Category: Poverty & income gap
-
Metrics, Reality, and Virginia’s New Accreditation Standards
Tomorrow the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) will release the first public school accreditation ratings calculated according to the 2017 Standards of Accreditation. The new standards are designed to measure how well schools are educating Virginia’s school children, giving credit to schools that are showing progress even if they fall short of the standards. VDOE…
-
ACLU: The System, Not Female Prisoners, Guilty
You find what you look for. When you look for statistical evidence of discrimination and injustice, you will find it. In a corrections system in which 85% of prisoners are male, for example, the ACLU of Virginia finds evidence of “widespread and discriminatory suffering” imposed upon women. You see, while women constitute only 15% of…
-
Distracting from the Big Issues at W&L
Washington & Lee University is the latest in a growing line of higher-ed institutions to engage in navel gazing and self-flagellation over its historical role in slavery and racial oppression. While honesty and candor in such matters is always called for — it is all too easy to sweep uncomfortable legacies under the rug —…
-
More Bureaucracy Won’t Help Virginia Schools
Among the most dismal of the Standards of Learning (SOL) results released last week by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) was that only 72% of 3rd graders had achieved reading proficiency — down 3% from the previous year ans 12% from a decade previously. The usual suspects will respond to the news with the…
-
The Political Economy of Dental Care
No sooner has Virginia enacted one vast new entitlement, Medicaid expansion, than the drumbeat begins on the next. No matter how much money government dedicates to health care, food, housing, education, transportation, legal aid, or whatever, there is always someone who is getting the short end of the stick by comparison. Always. And the answer…
-
Full Conformity Raises $3.6B In First Five Years
Assuming the Virginia General Assembly conforms the state’s tax rules to the IRS code as it exists now, adopting intact the recent federal changes, the state will reap an additional $3.6 billion in revenue over the next five years. Almost $2.5 billion of that will come from personal income taxes, with an additional $1.1 billion…
-
Stay Put, Young Man, Stay Put
The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis has published a useful reminder of how job and wage growth has bifurcated in Virginia — jobs and wages have increased smartly in Virginia’s major metro areas since the recession but have lagged markedly in non-metro Virginia. The trends, which reflect the larger urban-rural divide nationally cannot be reversed,…
-
The Social Cost of Domestic Violence
Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) accounts for more than one in seven violent crimes in the United States. Between 16% and 23% of American women experience IPV while pregnant. Social science researchers have suggested that domestic abuse affects not only the mother-to-be but her unborn children, but the social cost of the problem has been difficult…
-
Who Are These Guys, and Where Do They Get All Their Money?
The report issued by the Northam administration investigating charges of abuse at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center has come under withering criticism by nonprofit groups that filed a lawsuit last year bringing attention to the treatment of unaccompanied immigrant children held there. The Virginia Mercury has the story here. While I used the Department of…
-
Moneysaurus and the Trumpenproletariat
Since the end of World War II, the nonprofit sector has consumed an increasing share of the United States economy. Health care, which is dominated by nonprofit hospitals, now hogs an 18% share. The growth of higher education, an overwhelmingly nonprofit industry, continues to outpace the general economy. Millionaires and billionaires are converting wealth into…
-
Graph of the Day: Virginia’s Declining Fertility Rate
The number of births in Virginia continues declining, reaching the lowest level in years in 2017 — only 100,248. A decade before, births had numbered 108,884. Demographers Savannah Quick and Shonel Sen at the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia attribute the overall dip in fertility decline to a dramatic decline for 15-…
-
Working? A Republican Anti-Poverty Plan Works?
“The federal EITC, together with the Child Tax Credit, lifted nearly 200,000 Virginians out of poverty each year from 2011 to 2013, including nearly 100,000 children.” Lifted out of poverty. Let that sink in a minute. The writer of that sentence is admitting that the federal Earned Income Tax Credit lifts people out of poverty. …
-
More Proof that Higher-Ed Sticks It to the Middle Class
As the cost of attending top four-year college marches relentlessly higher, students from higher-income households are doing just fine: Their family incomes are matching the increase in tuition, fees, room and board. And lower-income students are faring pretty well, too: Scholarships and financial aid cover most of the rising costs. So, if the affluent and…
-
Tennessee License Suspension For Unpaid Debts Ruled Unconstitutionally Unfair to Indigent
A federal judge in the Middle District of Tennessee has ruled that Tennessee’s practice of suspending a driving license to compel the collection of delinquent court debts is unconstitutionally unfair to poor people. She has ordered Tennessee to stop and to start restoring the licenses of people who simply could not pay, but an appeal…
-
A Partial Defense of RRHA Eviction Policies
I never thought I’d find myself defending the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA), which I criticized last year for running up a $150 million maintenance backlog on its 4,000 public housing units. But the wheel of public policy debate turns in unexpected ways. Now, RRHA is being dinged for its high eviction rates. Here’s…