Category: Poverty & income gap
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How Important Is Insurance to Health Outcomes?
A dominant strain of political rhetoric tells us that having health care insurance is absolutely vital to maintaining peoples’ health and longevity. Without health insurance, people will die! The logic makes sense if one assumes that the United States (and Virginia) have a binary health care system in which people either (a) have health insurance…
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Probing the “Insurance Coverage” Numbers
With Governor Terry McAuliffe making another bid to expand Medicaid via a budget amendment, the publication by the StatChat blog ten days ago of data on the extent of insurance coverage in Virginia couldn’t be more timely. The blog post is content to present the data with little commentary or explanation of what’s happening, however,…
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Slum Maintenance at Essex Village
Who needs tenement slums when we’ve got public housing projects? The supposed “market failure” of the private sector to provide the poor and working class with decent shelter provided the justification for the federal government to get into housing business in the 1930s. We all know the result. Uncle Sam turned out to be the…
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A Prosecution or Persecution of Pawn Brokers?
The Virginia Attorney General’s office has extracted settlements from two Fredericksburg-area pawnbrokers for allegedly charging illegal interest and fees. Spotsylvania Pawnking LLC and Stafford-based All-Star Pawn & Gold will provide more than $62,000 in refunds to more than 1,000 customers to resolve the allegations. The two pawn shops also paid the Attorney General’s office a total…
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For-Profit Colleges and the Student Debt Apocalypse
Tressie McMillan Cottom worked as an enrollment officer at two for-profit technical colleges before she went on to earn a PhD., join the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University, and write a book, “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy.” Cottom says that for-profit colleges get one important thing right: They invest…
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How Much in Tax Breaks Does Harvard Really Need?
The 281 public universities studied by the Nexus Research and Policy Center received $7,000 a year per student in state support on average over the past three years. But that sum pales in comparison to the indirect support, in the form of tax breaks for endowments, enjoyed by the larger private universities. Gifts to university endowments…
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College Graduation Rates and SAT Scores
John Butcher, of Cranky’s Blog fame, is turning his analytical gaze from K-12 schools to higher education. In his latest post, he explores the strong correlation between a Virginia public institution’s six-year graduation rate and the average SAT scores of its student body, as seen in the table to the left and the plotted chart below…
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Fighting Food Deserts One Neighborhood at a Time
The Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a profile today of Jim Scanlon, a former Ukrops Super Market executive who opened a grocery store near downtown Newport News and plans another in Richmond’s East End. His mission is to eliminate Virginia’s so-called “food deserts” one neighborhood at a time. The story of how Scanlon has worked with local economic…
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Poverty and the Virginia Welfare State
Let’s say you’re a woman living in the City of Richmond. Let’s say you have two children, ages three and seven, but no husband. Let’s say you work 40 hours a week earning the minimum wage, or $15,080 per year. How much can you potentially receive in public benefits? Sean Gorman, the Richmond Times-Dispatch PolitiFact reporter,…
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Reinventing another Failed Public Housing Project
Kippax Place, a seven-story building in downtown Hopewell, is a product of 1970s-era public policy housing. Like so many public housing projects, it became almost unlivable. In an effort to restore the facility to habitable standards, the Hopewell Redevelopment and Housing Authority has contracted with the Community Housing Corporation to give the home for more than…
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Suspended Licenses in Virginia a Social Scourge
In the fiscal year ending June 2015, the Old Dominion suspended licenses of nearly 39,000 Virginians for drug convictions unrelated to driving. The practice is a relic dating back to 1991 and the war on drugs, and all but 12 states have abandoned it. Suspending licenses for drug possession is just one facet of a widespread abuse,…
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Food Pantries, the Latest College Craze
There’s a new wrinkle on the college affordability crisis. Some students are so strapped for cash that colleges are setting up food pantries. As CNN reports, membership in the College and University Food Bank Alliance has quadrupled in the past two years to 398 members. “Even if you don’t hear about hunger being a problem,…
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The Cosmetology Licensing Rip-Off
William E. Grobes IV has pleaded guilty to charges of committing wire fraud and money laundering in the operation of the College of Beauty and Barber Culture in Chesapeake. The case against him, according to WAVY-TV: Grobes represented to the [Veterans Administration] that CBBC provided full-time schooling to hundreds of veteran students beginning in October 2011.…
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Hillbillies Coming Apart
The year 2013 brought the publication of “Coming Apart: The State of White America,” in which sociologist Charles Murray argued that the white working class was not only economically challenged but dissolving in an acid of social dysfunction. Poor and working-class whites suffered from a decline in marriage, an increase in out-of-wedlock births, a rise in substance abuse…
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Jones’s Bet on Mixed-Income Housing
Can Church Hill North break Richmond’s cycle of poverty? by James A. Bacon Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones most likely will be remembered for boondoggles like the Washington Redskins stadium and fiascoes like the proposed Shockoe Bottom baseball stadium. But he should be recognized, too, for a mixed-income redevelopment project in the city’s poverty-stricken east…