Category: Poverty & income gap
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Takeaways From the GOP’s Big Win
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in Business and Economy, Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka The night of Tuesday, Nov. 4 was an ugly one for the Democrats and a big win for Republicans. Here are my takeaways from it: U.S. Sen.Mark Warner clings to a tiny lead that seems to grow slightly, still making it uncertain if opponent Ed Gillespie will ask for a recount. The…
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Steve Nash’s Important Book
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in Business and Economy, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka Stephen Nash, a former journalist who teaches at the University of Richmond, has written an important new book about how climate change could affect Virginia. His detailed reporting is impressive and I think he shatters the arguments of global warming deniers. Here is a book review I did for Style Weekly: “Imagine…
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Attack the Demographic Underpinnings of Poverty
by James A. Bacon There is a case to be made for family planning and access to abortion services as a way to improve the lives of poor women. If you lean liberal in your politics, you’ll probably be comfortable with the arguments advanced by Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell (published yesterday morning in the Times-Dispatch).…
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Sticking it to the Chinese
By Peter Galuszka This is a review of “Factory Man,” a book about the Virginia furniture business and dealing with the inequities of Chinese trade by Beth Macy (Little Brown, 451 pages). This was first published in the October 2014 Bulletin of the Overseas Press Club of America in New York of which I am…
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Tracking the Forgotten Virtue: Thrift
by James A. Bacon More interesting data from WalletHub: In a ranking of 150 metropolitan regions by 16 metrics indicating the degree to which local populations adhere to responsible household budgeting practices, Virginians fare better than their peers in any other Southern state — and that’s not just a reflection of the outsized influence of Northern Virginia,…
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Brat’s Strange Immigrant-Bashing
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in Business and Economy, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Electoral process, Federal issues, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Labor and Workforce, Media, Money in politics, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka It must have been an interesting scene. Congressional candidate David Brat had been invited to a meeting of the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce along with his Democratic rival Jack Trammell to outline his views on immigration and undocumented aliens. Brat, an obscure economics professor who nailed powerhouse Eric Cantor in a…
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The Uphill Climb for Virginia Schools
by James A. Bacon Why aren’t we making more progress improving the academic performance of Virginia’s school children? Many reasons have been advanced. Some say that school divisions don’t get enough money or that the money is unfairly distributed between schools. Others say that the public school system is over-regulated, bound by bureaucracy and resistant…
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Virginia Students Achieve SAT Gains
Some good news about College Board SAT scores in Virginia to balance out the dismal news about Standard of Learning (SOL) pass rates: Public school students eked out gains in average SAT scores in 2014, continuing to outperform their counterparts nationally. Average public school reading scores improved by three points on the 200- to 800-point…
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Good Ruling on Congressional Redistricting
By Peter Galuszka A panel of federal judges in Richmond has scrambled the carefully laid plans of legislators, most of them Republicans, to pack African-American voters into one congressional district to give the GOP an advantage in some of the state’s 10 other districts. The panel of U.S. District Court judges decreed that the General…
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Health Insurance as Driver of Income Inequality
If you want to address increasing income inequality in the United States, a good place to start would be to bring runaway health insurance costs under control. Health care costs — not globalization, automation or corporate greed — are the biggest driver in income inequality today, argue Mark J. Warshawsky and Andrew G. Biggs in the…
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Petersburg’s Renaissance
By Peter Galuszka Petersburg has been a special place for me. Years ago, when I’d pass through, I always felt I were driving onto the set of a 1950s or 1960s movie set in the South such as “Cape Fear” starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. A somnambulant ease pervades the place as does the…
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Do-Gooders Doing Bad
by James A. Bacon In a recent post, “Spotlighting the Wrong Victims,” I questioned the premise that “disparities” in arrests and suspensions of Henrico County students for school offenses represented some form of racial injustice. John Butcher, author of CrankysBlog, sheds further light on the issue. Read this post as a footnote to the original.…
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Spotlighting the Wrong Victims
by James A. Bacon Black students comprise 39% of the public school student population in Henrico County but account for 80% of all the kids arrested for offenses committed in schools. That disparity, combined with the fact that black students are disproportionately suspended from Henrico schools, is something that some people find disturbing, according to the…
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Changing the Culture of Reading
by James A. Bacon Dr. Carolyn Boone is a pediatrician who serves a largely African-American patient base in Northside Richmond. In addition to providing check-ups and vaccinations, she participates in the Virginia “Reach Out and Read” program, the goal of which is to teach the joy of reading to young children — and maybe to their…
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Values, Income and Academic Performance
by James A. Bacon Last night my wife and I engaged in an annual ritual of the school calendar. We went to Douglas Freeman High School to meet our son’s teachers and learn about the classes he’s taking. This was not a social event. We know very few Freeman families. Our motives were pragmatic. We…