Category: Poverty & income gap
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Let’s “Reimagine” Public Safety Built around Involved Fathers
by James A. Bacon When you ask a group of politicians, activists and intellectuals to put together a plan to “reimagine” public safety, you get a report like the one just issued by a City of Richmond task force. It calls for measures such as routing many 9-1-1 calls to mental health and conflict-resolution professionals…
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Bad Student Loan Debt: $435 Billion and Counting
by James A. Bacon “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen said many years ago. With the passage of time and inflation, we might need to update the quote to “a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there…” But even by the debased standards of…
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What Works: Helping Students Complete their College Degrees
by James A. Bacon In Virginia, nearly 30% of students who enroll in community college or four-year college fail to complete their degrees within six years. There is widespread agreement across the political spectrum that it would be a good thing if more students completed their degrees and fewer dropped out of college after loading…
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Bacon Bits: Government, Race, and Poverty
Whites need not apply. The initial draft of a Loudoun County Public Schools “student equity ambassador program” barred white students from admission to the program. The selection guidelines said specifically, “This opportunity is open to all Students of Color,” reports The Virginia Star. The guideline was deleted after whistleblowers called public attention to it, but…
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Energy “PIPP” Proposal Just the TIP of an Iceberg
By Steve Haner As the State Corporation Commission prepares to set up Virginia’s first electricity cost shifting program, using a tax on all electric bills to provide discounts to low-income customers, advocates are already pushing to expand and enrich it. An expert hired by an environmental group argues in testimony that the General Assembly erred…
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All Leader Saslaw Cares About: Is Dominion OK?
By Steve Haner Every now and then you can actually see the strings, see the puppet master that is Dominion Energy Virginia calling the shots at the Virginia General Assembly. Senate Majority Leader Richard Saslaw, D-Fairfax, provided a glimpse of its power during a floor debate Thursday. Republican senators were in revolt. Two days after…
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Dominion ❤ New Utility Bill Payment Plan
By Steve Haner Dominion Energy Virginia loves the General Assembly’s most recent proposal on how to deal with mounting unpaid utility bills in the COVID-19 recession. You might not. The state’s dominant utility has activated its network of grassroots lobbyists (including company retirees and stockholders) to express their personal support to their hometown delegate and…
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A Capitalist Solution to Food Deserts
by James A. Bacon Yesterday, channeling the spirit of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I asked what a young person should do if he or she wanted to make the world a better place. Broadly speaking, there are three approaches. One is activism in which people who, informed by a desire to improve the lives of those…
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What Drives Turnover Among School Principals?
by James A. Bacon Most principals of Virginia public schools — 70% — are “generally satisfied” with their jobs, although half work 60 or more hours and two-thirds feel like they spend most of their time solving immediate problems rather than creating great schools. Those are some of the findings of a survey of 467…
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Assembly May Add Unpaid Power Bills to Yours
By Steve Haner The General Assembly is moving toward a second method of transferring money from electricity customers who can pay their bills to those who cannot. A Senate bill up today will allow Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power to simply add yet another “rider” to everybody’s monthly bill for their uncollected accounts receivable.…
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VCU Health to Launch Voter-Registration Drive on Hospital Premises
by James A. Bacon The Virginia Commonwealth University Health System has informed employees that it will participate in the VotER Initiative to encourage patients to register to vote and vote by mail. “A large body of research tells us that sick Americans are less likely to vote,” commences the communication from Sheryl L. Garland, chief…
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Reform K-12 Education to Increase Diversity in Virginia’s Colleges — and in Life
by James C. Sherlock Much is appropriately made of the relative lack of diversity in Virginia’s state-supported colleges and universities. Some trace that exclusively to racial discrimination. My research indicates it may also reflect the educational disadvantages of being poor. Here I will offer a path to begin to fix both. I have researched and written…
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Trees, Temperatures and Racism
by James A. Bacon The New York Times has drawn a straight-line linkage between the redlining of neighborhoods in Richmond nearly a hundred years ago and the fact that African-American neighborhoods have higher average temperatures than mostly white neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods, often comprised of public housing, have fewer trees “to shield people from the sun’s…
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Virginia Educational Reform – Place, Class, Race — Or All Three?
by James C. Sherlock I am an optimist by nature. Optimism wins elections, and optimism can bring about democratic change. Governments at their most basic level are created by people to protect themselves from outsiders and to minimize conflicts within their own ranks. From a condo association to Congress, that is a core role. …
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Entrepreneurs, Rent Seekers and the Just Society
by James A. Bacon It’s a lazy, rainy day, and for amusement, I’ve been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s online work, “Principia Politica,” in which he applies his insights into risk, probability, and the non-linearity of complex systems to the realm of governance and politics. The graphic displayed above appears about halfway through the presentation without…