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,,,,,I grew up in Ireland in the foster care system for most of my early life....In my late teens and early twenties, my drug use spiraled out of control, I was homeless on the streets, and I finally ended up in prison. It gave me a place to live. I heard the gospel for the first time and was converted through reading Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Bible.....The church has made mistakes in the past by farming out, almost exclusively, social justice-type ministries to parachurch organizations. The church has also been guilty of paternalism and malevolent generosity when it comes...

The overall poverty rate in the United States dropped for the first time since 2006, with Hispanics being the only racial or ethnic group that experienced the most significant change in income. The U.S. Census Bureau's annual report released Tuesday indicated that the poverty rate among Latinos in 2013 decreased by 2.1 percentage points from the previous year. In addition, income for Hispanic households increased by 3.5 percent between 2012 and 2013 to $40,963. The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference that represents millions of Hispanic Evangelicals, attributed the rise in income to more Latinos...

Economy In Crisis: A new study by the Illinois Policy Institute shows in the past four years, the number of new food-stamp recipients in the state has outpaced new jobs nearly 2-to-1. Illinois Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, locked in a tight re-election battle with self-made billionaire Republican Bruce Rauner, has been arguing that Illinois, arguably the bluest of blue states, has turned the fiscal corner and is on its way back. The recovery may be slower than Quinn wants it to be — but, he says, it is real. It is an odd recovery, though, that makes more people dependent...

So far, if measured by household income, the 21st century has not been a good one for the United States of America. In its annual report on "Income and Poverty in the United States," released on Tuesday, the Census Bureau described real median household income as stagnating for two years after declining for two. "Median household income was $51,939 in 2013, not statistically different in real terms from the 2012 median of $51,759," said the Census Bureau. "This is the second consecutive year that the annual change was not statistically significant, following two consecutive years of annual declines in median...

The Census Bureau's annual report on poverty, released Tuesday, is noteworthy because this year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's launch of the War on Poverty. Liberals claim that the war has failed because we didn't spend enough money. Their answer is to spend more. But the facts show otherwise. Since its beginning, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson's War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that's three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution. The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs. These...

For every job created in the state of Illinois, two people sign-up for food stamps—not exactly an encouraging statistic. The state ranked ‘dead last’ across America for job growth in 2014, according to the Illinois Policy.Not only is the economically-challenged state failing to create positions in the private sector, it actually lost nearly 6,000 jobs between January and July of this year. Since the financial crisis of 2008, Illinois has almost 300,000 fewer workers:  The pace at which Illinois has been creating jobs is simply not good enough for Illinois families, and policy mistakes, such as the historic 2011 tax hikes,...

This week, the U.S. Census Bureau is scheduled to release its annual poverty report. The report will be notable because this year marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. In his January 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson proclaimed, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”[1] Since that time, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all military wars in...

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress on Tuesday that he would recommend deploying United States combat forces against Islamic extremists in specific operations if the current strategy of airstrikes was not successful, raising the possibility of the kind of escalation that President Obama has flatly ruled out. General Dempsey said that the ground forces would likely be Special Operations commands who could call in airstrikes from the ground. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said that while he was confident in the ability of the coalition of American, European...

Liberals claim that the War on Poverty has failed because we didn’t spend enough money. Their answer is just to spend more. But the facts show otherwise. Since its beginning, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution.

In June 2014, there were 46,496,145 recipients of the food stamp program, which is enough to fill the Yankee Stadium 925 times, according to data from the Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Yankee Stadium is equipped to hold 50,291 persons, meaning that the 46,496,145 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients in June 2014 could fill the stadium 925 times. The number of recipients was up 270,999 since the previous month in May 2014 when there were 46,225,146 individuals participating in the program. Similarly, the number of households participating in the SNAP program has increased as well from the 22,590,393 participating...

Recently we reported there are 92 million Americans out of work who didn’t look for employment last month – while there were 9 million out of work who were still looking. And you must understand, since the 92 million aren’t looking, they’re not counted as “unemployed” therefore giving the impression that American unemployment is only 6.1 percent. Well, we haven’t looked at the growth of the welfare nanny-state for sometime. As we are winding down the baseball season — which is the last season for Yankee stalwart Derek Jeter — I figured we could pay tribute to the Yankees as...

This is my third consecutive column about the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black youth, by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. I have focused on this because the circumstances that led to this tragedy point to more than narrow, parochial concerns of low-income minority communities. They point to things fundamentally wrong in America that are dragging us all down. Hopefully, remedial measures will be adopted that will lower the likelihood that a police officer will reduce a black youth to a racial stereotype and kill him. But even with such measures, we cannot continue to ignore circumstances...

Ferguson became a Selma-like moment for the 2010s – to the extent the stark images caused a nation to stop and reflect on the state of racial relations in America. Moreover, a new generation of activists, who were not weaned on the nonviolence of the Civil Rights Era, is coming to the fore. Ferguson, Mo. — Burly, with tattoos and a bandanna over his face, Anthony Pruit stepped up to the Missouri State Highway Patrol captain trying to cool the tensions that engulfed Ferguson, Mo., in protests and riots this summer. “We hurt, we broken, and we ain’t all criminals,”...

They are impoverished in industry and suffer from severe poverties of honesty, decency and shame. Their fake poverty is as fake as their concern for the poor No group has been hit harder by the Obama economy than American liberals. From Marin County, where bundlers have had to struggle to scrape together a few ten grand bills to attend Obama fundraisers, to Washington D.C. whose bedroom communities now have seven of the ten highest household incomes in the country, poverty is hitting poor rich little liberals really hard. In 2006, Alaska had the highest household income. But voters chose Obama...

When Republicans want to support their position that Americans have become dependent on welfare, they frequently point to the number of workers on food stamps. In 2012, Senator Rand Paul called the program “out of control.” In 2011, Senator Jeff Sessions told the Daily Caller, “There is no doubt, if this country isn’t willing to look under the hood of the food stamp program as we try to bring our surging debt under control, we are obviously not serious about what we are doing.”Paul, Sessions and their Republican colleagues are right that the number of food stamp beneficiaries grew considerably...

Consumer spending fell in July for the first time in six months, as Americans cut back on purchases of new cars and other retail goods, the government reported Friday. The drop in spending was a bit of a surprise: economists polled by MarketWatch had predicted a seasonally adjusted 0.1% increase. The growth in incomes, meanwhile, slowed to 0.2% pace in July from 0.5% in each of the prior two months. It was the smallest gain since December and also below Wall Street expectations.

Fifty years after the “war on poverty” was first waged, there are signs a new offensive is needed. Newly released Census data reveals nearly 110 million Americans – more than one-third of the country – are receiving government assistance of some kind. The number counts people receiving what are known as “means-tested” federal benefits, or subsidies based on income. This includes welfare programs ranging from food stamps to subsidized housing to the program most commonly referred to as “welfare,” Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. At the end of 2012, according to the stats, 51.5 million were on food stamps, while...

Our current welfare system is clearly a mess. The federal government currently funds 126 separate anti-poverty programs, at least 72 of which provide either cash or in-kind benefits to individuals. For example, there are 33 housing programs, run by four different cabinet departments, including bizarrely the Department of Energy. There are currently 21 different programs providing food or food purchasing assistance. These programs are administered by three different federal departments and one independent agency.  There are eight different health care programs, administered by five separate agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services. And six cabinet departments and five...

One hundred ten million! That’s how many Americans now live in households that receive some form of means-tested welfare benefit from the federal government. According to a report from the Census Bureau released last week, that’s the highest absolute number in American history, and it represents 35.4 percent of the American population. Think about it — more than one out of every three Americans live in households that are now on welfare. Looked at another way, America’s welfare state now has nearly three times the population of the largest actual state. Because many of these households include more than one...

Count yourself fortunate, or something, if you’re among the 48 percent of Americans who can cough up a spare $400 in emergency cash without having to beg, borrow or steal. According to a Federal Reserve report on American households’ “economic well-being” in 2013, fewer than half of all Americans said they’d be able to come up with four Benjamins on short notice to deal with an unexpected expense. The report, released last week by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, indicates a disparity between how Americans view their financial situation and the reality of where their finances actually...