice creates a Catch-22 for the people, mostly…
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EITC, TANF and the Benefits Cliff
For low income families receiving assistance in Virginia, their cash benefit from the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is larger – often substantially larger – than the cash provided by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). A single mother with two small children who has a full-time minimum wage job ($7.25 per hour) qualified…
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The Push for EITC Cash Grants Accelerates
With the 2019 General Assembly now a handful of weeks away, the main advocacy group for a new cash welfare entitlement in Virginia is ramping up its efforts with various appeals, perhaps testing themes for later use. On Wednesday on its website the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis was arguing that the state Earned Income…
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2019 General Assembly Session – Privatizing Public Roads in McLean, Va
Judge Dillon’s revenge. Development vs transportation has been a long running battle in Virginia. Northern Virginia’s local government politicians never met a developer (or developer’s campaign contribution) they didn’t love. Virginia’s state legislators love NoVa growth since it provides more state tax money to spread around like party favors to their downstate constituencies. However, those…
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Medicaid Expansion’s Achilles Heel: the Doctor Shortage
The Northam administration sold Medicaid expansion to the public in part by claiming that the net cost to Virginia taxpayers would be minimal. Uncle Sam would pay for 90% of the cost of extending medical coverage to up to 400,000 Virginians, and the state’s 10% share would be offset by savings in prisons, mental health,…
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A Crime-Fighting Experiment at Gilpin Court
The Attorney General’s office is funding an interesting social experiment. On the theory that fighting crime requires addressing root causes over and above actually, uh, fighting crime, the AG is providing $1 million to fund programs designed to improve health, education and economic outcomes and strengthen neighborhood ties at the City of Richmond’s largest housing…
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Smaller Class Sizes Not the Answer
Parents and educators commonly believe that smaller class sizes provide a superior education. It seems logical: Smaller classes allow teachers to provide more individual attention to students. But the evidence supporting this intuitive view is surprisingly thin. A new study by the Campbell Collaboration, which promotes social and economic change through evidence-based policy, which calls…
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Market-Based Social Justice: Roll Back Zoning Restrictions on Housing Supply
Unaffordable housing is a problem for more Virginians today than it was during the 2000s housing bubble. Median rent has increased at three times the rate of incomes since the end of the recession, says Hamilton Lombard with the Demographics Research Group at UVa on the StatChat blog. Among Virginians earning between $35,000 and $75,000…
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“Government Failure” in the Housing Market
Something is seriously out of whack here. The Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA) has a vision — a commendable one, I might add — of demolishing the city’s six public housing projects to end concentrated pockets of poverty, crime, substance abuse and social dysfunction. But it turns out that the price of developing new…
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Virginia’s Not-So-Crazy Rich Asians
Once the victims of discrimination, Asians now are prospering in the United States. The median income in 2017 for Asians in the United States was $83,500. That compared to a national average of $60,300 — a 38% differential. In Virginia, Asians’ incomes, and the income gap with other Americans, was even greater: $101,500 compared to…
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Some School Districts Do a Better Job Educating Poor Kids than Others
I’m playing around with Datawrapper, which provides cool ways to display data– don’t quite have the hang of it, but making progress. Anyway, my inaugural effort shows the considerable variability between school districts in pass rates for English Standards of Learning (SOL) tests. We all know that the socio-economic status of a student is a major predictor…
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Getting Virginians their Lives Back One License at a Time
L.C. lived with a relative in Amelia County, raising her daughter and driving to her job at a Richmond-area hospital. She frequently loaned her car to the family member. Unbeknownst to her, the relative racked up frequent toll violations. The charges quickly added up — $0.75 per toll, plus $25 administrative fees for not paying…
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Failing Richmond Schools Doubling Down on Failing Policies
The Richmond Public School System is in crisis, roiled by two independent audits and the publication of new state data showing that the administration is hobbled by rampant inefficiency, there are deep and pervasive achievement gaps between white students and black and Hispanic students, and the high school dropout rate is the highest in Virginia.…
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The Catastrophic Effects of Henrico Schools’ War on Discipline
Sometimes I ask myself, do I write too much about race on Bacon’s Rebellion? I lament the nation’s descent into racial identity politics — am I contributing to the trend by dwelling upon the topic so much myself? Then I encounter a report like “A Review of Equity and Parent Engagement in Special Education in…