Category: Poverty & income gap
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Killjoys versus GilJoy: Grievance Versus Opportunity
Northern Virginia progressives opposed to subsidies for Amazon are grievance-mongering nihilists who have nothing to offer but spittle and bile. Far from helping the people they purport to speak for, if they were successful in scuttling the Amazon deal — the Arlington County Board still must vote on county subsidies — they would cause only…
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The Wrong Way to Tackle Food Insecurity
According to U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, more than 1 million Virginians live in food deserts. To deal with the problem, he has sponsored legislation in Congress to incentivize businesses and nonprofits to provide healthy food in those areas. And he was in Salem yesterday visiting Feeding America Southwest Virginia to talk about food insecurity.…
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Kamras Feeds a False Narrative
In a Sunday op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond city school Superintendent Jason Kamras opined on “institutional racism” in Virginia schools. In building his case for the existence of such injustice, he cited the supposed disparity in funding, writing: According to the National Center on Education Statistics, Virginia’s highest poverty school divisions — which serve large…
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General Assembly Acts to Curb Evictions
by Richard Hall-Sizemore Virginia has made another “top-10 in the nation” list. But this one is not one to be celebrated. Last spring, using national eviction data, researchers at Princeton University released eviction rate rankings of large cities in the United States. Cities in Virginia comprised five of the ten cities with the highest eviction…
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Senate Addresses Supply of Affordable Housing
One in three households in the state spends more than 30 percent of their income on housing, reports the Virginia Mercury. The apartment industry argues that housing will become unaffordable for even more as the state’s population grows faster than the housing supply. If I were a middle-class Virginian most of whose net worth was…
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Mapping the Opioid Death Epidemic
This map illustrates a key point in the previous post. The localities marked in blue show increases in opioid-related deaths between 2011 and 2017, and the localities shaded red experienced a decrease. While the opioid epidemic has intensified in Virginia overall, the increase (in raw numbers) has been concentrated in Virginia’s metropolitan areas. The rural…
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Opioid Overdose Deaths and Diseases of Despair
Everyone seems to agree that Virginia, like the rest of the nation, is in the grips of an epidemic of opioid overdoses. Virginia Department of Health (VDH) data show that the number of overdose deaths attributable to Fentanyl and/or heroin and to prescription opioids has increased from 637 in 2011 to 1,426 last year. The…
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Re-Examining the Role of Elite Higher Ed in American Society
by Reed Fawell III “Going to Yale Could Make You Rich, or Lonely,” by Lyman Stone, published in The Federalist on Dec. 19, 2018, exposed some surprising findings regarding the costs and benefits of college attendance. Stone is worth quoting at length: There’s a long-standing economic consensus that, for high schoolers smart enough to get…
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EITC Grants Do Nothing for Middle Class
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) proposal that Virginia Democrats are pushing for passage in the 2019 General Assembly is being sold as a major financial boon for the middle class, but is it? “Our working families making $54,000 a year or less are not going to see a big benefit from these federal tax…
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Northam Plans to Curtail License Suspensions
A huge victory for the drive-to-work movement: Governor Ralph Northam has announced plans to halt the practice of suspending driver’s licenses as a way to collect unpaid court fines and fees, reports the Washington Post. In Virginia more than 276,000 licenses were suspended in 2017 alone. The practice creates a Catch-22 for the people, mostly…
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EITC, TANF and the Benefits Cliff
For low income families receiving assistance in Virginia, their cash benefit from the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is larger – often substantially larger – than the cash provided by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). A single mother with two small children who has a full-time minimum wage job ($7.25 per hour) qualified…
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The Push for EITC Cash Grants Accelerates
With the 2019 General Assembly now a handful of weeks away, the main advocacy group for a new cash welfare entitlement in Virginia is ramping up its efforts with various appeals, perhaps testing themes for later use. On Wednesday on its website the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis was arguing that the state Earned Income…
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2019 General Assembly Session – Privatizing Public Roads in McLean, Va
Judge Dillon’s revenge. Development vs transportation has been a long running battle in Virginia. Northern Virginia’s local government politicians never met a developer (or developer’s campaign contribution) they didn’t love. Virginia’s state legislators love NoVa growth since it provides more state tax money to spread around like party favors to their downstate constituencies. However, those…
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Medicaid Expansion’s Achilles Heel: the Doctor Shortage
The Northam administration sold Medicaid expansion to the public in part by claiming that the net cost to Virginia taxpayers would be minimal. Uncle Sam would pay for 90% of the cost of extending medical coverage to up to 400,000 Virginians, and the state’s 10% share would be offset by savings in prisons, mental health,…
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A Crime-Fighting Experiment at Gilpin Court
The Attorney General’s office is funding an interesting social experiment. On the theory that fighting crime requires addressing root causes over and above actually, uh, fighting crime, the AG is providing $1 million to fund programs designed to improve health, education and economic outcomes and strengthen neighborhood ties at the City of Richmond’s largest housing…