Category: Poverty & income gap
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The Social Cost of Domestic Violence
Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) accounts for more than one in seven violent crimes in the United States. Between 16% and 23% of American women experience IPV while pregnant. Social science researchers have suggested that domestic abuse affects not only the mother-to-be but her unborn children, but the social cost of the problem has been difficult…
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Who Are These Guys, and Where Do They Get All Their Money?
The report issued by the Northam administration investigating charges of abuse at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center has come under withering criticism by nonprofit groups that filed a lawsuit last year bringing attention to the treatment of unaccompanied immigrant children held there. The Virginia Mercury has the story here. While I used the Department of…
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Moneysaurus and the Trumpenproletariat
Since the end of World War II, the nonprofit sector has consumed an increasing share of the United States economy. Health care, which is dominated by nonprofit hospitals, now hogs an 18% share. The growth of higher education, an overwhelmingly nonprofit industry, continues to outpace the general economy. Millionaires and billionaires are converting wealth into…
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Graph of the Day: Virginia’s Declining Fertility Rate
The number of births in Virginia continues declining, reaching the lowest level in years in 2017 — only 100,248. A decade before, births had numbered 108,884. Demographers Savannah Quick and Shonel Sen at the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia attribute the overall dip in fertility decline to a dramatic decline for 15-…
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Working? A Republican Anti-Poverty Plan Works?
“The federal EITC, together with the Child Tax Credit, lifted nearly 200,000 Virginians out of poverty each year from 2011 to 2013, including nearly 100,000 children.” Lifted out of poverty. Let that sink in a minute. The writer of that sentence is admitting that the federal Earned Income Tax Credit lifts people out of poverty. …
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More Proof that Higher-Ed Sticks It to the Middle Class
As the cost of attending top four-year college marches relentlessly higher, students from higher-income households are doing just fine: Their family incomes are matching the increase in tuition, fees, room and board. And lower-income students are faring pretty well, too: Scholarships and financial aid cover most of the rising costs. So, if the affluent and…
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Tennessee License Suspension For Unpaid Debts Ruled Unconstitutionally Unfair to Indigent
A federal judge in the Middle District of Tennessee has ruled that Tennessee’s practice of suspending a driving license to compel the collection of delinquent court debts is unconstitutionally unfair to poor people. She has ordered Tennessee to stop and to start restoring the licenses of people who simply could not pay, but an appeal…
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A Partial Defense of RRHA Eviction Policies
I never thought I’d find myself defending the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA), which I criticized last year for running up a $150 million maintenance backlog on its 4,000 public housing units. But the wheel of public policy debate turns in unexpected ways. Now, RRHA is being dinged for its high eviction rates. Here’s…
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Tenant-Rights Activists, Meet the Housing Shortage
The debate over tenant evictions is gaining traction now that the Virginia Housing Commission has taken up the issue. Two concrete proposals were put before the Commission during a Tuesday hearing. One would extend the time from five days to two weeks before rent is declared to be late. A second would give tenants more time…
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Proceed Cautiously with Eviction Reforms
Carlos Lopez, a Los Angeles landscaper, inherited a house and let it out to rent. When the original tenant went to jail, a woman Lopez had never seen before was occupying the premises and refusing to pay any rent. He engaged an attorney to evict her. The squatter lawyered up, too, obtaining free legal services…
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Millions More for Medicaid Expansion? Now You Tell Us
One of the conceits of Virginia’s Medicaid debate is that expansion would pay for itself. Uncle Sam would pick up 90% of the cost, leaving Virginia to raise money for only 10%. The Commonwealth would save a few hundred million dollars through reduced funding for prison healthcare, mental health, indigent care funding, FAMIS pregnant women, and…
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OK, We Enacted Medicaid Expansion. Let’s Measure How Well It Works.
So… The General Assembly has enacted Medicaid reform. That’s a big win for Governor Ralph Northam and Virginia Democrats, and potentially good news for 400,000 of near-poor Virginia adults who now will qualify for a healthcare program that will be 90% funded by the federal government and 10% by the state. It’s not such good…
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Virginia Eviction Laws Stacked Against the Poor
by Marc Lockhart Last Tuesday I joined more than 100 people for the inaugural meeting of the Campaign to Reduce Evictions (CARE), sponsored by the Virginia Poverty Law Center, at First Baptist Church in Richmond. We assembled for two hours to investigate why Richmond has the second highest eviction rate in the country among large…
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A New Narrative for African-Americans
Hip-hop artist Kanye West has sent the Twitterverse into a frenzy by tweeting his approbation of psychologist Jordan Peterson, economist Thomas Sowell, and viral sensation Candace Owens. The thrust of West’s comments is that African-Americans should be allowed to think for themselves. Intellectuals like Sowell and Walter Williams, read only by conservative intellectuals, fought the…
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Are Virginia’s Civil Courts Stacked Against the Poor?
Only one in 500,000 civil cases handled in Virginia’s general district courts each year have lawyers representing both plaintiffs and defendants, according to a new study by the National Center for State Courts. And what does that mean? “When only one side has an attorney and the other side doesn’t, then the system becomes dysfunctional,…