Free Republic

Month after month, the reports are announced: Job losses outpace job gains, every month. Hundreds of thousands leave the workforce, every month. The new jobs – what few there are – are more likely to be part-time than full-time, and to be lower-paying than the ones lost. Too often, the new jobs are the career-enders, not the career starters that new jobs need to be. The story of the cooked books of the unemployment statistics is old news. For years now, the government reports have been leaving out the “non-participation” rate, so the unemployment percentage today bears no resemblance to...

Citing the need to replace “despair with opportunity” 50 years ago this week President Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty. His effort to roll back severe economic distress, along with a host of other Great Society programs, was the largest push to help Americans on the economic and racial margins since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many of Johnson’s programs were key to creating economic possibility for millions who had never known it, and a whole host of them such as HeadStart, Medicaid, food stamps, and loans for higher education continue to do that. Given the success of...

As Barack Obama scrambles to eviscerate key sections of his own signature health care law, he and other Democrats are trying to shift voters' focus to another issue -- income inequality. Unfortunately, the solutions they advocate are pitifully inadequate or painfully perverse. Start with the minimum wage, which some Democrats see as an election-winning wedge issue in 2014. True, raising the minimum wage polls well. But does anybody really care much about it? Few minimum wage earners are heads of households; many more are teenagers earning spare cash. Most economists agree that a higher minimum wage costs some low-skilled workers...

President Barack Obama is set to speak on Thursday about how he will target job creation, housing, law enforcement and education in the poorest U.S. communities, part of his pledge to narrow the gap between rich and poor in America. Obama signaled last month that he plans a new focus this year on income inequality, which he called "the defining challenge of our time", pushing to raise the minimum wage and find new ways to help poor children break out of the cycle of poverty. As part of this effort, Obama will create "promise zones" in San Antonio, Philadelphia, Los...

One in five Democrats now opposes ObamaCare, a record high, according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll. And more than one in six Democrats now say they want it repealed, another new high. Overall, 55% of the public oppose the law, the highest since IBD/TIPP started asking this question in 2010. Just 37% support ObamaCare, matching a record low. And while support for outright repeal of the law inched down in January, that was because it fell among Republicans and independents. Among Democrats, support for repeal jumped 4 points. ObamaCare is also clearly driving down President Obama's approval rating, which dropped...

In contrast, children are voiceless, so they are the age group most likely to be poor today. That’s a practical and moral failure. I don’t want anybody to be poor, but, if I have to choose, I’d say it’s more of a priority to help kids than seniors.

Obama doesn’t plan to commemorate the anniversary Wednesday of Johnson’s speech in 1964, which gave rise to Medicaid, Head Start and a broad range of other federal anti-poverty programs. The president’s only public event Tuesday was a plea for Congress to approve extended benefits for the long-term unemployed, another reminder of the persistent economic troubles during Mr. Obama’s five years in office. ... Although the president often rails against income inequality in America, his policies have had little impact overall on poverty. A record 47 million Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more than when he took office. ......

This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s proclamation of a “war on poverty,” and the progress in this theater has not been encouraging. Trillions of dollars have been spent, and the number of Americans living in poverty is higher today than it was in 1964, while the poverty rate has held steady at just under one in five. That contrasts unpleasantly with the trend before President Johnson declared his war: The poverty rate had been dropping since the end of World War II. That progress came to a halt as President Johnson’s expensive and expansive vision...

President Obama considers income inequality a “defining challenge of our time.” Continuing from my previous column ( “Questions for redistribution's proponents” ), I have some additional questions for Mr. Obama and others who want government to redistribute more income from “the rich” to “the poor.” • When you describe growing income inequality in the United States, you typically look only at the incomes of the rich before they pay taxes and at the incomes of the poor before they receive noncash transfers from government such as food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid. You also ignore noncash transfers that the poor receive...

As a child of the 80s, I remember We Are the World. Yeah, the song is terrible, but it was nice to see rock stars care about charity. Back then poverty in Africa was in the news all the time. But things have been changing in Africa and in other “third-world” countries. More countries are opening up their markets. China, Russia, India, and Botswana are all much freer economies than they were in 1970. But even I was shocked when I saw this graph: Mark Perry, an economics professor at UM-Flint said it best: Well, the chart above could perhaps qualify...

In his inaugural address Wednesday, incoming New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to establish an intellectual pedigree for his focus on economic inequality. He invoked Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Smith, Frances Perkins, Fiorello La Guardia, Jacob Riis, David Dinkins, Mario Cuomo, and Harry Belafonte. It reminded me of when Democrats, eager to prove their national-security bona fides, tell audiences they hail from the party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. As if there wasn’t some other Democrat after Kennedy who dabbled at war and peace, some guy from Texas. De Blasio’s speech was a bit...

For decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that over 30 million Americans were living in “poverty,” but the bureau’s definition of poverty differs widely from that held by most Americans. In fact, other government surveys show that most of the persons whom the government defines as “in poverty” are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term. The overwhelming majority of the poor have air conditioning, cable TV, and a host of other modern amenities. They are well housed, have an adequate and reasonably steady supply of food, and have met their other basic needs, including medical care....

To put it in today’s standard D.C. terms, Democrats sure must hate poor people. That’s silly, of course. But there’s no doubt that Democrats are preparing to push policies that are likely to hurt struggling low- and middle-income Americans. Both the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress have announced that their top priority when Congress returns later this month will be extending unemployment benefits and raising the minimum wage. Both policies are likely to leave more Americans jobless — especially low-income workers with few skills, the very people Democrats claim they want to help most. Take the...

Abstract: For decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that over 30 million Americans were living in “poverty,” but the bureau’s definition of poverty differs widely from that held by most Americans. In fact, other government surveys show that most of the persons whom the government defines as “in poverty” are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term. The overwhelming majority of the poor have air conditioning, cable TV, and a host of other modern amenities. They are well housed, have an adequate and reasonably steady supply of food, and have met their other basic needs, including medical...

In May 2009, a small experiment involving 13 homeless men took off in London. Some of them had slept in the cold for more than 40 years. The presence of these street veterans was far from cheap. Police, legal services, health care: Each cost taxpayers thousands of pounds every year. That spring, a local charity decided to make the street veterans — sometimes called rough sleepers — the beneficiaries of an innovative social experiment. No more food stamps, food-kitchen dinners or sporadic shelter stays. The 13 would get a drastic bailout, financed by taxpayers. Each would receive 3,000 pounds (about...

Staying in a kind of reflective mode from Last SundayÂ’s Gospel on Greed and how to avoid it, there may be value in pondering why Jesus called some (or all) mammon (wealth) unrighteous. The phrase occurs in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus says: I tell you, make friends for yourselves by your use of dishonest wealth, so that, when it fails, they will welcome you to eternal dwellings. (Luke 16:9). We discussed yesterday what it means to be welcomed into eternal dwellings and who these friends who welcome us really are. But in this post perhaps we can consider...

On Thursday's PoliticsNation on MSNBC, during a discussion of Republican resistance to extending unemployment benefits, MSNBC political analyst Goldie Taylor charged that the GOP "almost single-handedly blew up this economy," and that it was "as if" they "blew up" the "bridge" and then "dared people to cross to the other side of the canyon on their own." After host Al Sharpton played several soundbites of Republican elected officials and complained that they "act as though" the unemployed are "dependents, that they're some kind of beggars," he turned to Taylor who responded: You know, this is a party who almost single-handedly...

On Thanksgiving eve, a Nicholas Kristof editorial instructed us on how to think about poverty in The New York Times. The main reason there is poverty, he tells us, is bad luck.We don’t choose our parents, after all. Or the household or neighborhood we are born into. Here are a few of his observations, with my emphasis added:“As Warren Buffett puts it, our life outcomes often depend on the ‘ovarian lottery.‘[T]he difference between being surrounded by a loving family or being homeless on the street is determined not just by our own level of virtue or self-discipline, but also by an inextricable mix of luck, biography,...

Karen Owen, a writer for the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Virginia, authored a recent column in which she sneered that “the term Christian conservative” is “an oxymoron.” How, she asked, “can we call ourselves – and practically insist that we are – a Christian nation when we seemingly ignore so many teachings of Christ?” So what examples does she cite to make her dubious case? Well, there’s the decision by greeting card giant Hallmark to alter the lyrics of “Deck the Halls” on a Christmas ornament from “don we now our gay apparel” to “don we now our fun apparel.”...

The growth of three dimensional (3-D) printing technology brings opportunities scientific, entrepreneurial – even culinary. Some people are using the devices to build custom creations out of chocolate. “I don’t know if it’s good chocolate,” said Prabhjot Singh, Director of Additive Manufacturing at General Electric (GE), which uses 3-D printers to make parts for aviation and advanced energy-generation machinery – presumably out of non-edible materials. The process delivers performance while producing designs and prototypes for parts more quickly. Three dimensional printing uses a digital model to create a 3-D object by adding consecutive layers of material to it. That requires...