Category: Children and Families
-
They Are Coming For Your Family, Your Strip Malls
By Peter Galuszka State Sen. Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield County, has always played the clown. The conservative politician grabbed attention a year or so back when she addressed a meeting at the General Assembly wearing a revolver in a holster on her hip. She’s also feuded with the county Republican Party and was defrocked. Now Chase…
-
The Shutdown and Unintended Consequences
Public policy during the COVID-19 epidemic has focused relentlessly on the number of virus infections, hospitalizations and death. Given that monomaniacal, media-driven fixation, other metrics of social health and well have been largely ignored in the debate over how rapidly to return the county back to something resembling normal. Some obvious predictions: The shutdown will…
-
Thank God for Medicaid Expansion
By Peter Galuszka For years after the Affordable Care Act, “Obamacare,” made millions of federal dollars available for states to expand Medicaid health coverage, Virginia Republicans steadfastly blocked Virginia from using the money. Led by former House Speaker Bill Howell and Sen. Tommy Norment, the GOP claimed that expanding Medicaid to nearly 400,000 people would…
-
A Look at Richmond and COVID-19
—
by
in Agriculture & forestry, Business and Economy, Children and Families, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Consumer Protection, Culture wars, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, Entrepreneurs and Innovation, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Housing, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Money in politics, Planning, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Resilience, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Telecommunications, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka Here is a roundup story I wrote for Style Weekly that was published today that explains the effects of COVID-19 on the Richmond area. Hopefully, BR readers will find it of interest. It was a tough piece to report. The impacts of the deadly virus are very complicated and multi-faceted. An especially…
-
Bringing Addicted Babies into the World Should Be a Crime
by James A. Bacon When social breakdown, a drug epidemic and failed government institutions converge, this is what you get: babies like Charlee Ford (seen at left) born with opioids and marijuana in her system and diagnosed with cerebral palsy. After birth, her lungs failed for nine minutes before doctors revived her. In her short,…
-
End Parental Discrimination in Surrogacy Cases
by Jay Timmons Residents in the Richmond area are represented by three Republicans in the state Senate with very different views of Life and Family. All three will be on the ballot Tuesday. When it counted, Siobhan Dunnavant stood strong for children and the unborn. But sadly, Glen Sturtevant and Amanda Chase chose discrimination and…
-
Virginia’s Human Trafficking Horror
by James A. Bacon Virginia’s elected officials don’t agree about much. But they do share one common interest across the partisan divide: fighting human trafficking. Even in our hyper-partisan world, Democrats and Republicans still can unite over the proposition that sexual enslavement and exploitation is a bad thing. In October of 2018, the Human Trafficking Institute released…
-
The New Childcare Crisis: Affordability
by James A. Bacon The cost of full-time infant care in Virginia has increased by 37% in inflation-adjusted dollars between 2008 and 2017, while women’s wages in the state have grown by only 5%, finds a new report by the National Women’s Law Center, “From Shortchanged to Empowered: A Pathway to Improving Women’s Well-Being in…
-
Does the Left Have an Understandable Position on Immigration and How Much Does It Matter?
by Don Rippert Debate: The debate on immigration in America continues to rage. People who hold right-of-center political beliefs seem to think that the U.S. immigration laws should be vigorously enforced. There may be some “wiggle room” on the right. For example, some conservatives believe there should be exceptions to deportation for those illegally in…
-
The Most Cost-Effective Anti-Poverty Program Known to Man: Contraception
Back to exploring “root causes” of poverty… This chart shows vividly how poverty is a demography-driven phenomenon. Poor people have more children than the not-poor do, and they have children at a younger age. The consequence of this “disparity” in fertility rates is that the percentage of children raised in poverty is vastly higher than…
-
How Crime-Prone Students Worsen Educational Outcomes for Everyone
Exposure to crime-prone students in school has “large and significant” effects on test scores, school discipline and even adult criminal behavior, finds a new study by Stephen B. Billings and Mark Hoekstra published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Exposure to crime-prone peers in the same neighborhood also has an effect, but the negative influence…
-
If Kids Are Going Hungry, Does Anyone Care Why?
No one wants to see children go hungry, so one’s natural instinct is to sympathize with a new initiative like No Kid Hungry, which is helping parents and caregivers locate free meals in their communities with a simple text message. But a Richmond Times-Dispatch article profiling the program makes a startling statement: The school year…
-
A Horrible Abuse Case. The Daily Reality Behind It.
The news today is horrifying – the death, possibly from sexual abuse, of a 17-month-old. Our distracted minds are focused, for a while, and we all go into a collective shudder and wonder what monster could do such a thing. The daily reality is worse and doesn’t get enough attention. In the fiscal year ending…
-
Replacing One Inequity with Another
Governor Ralph Northam vetoed a bill yesterday that would have imposed mandatory minimum sentences on repeat domestic abusers on the grounds that racial minorities would be disproportionately affected. I nearly headlined this post, “Northam to Domestic Abuse Victims: Drop Dead.” I decided that wouldn’t be quite fair. But I wouldn’t be surprised if many people…
-
Foster Care Reform: This Just Might Work
In the Age of Donald Trump and the Resistance, it’s hard to find anything that most Americans agree upon. But one is that society — working through government and nonprofits — can do a better job of helping kids removed from the custody of unfit parents. In Virginia, unfortunately, the state’s foster care system is…