Category: Poverty & income gap
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A Capitalist Solution to Food Deserts
by James A. Bacon Yesterday, channeling the spirit of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I asked what a young person should do if he or she wanted to make the world a better place. Broadly speaking, there are three approaches. One is activism in which people who, informed by a desire to improve the lives of those…
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What Drives Turnover Among School Principals?
by James A. Bacon Most principals of Virginia public schools — 70% — are “generally satisfied” with their jobs, although half work 60 or more hours and two-thirds feel like they spend most of their time solving immediate problems rather than creating great schools. Those are some of the findings of a survey of 467…
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Assembly May Add Unpaid Power Bills to Yours
By Steve Haner The General Assembly is moving toward a second method of transferring money from electricity customers who can pay their bills to those who cannot. A Senate bill up today will allow Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power to simply add yet another “rider” to everybody’s monthly bill for their uncollected accounts receivable.…
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VCU Health to Launch Voter-Registration Drive on Hospital Premises
by James A. Bacon The Virginia Commonwealth University Health System has informed employees that it will participate in the VotER Initiative to encourage patients to register to vote and vote by mail. “A large body of research tells us that sick Americans are less likely to vote,” commences the communication from Sheryl L. Garland, chief…
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Reform K-12 Education to Increase Diversity in Virginia’s Colleges — and in Life
by James C. Sherlock Much is appropriately made of the relative lack of diversity in Virginia’s state-supported colleges and universities. Some trace that exclusively to racial discrimination. My research indicates it may also reflect the educational disadvantages of being poor. Here I will offer a path to begin to fix both. I have researched and written…
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Trees, Temperatures and Racism
by James A. Bacon The New York Times has drawn a straight-line linkage between the redlining of neighborhoods in Richmond nearly a hundred years ago and the fact that African-American neighborhoods have higher average temperatures than mostly white neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods, often comprised of public housing, have fewer trees “to shield people from the sun’s…
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Virginia Educational Reform – Place, Class, Race — Or All Three?
by James C. Sherlock I am an optimist by nature. Optimism wins elections, and optimism can bring about democratic change. Governments at their most basic level are created by people to protect themselves from outsiders and to minimize conflicts within their own ranks. From a condo association to Congress, that is a core role. …
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Entrepreneurs, Rent Seekers and the Just Society
by James A. Bacon It’s a lazy, rainy day, and for amusement, I’ve been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s online work, “Principia Politica,” in which he applies his insights into risk, probability, and the non-linearity of complex systems to the realm of governance and politics. The graphic displayed above appears about halfway through the presentation without…
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Meters Keep Spinning On Unpaid Utility Bills
By Steve Haner During the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Virginians piled up $184 million or more in unpaid bills with several Virginia utilities, and that was before the worst of the heat arrived in July. The figure comes from a short letter from the State Corporation Commission to General Assembly leaders dated…
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Everyone Has the Capacity to Be Great
The following post republishes an excerpt from B.K. Fulton’s new book, “The Tale of the Tee: Be Kind and Just Believe.” Fulton, an African-American Christian, entrepreneur and philanthropist, co-wrote the book with Jonathan Blank, who is Jewish, a lawyer and an activist. The two men did not know each other prior to June 14, 2020.…
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How Discount Power For Poor Will Raise Your Bill
By Steve Haner Virginia’s two major electric utilities estimate that as many as 150,000 of their poorest residential customers will see their monthly bills reduced next year using money extracted from all their other customers on their own power bills. Appalachian Power Company projects about 30,000 of its low income customers will receive subsidies of…
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Justice at Last for Rojai Fentress
by James A. Bacon It would be entirely understandable if Rojai Fentress were angry and embittered by the miscarriage of justice that convicted him of a 1996 murder and kept him imprisoned until July of this year. But in a recent Encorepreneur Zoomcast, he expressed nothing but joy at his new-found freedom, gratitude toward those…
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New Houses for $150,000
by James A. Bacon It remains an eternal mystery why it costs in the realm of $250,000 or more per unit to build apartment buildings for the poor in the Richmond region. The Danville Redevelopment and Housing Authority is delivering five new houses on their own lots near downtown Danville, for a sales price as…
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Advancing the Opportunity Agenda: Make 401(k)s More Portable
by James A. Bacon Robert L. Johnson, founder of the Black Entertainment Network and America’s first black billionaire, touted a proposal on CNBC this morning to help African-Americans — and, for that matter, all Americans — build wealth through their 401(k) plans. His proposal would make it easier for Americans to carry their employer-based retirement…
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What It Is, Is Not Journalism
By Dick Hall-Sizemore I never thought that I would agree with Jim Bacon on the slant of the RTD’s news coverage, but an article on evictions today just really irritated me. It was the usual article about activists demonstrating at the Richmond courthouse and protesting evictions. (At least the demonstration on Thursday was peaceful; no…