Category: Poverty & income gap
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The Cost of Family Breakdown in Richmond
Family breakdown and the absence of fathers in the household in the City of Richmond costs taxpayers at the federal, state and local levels a mind-boggling $205 million a year, according to a new report issued by the Richmond Family & Fatherhood Initiative. The study bases that figure on the assumption that a “minimum” of…
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The Phoniness of “March” Coverage
By Peter Galuszka Today is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington that attracted hundreds of thousands of people from various backgrounds and one purpose: to register their support of change in America’s perpetually strained race relations. At the time, I was 10 years old, spending my first full summer in West Virginia where…
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Working Still Beats Welfare in Virginia
Despite the highly controversial reform of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program in 1996, welfare benefits actually have increased in generosity over the past 17 years. Social-services benefits for the poor pay more than minimum-wage jobs in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states they…
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UVa Stops Shafting the Middle Class
The University of Virginia Board of Visitors voted earlier this week to restructure AccessUVa, its student aid program. This fall students from the poorest families will have to take out loans as part of their financial-aid packages just like other students. The University still will continue its “needs blind” admissions policy, which meets 100% of…
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Richmond’s Remarkable Underground Press
By Peter Galuszka With its broad, tree-lined avenues, Georgian-style redbrick buildings and statues of Confederate generals, Richmond comes off a snooty and tranquil. Yet, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel, it is a place “with larger-than-life personalities and a façade of gentility and political etiquette covering an underworld of cut-throat, back-room politics…
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Welfare Dependency Breeds More Welfare Dependency
A new study explores the phenomenon of inter-generational welfare and finds that children of parents on welfare increase their participation over the next five years by 6% and over the next 2 years by 12%. “We find strong evidence of a welfare culture, where welfare use in one generation causes welfare use in the next…
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Will More Gov’t Spending Reduce Richmond Food Insecurity?
by James A. Bacon After two years of deliberations, a Richmond Food Policy Task Force has issued recommendations for tackling so-called “food deserts” in low-income city neighborhoods racked by obesity and food insecurity. I was anticipating a touchy-feely report full of good intentions divorced from real-world considerations. My worst fears were not confirmed. Although they…
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Better Government through Better Metrics
by James A. Bacon Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones wants to tackle the city’s entrenched poverty, and he wants to do it by investing smartly in community revitalization efforts. The big question is, what works? Supporting job training might seem a logical way for the city to lift people out of poverty. But what good is …
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Breadwinner Moms and Income Inequality
by James A. Bacon The Pew Research Center made a big splash in May with research showing that mothers are the sole or primary source of family income for two out of five American families. The Pew study, based upon an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, yielded important insights into the dynamics of wealth…
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Does Anyone Know What the Rules Are?
By Peter Galuszka The furor over celebrity chef Paula Deen’s use of a pejorative term against African-Americans is curious because it raises so many issues that still bubble in this country and still resonate in the South. They involved codes of appropriate behavior that are extremely hard to figure out. Deen, whose buttery and sugary…
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The South Has Risen
For a Californian, Joel Kotkin sure sounds like a Southern triumphalist. One hundred and fifty years after its defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, he writes in “As the North Rests on Its Laurels, the South Is Rising Fast,” the region is on the move. While Northerners stereotype the South as the home of the ignorant,…
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Food Insecurity: Virginia Must Be Doing Something Right. But What Is It?
by James A. Bacon Question: Why does Virginia have the third lowest rate (tied with Massachusetts) of “food insecurity” among the 50 states? Given the Old Dominion’s low rates of unemployment and poverty and relatively high incomes, one would expect Virginians to be less at risk for going hungry. But look at the map above,…
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Granny Flats Making a Come Back — Hoorah!
by James A. Bacon Cities across The United States and Canada are liberalizing their zoning codes to allow more “accessory units” like basement apartments, granny flats and even tiny houses in the back yard, reports the Wall Street Journal. The trend is especially evident in regions with housing shortages and high real estate prices like…
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Virginia Poverty: Better and Worse than We Thought
Motivated by the many drawbacks of the official U.S. measure of poverty, the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has introduced a “Virginia Poverty Measure” (VPM) to account for regional differences in the cost of living, the impact of government assistance and other factors. The more nuanced statistical analysis does not alter the overall poverty…
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IG of the Day: Teen Birth Rate
This map, posted by Richard Florida to the Atlantic Cities blog, shows state-by-state variations in the teen birth rate. Florida makes an unconvincing case that ties higher teen birth rates to the practice of religion, posture on birth control and red state governance, confusing correlation with causality. “Despite all the hectoring and moralizing,” he writes,…