Category: Poverty & income gap
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Virginia Graduation Rates: Fair to Middling
Until this week it was impossible to make meaningful state-to-state comparisons in high school graduation and dropout rates because each state had its own definition of what constituted a dropout. Invariably, states used definitions that would make them look better. The U.S. Department of Education has required states to use the same methodology to compare…
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Crime Drops, But Virginians Pack More Heat
By Peter Galuszka Virginians have been buying more firearms than ever even though crime has been steadily falling. Why? Last year, 420,829 firearms were bought through licensed gun dealers in Virginia. That’s a 73 percent increase from the sales in 2006. Leading the list were pistols (175,717) sold last year, followed by rifles (135,495). Central…
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Breaking the Cycle of Poverty
Communities in Schools aims to boost graduation rates for inner city Richmond students by helping them surmount a deep-rooted culture of poverty.
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It’s Not Your Grandfather’s White Suburb Anymore
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in Business and Economy, Demographics, Economic development, Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, Transportation, Water-waste waterBy Peter Galuszka Virginia’s slow and steady color change from red to blue was underscored again in the Nov. 6 election with Barack Obama once again winning the Old Dominion. As Republicans lick their wounds, they may consider just how reliable GOP bastions of the state are changing and how that very neatly tracks trends…
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Another Income-Inequality Study Stating the Obvious
by James A. Bacon Along comes another study demonstrating that income inequality in the United States is getting worse and worse. The wrinkle this time is that it breaks down the growth in inequality by state. Virginia, it turns out, ranks 15th in the country for income inequality in 2008-2010, with the top fifth of…
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Medicaid, the New Middle-Class Entitlement
by James A. Bacon The Medicaid program was enacted in 1965 to provide a medical safety net for low-income families and for destitute elderly who had exhausted their personal resources. It has morphed into an entitlement to preserve middle-class standards of living. The reasons are understandable. You’d have to have heart of stone not to…
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Is Now the Time for a Carbon Tax?
By Peter Galuszka With the 2012 election decided, there seems to be some movement towards considering establishing a carbon tax to cut greenhouse gases and mitigate climate change. Despite the Kyoto Protocols of 1997, which the U.S. did not sign, and a slew of renewable energy projects in places such as Europe, there has been…
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President Barack Obama!
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in Business and Economy, Children and Families, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Gun rights, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, LGBQT, 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, Taxes, Transportation, Uncategorized, Water-waste waterBy Peter Galuszka President Barack Obama’s re-election and success with Virginia in Tuesday’s contest could provide a fresh opportunity to solidify more economic recovery than what have otherwise may have happened. It could be a real chance for bipartisan progress. Here’s my takeaway at 2:30 a.m.: Virginia has again shown that it is morphing into…
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No Need for Question 1 on Eminent Domain
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Environment, Government Finance, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Planning, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, TaxesBy Peter Galuszka It hasn’t gotten a lot of attention during this campaign, but Virginia will decide Tuesday whether to go with an amendment resulting in the toughest law in the country regarding eminent domain. Virginia has a law already that requires fair market compensation for private property taken for “Public Good” such as building…
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More Internet Sociology on Dropout Rates
by James A. Bacon In a blog post yesterday, I observed that, while blacks are more prone to drop out from high school than whites statewide, in some 30 rural Virginia localities, blacks showed a lower dropout rate. In Nottoway County, the drop-out gap between blacks and whites was 14 percentage points for the class…
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Graduation Rates and White Social Pathology
by James A. Bacon Over the weekend, I heard a story that a teacher from Wilkes County, N.C. in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, told about discipline problems he had encountered at school. My friend kept us spellbound as he described how a trouble maker, whose mother had taught him “not to take…
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Virginia Immigrants: More Prosperous than the Natives
With more than 900,000 foreign-born residents living here in 2010, Virginia had the ninth largest immigrant population in the United States, reports the Commonwealth Institute in a new report, “Critical Assets: The State of Immigrants in Virginia’s Economy.” Forty percent of Virginia immigrants hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. They are more likely to participate…
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The Tea Party Fades Into History
By Peter Galuszka Whatever happened to the Tea Party movement? The other day I found my laminated plastic media credential for the Virginia Tea Party PATRIOTS CONVENTION that happened about this time two years ago at Richmond’s convention center. I was overcome with nostalgia. It was such a fun group: Patrick Henry re-enactors, Jamie Radtke,…
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The Big Picture on Coal
By Peter Galuszka Coal mining continues to be a flash point in the presidential campaign as Mitt Romney accuses Barack Obama of proposing onerous regulations designed to kill Appalachian coal jobs. In the two years I spent researching my new book, “Thunder on the Mountain: Death at Massey and the Dirty Secrets Behind Big Coal,…
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Hampton Roads More Broadly Affluent than NYC?
Dr. James V. Koch, a professor of economics and former president of Old Dominion University, is back in the news yet again, this time for making the seemingly outrageous observation that Hampton Roads is more affluent than New York City. A few years ago, when he first discovered Hampton Roads’ relative affluence compared with New…