Category: Poverty & income gap
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Slaying the Debt Dragon – or Feeding the Beast?
by James A. Bacon There aren’t many things that almost everyone across the ideological spectrum agrees about, but one of them is that indebtedness from student loans is out of control. Here in Virginia, about one million students owe roughly $30 billion, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch — or about $30,000 each on average. The loan…
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A Poverty-Fighting Program that Pays Its Own Way
by James A. Bacon People have lots of ideas about how to address poverty. Most of them don’t work, as the United States has learned from more than 50 years of building a welfare state. Ever-hopeful social reformers always have some bright new idea they believe will make a difference — unlike all the bright new ideas that…
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Social “Justice” and Wealth Destruction
by James A. Bacon It is well documented that African-Americans and Hispanics lost a higher percentage of their net worth since the Great Recession of 2007 than did whites and Asians. The pressing question is why? The dominant explanation is that racism and discrimination — or at least the after-effects of overt racism and discrimination reflected in…
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The New Wave of Senseless Violence
by James A. Bacon This may be the most grim but fascinating sociological insight into the nature of poverty and crime I’ve seen all year… While violent crime is down overall in the City of Richmond since its horrendous peak in the 1990s, which earned the city the reputation as a murder capital of the…
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The Forgotten Victims of the Crack Addict
by James A. Bacon Carl V. Hughes IV, a 28-year-old Chesterfield County man, had a serious addiction to crack cocaine. Living with his sister and elderly parents, he frequently stole from them to support his habit. According to testimony from a recent trial, he’d stolen a video game system and games from his sister, a…
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Hosing the Middle Class: Campus Edition
by James A. Bacon Paige Taul, a 19-year-old University of Virginia student, earns $8.25 as a cashier at a college bookstore. Assuming no taxes were taken out of her paycheck, she would have to work about 80 hours to earn the $657 that UVa charges its students through fees to support the athletic program. “Wow, that doesn’t…
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No Easy Route on the Jeff Davis Highway
by John Szczesny Kudos to the Richmond Times-Dispatch for putting a human face on Chesterfield County’s plan to revitalize the Jefferson Davis Highway corridor. The RTD’s Pathway to Poverty feature is a sobering look at how poverty and homelessness have made life a daily struggle for so many in the area. It also begs the…
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More Meaningless Numbers from Virginia Educrats
by James A. Bacon In a story that generated front-page headlines, Governor Terry McAuliffe announced yesterday a “significant increase” in the number of Virginia public schools earning accreditation in 2015. The number of fully accredited schools increased by 10 percentage points to 78%. “Offering every Virginia student a world class education in a public school is…
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Shutting Down the School-to-Prison Pipeline
by James A. Bacon Amid growing national concerns about “mass incarceration,” particularly of African-Americans, a Center for Public Integrity study found in August that Virginia schools refer students to law enforcement agencies at a higher rate than schools in any other state in the country — and three times the national average. The report highlighted…
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Woolly Headed Thinking about Transportation
by James A. Bacon Virginia Beach’s ongoing debate over light rail is emblematic of everything that is wrong with Virginia’s system for determining which transportation projects get built. While the Virginia Department of Transportation is implementing a mechanism for ranking road and highway projects, there is no mechanism for ascertaining the proper balance between roads/highways and…
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How the War on Poverty Went Awry
by James A. Bacon In 1968, nearly five decades ago, Edward C. Banfield wrote a brilliant analysis of urban problems in America: “The Unheavenly City.” Today, his contributions have been all but forgotten. But they are worth resurrecting because of their prescience. While optimists proclaimed that the expansive programs of the Great Society would conquer poverty, Banfield…
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Addressing the Racial Divide in School Performance
by James A. Bacon Race is a bigger indicator of success than economic status in Lynchburg city schools, asserted Jay McClain, assistant superintendent for instruction, at a school board retreat yesterday. Even when controlling for economic disadvantage, white students show pass rates about 20 points higher than black students, he said, as reported by the…
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Highland View: a Poor School that Works
by James A. Bacon Highland View Elementary School educates children from one of the poorest districts in Bristol, a city where the poverty rate is nearly twice the state average. Poor families, mostly white, grapple with the same kinds of issues commonly associated with inner-city black families in Virginia’s urban crescent: broken families, high unemployment, alcohol…
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Maximizing the ROI on Investments in Human Capital
by James A. Bacon There is a sterile quality to the debate over universal childhood education. Liberals cite studies that say that it makes sense to invest in pre-school for poor children on the grounds that it increases the odds that kids will perform better academically, thus less likely to drop out of school, more…
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How Inflated Are Hospital Charity Care Numbers?
Bart Hinkle, an editorial writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, has long crusaded against “baroque and opaque” pricing in the hospital industry, a fundamental flaw in the health care system that makes it difficult for patients to exercise consumer choice. Now Hinkle is taking aim at the accounting conventions by which hospitals calculate how much charity care…