Category: Poverty & income gap
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Time to Reform Practice of Cash Bonds
Earlier this month Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Herring announced that his office would no longer recommend requiring cash bond for people charged with crimes. Instead, prosecutors would recommend defendants either be held in jail or be given their freedom until the trial. Too many people are unable to raise cash for the bond, and Herring…
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Can Medicaid Expansion Address the Doctor Shortage?
With Virginia on the cusp of Medicaid expansion, it is heartening to see someone asking the obvious question: What good is Medicaid coverage if you can’t find a doctor? Bob Burke at Virginia Business states the obvious: Getting a Medicaid card doesn’t necessarily mean you have a doctor at hand. Plenty of places in Virginia…
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Henrico’s Housing Whack-a-Mole
Henrico County, following the priorities of its new Democratic Party majority on the Board of Supervisors, has created a $2 million fund to head off neighborhood blight by financing renovations and redevelopment of the county’s aging housing stock, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. As an example of what the fund can do, county officials pointed to…
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Spend Less, Invest More, Improve Credit Scores
The editorial board of the Virginian-Pilot finds it a matter for “concern” that African-Americans are denied mortgage loan applications in the Hampton Roads region at a higher rate than whites. “In Hampton Roads,” writes the Pilot, black applicants during the study’s period — 2015 and 2016 — were 2.4 times more likely to be denied…
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Race, Responsibility and the Welfare State
by Vic Nicholls What is the justification for taxing people to provide healthcare? There is no mandate for it in the Constitution. The “general welfare” was never considered to include health care. The campaign slogans of the Founding Fathers never included, “Free leech treatments for all!” Are all men “created equal”? No. Everyone has…
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The Crisis in African-American Student Indebtedness
The student loan default crisis is bad… and getting worse, finds Judith Scott-Clayton, a Brookings Institution scholar, based on her analysis of the latest student loan data released by the U.S. Department of Education. Debt and default has reached “crisis” levels among African-Americans, and even a bachelor’s degree is no guarantee of security. Black B.A. graduates…
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Poor Choices and Food Insecurity
Sparkpeople, a publisher of health, fitness and food information, created the graphic shown above to demonstrate that eating healthy food need not be more expensive than eating junk food. Sparkpeople blogger Stepfanie Romine recently wrote that she hears the excuses every day — “I can’t afford to buy healthy food,” “fruits and vegetables are too expensive,” “it’s…
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Supply-Side Experiment in Food Desert Goes Bust
Poor Jim Scanlon. He bought into the conventional wisdom that food deserts are a supply-side problem — an unwillingness of grocery store operators to locate in inner cities. Hoping to remedy that deficiency, the idealistic former Ukrop’s executive opened Jim’s Local Market in a low-income neighborhood in Newport News in May 2016. Now, a year…
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This Is Us. Ugh.
by Chris Saxman During Monday’s Senate Commerce and Labor Committee, three bills were on the agenda attempting to raise the minimum wage. Virginia’s policy has been at least since the late 1990s to mirror the federal minimum wage which stands at $7.25 an hour. That rate became effective in July of 2009. Watching the committee hearing…
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When the State Feeds Children, Children Go Hungry
I can’t say anything bad about Virginia’s first lady, Dorothy McAuliffe. Her cause is admirable: ending childhood hunger. Her compassion seems entirely genuine. And it appears that she had been very effective, if effectiveness can be measured by the resources she has mobilized to advance her goals. Writing in a Richmond Times-Dispatch op-ed today, McAuliffe…
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The “Food Desert” Theory Does Not Reflect Reality
A large social-scientific literature has documented that low-income neighborhoods are far more likely than affluent neighborhoods to be “food deserts,” that is to have low access to healthy food. The big question is why. Does the food-desert phenomenon reflect institutional racism, in which corporate grocery-store chains are unwilling to serve neighborhoods dominated by poor minorities?…
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One of Three Virginia Children Unready for Kindergarten
Roughly one third of Virginia children lack the social, self-regulation, literacy or math skills needed for kindergarten, finds a study on early childhood development released by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). (That estimate was derived from a representative sampling from 63 of Virginia’s 132 school systems, so a comprehensive statewide survey might…
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Is the Big Problem at Richmond Schools Decrepit Buildings or Teacher Turnover?
The City of Richmond is debating proposals to spend $740 million to $800 million to modernize the city’s school buildings after years of neglect. The latest new wrinkle reported by the –Richmond Times Dispatch is that the Richmond School Board has delayed a vote on the grounds that it needed more time to ponder the plan.…
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Poverty, Government, and the Bourgeois Virtues
Unwinding historical injustices that trap African-Americans in inter-generational poverty is “the moral challenge of our time,” Mayor Levar Stoney told attendees of at an anti-poverty conclave at Virginia Union University Tuesday. Policy decisions that hurt the poor “have done more to hold the flesh and blood of our city back … than any bronze and…
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Even Progressives Acknowledge the Failure of Indiscriminate Student Loans
I’ve been making the case for a couple of years now that if you’re looking for a real example of social injustice, take a look at the United States higher education system. For years liberals and progressives argued that everyone deserves a college education, that government should help anyone with a high school degree attend…