Category: Poverty & income gap
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End Student Subsidies for College Athletics
by James A. Bacon House Majority Leader Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, is intimately acquainted with the high and rising cost of higher education in Virginia. His two oldest have graduated from Longwood University and James Madison University, and he has two high-schoolers on the way. Not surprisingly, he describes himself as “stressed and anxious” about…
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Big Energy’s Conspiracy with Attorneys General
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, Transportation, Uncategorized, Water-waste waterBy Peter Galuszka What seems to be strong opposition to a host of initiatives by President Barack Obama and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to curtail carbon and other forms of pollution is no mere coincidence. According to a deeply reported story in Sunday’s New York Times, some state attorneys general, most of them Republicans,…
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Virginia’s Very Own Keystone XL
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, Transportation, Uncategorized, Water-waste waterBy Peter Galuszka The rise of natural gas keeps raising more questions about the proper future of Virginia’s and the nation’s energy policies. What just a little while ago seemed a benign source of energy has gushed into a mass of controversy and advantage. One focus of the conflict – good and bad – is the…
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Enforcing the American Way of Poverty
by James A. Bacon A critical but unappreciated contributor to poverty in the United States is the paucity of “social capital” among the poor. Social capital is the term economists use to describe informal knowledge and networks in communities that enable people to collaborate for their mutual benefit and greater good. The term encompasses such intangibles as trust,…
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Who Speaks for the Victims of the “Victims”?
by James A. Bacon Cosmological theorists posit the existence of an infinitude of alternate universes. In one of those universes, perhaps there is one with a Henrico County School System that collects data showing that African-American students are more likely to suffer from violence and disrupted classes in school rather than data showing that African-American students are…
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Bringing Big Data to the Poverty Debate
Here is a positive development in state government that will never get the attention it deserves: The Virginia Department of Social Services is joining four other state agencies in contributing data to the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS). VLDS is a system for accessing data maintained by the Virginia Department of Education, the State Council for Higher Education…
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My Drive Through Two West Virginias
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (K-12), Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka It was a biting eight degrees when I hit the road in Beckley, W.Va. last Wednesday morning having held a book signing and given a talk in Charleston the night before. I wanted to drive two hours up to Harrison County, where my family lived from 1962 to 1969, and see what…
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Fracking Our Pristine Mountain Forests
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in Business and Economy, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, Uncategorized, Water-waste waterBy Peter Galuszka Is nothing sacred? Of all groups, the U.S. Forest Service should protect the lands it controls, but today it introduced a plan that would allow limited hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in the 1.1 million-acre George Washington National Forest which straddles Virginia and West Virginia. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe had opposed lifting…
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Takeaways From the GOP’s Big Win
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in Business and Economy, Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka The night of Tuesday, Nov. 4 was an ugly one for the Democrats and a big win for Republicans. Here are my takeaways from it: U.S. Sen.Mark Warner clings to a tiny lead that seems to grow slightly, still making it uncertain if opponent Ed Gillespie will ask for a recount. The…
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Steve Nash’s Important Book
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in Business and Economy, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka Stephen Nash, a former journalist who teaches at the University of Richmond, has written an important new book about how climate change could affect Virginia. His detailed reporting is impressive and I think he shatters the arguments of global warming deniers. Here is a book review I did for Style Weekly: “Imagine…
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Attack the Demographic Underpinnings of Poverty
by James A. Bacon There is a case to be made for family planning and access to abortion services as a way to improve the lives of poor women. If you lean liberal in your politics, you’ll probably be comfortable with the arguments advanced by Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell (published yesterday morning in the Times-Dispatch).…
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Sticking it to the Chinese
By Peter Galuszka This is a review of “Factory Man,” a book about the Virginia furniture business and dealing with the inequities of Chinese trade by Beth Macy (Little Brown, 451 pages). This was first published in the October 2014 Bulletin of the Overseas Press Club of America in New York of which I am…
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Tracking the Forgotten Virtue: Thrift
by James A. Bacon More interesting data from WalletHub: In a ranking of 150 metropolitan regions by 16 metrics indicating the degree to which local populations adhere to responsible household budgeting practices, Virginians fare better than their peers in any other Southern state — and that’s not just a reflection of the outsized influence of Northern Virginia,…
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Brat’s Strange Immigrant-Bashing
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in Business and Economy, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Electoral process, Federal issues, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Labor and Workforce, Media, Money in politics, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka It must have been an interesting scene. Congressional candidate David Brat had been invited to a meeting of the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce along with his Democratic rival Jack Trammell to outline his views on immigration and undocumented aliens. Brat, an obscure economics professor who nailed powerhouse Eric Cantor in a…
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The Uphill Climb for Virginia Schools
by James A. Bacon Why aren’t we making more progress improving the academic performance of Virginia’s school children? Many reasons have been advanced. Some say that school divisions don’t get enough money or that the money is unfairly distributed between schools. Others say that the public school system is over-regulated, bound by bureaucracy and resistant…