Category: Poverty & income gap
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Map of the Day: Decline in Teen Birth Rate
The fertility rate for U.S. women reached an all-time low in 2015. All told, there have been 3.4 million fewer births since 2007 than would have occurred had fertility rates not declined, writes Hamilton Lombard in the StatChat blog. There are reasons to be concerned. Fewer births means fewer Americans entering the workforce, fewer workers paying…
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Can Atlanta’s East Lake Experiment Work in Virginia?
by James A. Bacon It is axiomatic among social scientists that concentrating poor people in public housing projects accentuates the social pathologies that make poverty self-perpetuating and unbearable. The oft-touted solution is to create more mixed-income neighborhoods that de-concentrate poverty. Presumably, the presence of working- and middle-class households people would moderate the anti-social behavior of the…
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War on the Poor Update: the Attack on Payday Lending
by James A. Bacon Once again the war drums are pounding as do-gooders unleash a wave of publicity against payday lending. A local case in point is a guest column in the Virginian-Pilot under the name of Debra Grant, who told her personal story. This is how it started: I had a relative who needed to borrow $150,…
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Will More Money Really Help Poor Students?
by James A. Bacon Once upon a time, the liberal critique of Virginia’s school funding system was that schools with rich kids got more money per student than schools with poor kids. The state of Virginia moved to address funding inequalities two-and-a-half decades ago. Now liberals have raised the bar. It’s not enough to provide equal resources. Now…
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Is There Really a Problem Here?
by James A. Bacon A new report by the Pew Research Center, “The Geography of America’s Shrinking Middle Class,” has garnered widespread attention by focusing on the erosion of America’s “middle class” between 2000 and 2014, confirming the dominant narrative of increasing income inequality across the United States. As a summary of the report emphasizes, “The…
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“Coming Apart” — Virginia Edition
by James A. Bacon Three years ago sociologist Charles Murray wrote a book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” in which he described the social disintegration of lower-income and working-class whites in the United States. He documented the decline of marriage, the rise of out-of-wedlock births, the spread of substance abuse, and deterioration of work…
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Polite but Restrained Applause for UVa’s Scaled-Back Tuition Hike
by James A. Bacon Let’s give a polite golf clap to the University of Virginia. After getting a $3 million boost in state support in the new FY 2017 budget, the Board of Trustees has scaled back its planned 3% tuition increase for continuing in-state students to 1.5%, reports the Daily Progress. The planned 10%…
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How Many Millions Have Died from This Failed Scientific Orthodoxy?
One of the most rigorous scientific experiments on the effects of fatty foods in the diet took some 40 years to complete, but the results are now in. Reports the Washington Post: Collectively, the fuller results undermine the conventional wisdom regarding dietary fat that has persisted for decades and is currently enshrined in influential publications…
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Debt Bondage Update
by James A. Bacon As student loan debt passed the $1.3 trillion mark, 43% of the roughly 22 million Americans with student loans were not making their loan payments, according to new numbers published by the U.S. Department of Education. About 3.6 million borrowers were in default on $56 billion in student debt as of Jan. 1, meaning they…
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Demographic Mystery Almost Solved
by James A. Bacon And now for an answer to the fascinating question posed by Hamilton Lombard on the StatChat blog: why African-Americans living in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware have the highest median incomes anywhere in the United States (see “A Demographic Mystery“)…. Ultimately, he says, the answer can be traced to the history of slavery…
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A Demographic Mystery
The median income for African-Americans among the 50 states is highest in Maryland, second highest in Delaware and third highest in Virginia. The flip side of the coin is that the counties with the lowest African-American poverty rates are overwhelmingly clustered in the Mid-Atlantic, as can be seen in the map above. What’s going on?…
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Fed Theft Update: $749 Billion from Bank Depositors
Federal Reserve Bank suppression of interest rates has cost bank depositors $749 billion in interest income on savings accounts, CDs, and money market accounts over the past six years, according to Richard Barrington with MoneyRates.com. Quantitative Easing has made possible one of the greatest redistributions of wealth in United States history. Unlike with taxes, which…
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The Decimation of Coal Production and Alienation of the Working Class
In rejecting the extension of coal tax credits Friday, Governor Terry McAuliffe noted that the number of coal miners employed in Virginia has tumbled from 11,100 in 1988 to less than 3,000 in 2015. At one time — the late 70s and early 80s, as I recall — coal mining employed more than 20,000. Since then,…
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Sorry, College Kids, Living off Beer and Pizza Does Not Make You Poor
As readers know, I am a data junkie, and I post a lot of maps and charts highlighting, among other things, the variations of wealth and poverty in Virginia. The data is useful in helping us understand social, economic and political dynamics of the state, but they usually come with an asterisk. Poverty rates tend…
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Are the End of Times Upon Us?
by James A. Bacon Surely we have reached the end of times of apocalyptic lore when the leading Republican candidate for president flapped his arms during a national debate and assured the American people that not only are his hands of respectable size but so is another part of his anatomy. “I guarantee you, there’s no problem,”…