Category: Poverty & income gap
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The Structural Racism of Student Loan Debt
by James A. Bacon Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student loan debt, exceeding the amount they owe on credit cards ($700 billion) or automobile loans ($1 trillion). Unlike other forms of debt, student loans are disproportionately concentrated among young people. Further, student loans are uniquely onerous because the debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy…
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In an Age of Washington Gridlock, the Laboratory of Democracy Is looking Pretty Good
by James A. Bacon Seventy-two percent of Americans think the United States is headed in the “wrong direction,” according to a recent AP-Gfk poll, and most of those discontents attribute their sentiment to the dysfunction of American politics. That’s no surprise given the gridlock that has beset Washington, D.C. — gridlock resulting from the polarization of…
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VLDS Big Data Just Got Bigger
by James A. Bacon This blog post is geeky, but it’s important — so stick with me! If you favor public policy based on what works as opposed to public policy based on ideology or political muscle, then you should be very encouraged by the progress made by the Virginia Longitudinal Data Survey (VLDS) in incorporating new…
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The Student Indebtedness Dilemma
by James A. Bacon The problem of student debt is finally getting high-level attention in Virginia, as evidenced by a panel discussion on the subject hosted in Richmond over the weekend. It’s less clear that anyone has a realistic idea of what to do about it. Some one million Virginians owe a total of $30…
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A Greater Role for Nurse Practitioners
by James A. Bacon While Medicaid expansion may have been dead on arrival at the General Assembly this year, the Senate Education and Health Committee has been thinking of other ways to improve medical access for Virginia’s poor. One solution is to loosen the regulatory restrictions that limit the ability of nurse practitioners to handle…
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The Small Business Route out of Poverty
by James A. Bacon UnBoundRVA is my kind of anti-poverty initiative! The organization identifies people in low-income neighborhoods who have the potential to succeed as small business owners, and then provides them a year of training, advice and networking support as they develop a business plan. Once the business models are in place, each hopeful business owner makes…
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IG of the Day: Virginia GINI
Where is income inequality in Virginia the most severe? College towns like Blacksburg, Charlottesville and Harrisonburg, and poor, rural mill-town jurisdictions like Danville and Grayson, Halifax and Greensville Counties. Where is inequality in Virginia least evident? In the Washington suburbs and a broad swath of rural counties in eastern Virginia. That’s the insta-analysis of a…
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Your Tax Breaks at Work
by James A. Bacon The Terraces at Manchester, a 148-unit luxury apartment across the river from downtown Richmond, opened in August. Its amenities include views of downtown and the river, an outdoor pool, a club room, a sky lounge, a rooftop dog park and, of course, an active urban lifestyle. Its cheapest apartment, with a…
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Slaying the Debt Dragon – or Feeding the Beast?
by James A. Bacon There aren’t many things that almost everyone across the ideological spectrum agrees about, but one of them is that indebtedness from student loans is out of control. Here in Virginia, about one million students owe roughly $30 billion, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch — or about $30,000 each on average. The loan…
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A Poverty-Fighting Program that Pays Its Own Way
by James A. Bacon People have lots of ideas about how to address poverty. Most of them don’t work, as the United States has learned from more than 50 years of building a welfare state. Ever-hopeful social reformers always have some bright new idea they believe will make a difference — unlike all the bright new ideas that…
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Social “Justice” and Wealth Destruction
by James A. Bacon It is well documented that African-Americans and Hispanics lost a higher percentage of their net worth since the Great Recession of 2007 than did whites and Asians. The pressing question is why? The dominant explanation is that racism and discrimination — or at least the after-effects of overt racism and discrimination reflected in…
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The New Wave of Senseless Violence
by James A. Bacon This may be the most grim but fascinating sociological insight into the nature of poverty and crime I’ve seen all year… While violent crime is down overall in the City of Richmond since its horrendous peak in the 1990s, which earned the city the reputation as a murder capital of the…
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The Forgotten Victims of the Crack Addict
by James A. Bacon Carl V. Hughes IV, a 28-year-old Chesterfield County man, had a serious addiction to crack cocaine. Living with his sister and elderly parents, he frequently stole from them to support his habit. According to testimony from a recent trial, he’d stolen a video game system and games from his sister, a…
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Hosing the Middle Class: Campus Edition
by James A. Bacon Paige Taul, a 19-year-old University of Virginia student, earns $8.25 as a cashier at a college bookstore. Assuming no taxes were taken out of her paycheck, she would have to work about 80 hours to earn the $657 that UVa charges its students through fees to support the athletic program. “Wow, that doesn’t…
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No Easy Route on the Jeff Davis Highway
by John Szczesny Kudos to the Richmond Times-Dispatch for putting a human face on Chesterfield County’s plan to revitalize the Jefferson Davis Highway corridor. The RTD’s Pathway to Poverty feature is a sobering look at how poverty and homelessness have made life a daily struggle for so many in the area. It also begs the…