Free Republic

In the summer of 1996 I got off a long flight at Baltimore to begin a PhD at Johns Hopkins University. My roommates-to-be were two Indian students who had rented a car to pick me up were somewhat unfamiliar with the roads. So, having taken a wrong turn off the highway, we found ourselves in West Baltimore, not far from Mondawmin Mall where two weeks ago rioting began in the wake of the custodial death of Freddie Gray. Out of the backseat I saw shabbily dressed people sitting on plastic chairs or on the stoops of their rowhouses. These houses...

A new report released by the Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) says that only 16 percent of 15- to 17-year-old teens in Baltimore have been raised in an intact, married family. The report, released Wednesday and compiled in light of the recent Baltimore riots, cites Census Bureau statistics showing that, in terms of family units, Baltimore is “one of the five least intact counties of America,” along with Cuyahoga, Ohio; the Bronx, N.Y.; the District of Columbia; and Shelby County, Tenn. The report cites studies indicating that children who grow up in intact, married families are...

All children, regardless of their circumstances, deserve safe, nourishing and delicious school meals.One of the best ways to help district nutrition programs as they transition to healthier food is to buy school lunch for your children. When I talk with parents about school food, many are so disappointed in the options their schools provide that they’ve simply opted out. They pack their children’s lunches every day, giving up on their school’s nutrition program as a lost cause. I understand and support parents who insist their children eat healthfully and responsibly. My dream is a nation in which all food –...

Reflecting upon Ferguson and Baltimore—along with Detroit and other cities—reveals what they all have in common: most of their African-American residents are captives on what some might call the new plantations—urban islands of poverty surrounded by the fetid waters of political disinterest. The new plantations aren’t so new, created as they were by The Great Society, when Lyndon Johnson wrapped himself in the mantle of the brave new world, and despite presumably noble instincts, laid the foundations for a social slavery he would never have imagined. It’s debatable, of course, but when one peruses the photographic journals compiled by Pittsburgh’s...

Regardless of how Dr. Ben Carson chooses to try to convince Republican voters that he should be their candidate for president, Carson's personal story is particularly worthy of the attention of all Americans during these troubled times. His story defies much of the conventional wisdom we get from both the left and the right to "explain" the grave social problems in our poor minority communities and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to success facing poor black children. From the left, we hear that black life in America would have no hope but for government programs to ease the burdens of an...

Neighborhoods matter. That’s the upshot of two fascinating new studies from Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues. In the 1990s, the federal government launched an experiment, called the Moving to Opportunity project. It created a lottery for housing vouchers that would allow the winners to move out of high-poverty neighborhoods into low-poverty ones. The project’s initial findings were a disappointment for people — like me — who argue that culture matters quite a lot. It did find that neighborhood poverty was a big factor in determining economic mobility, but researchers saw little evidence that getting poor people out of...

Last year the United States celebrated the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty begun by LBJ in 1964. Over that time the country has spent approximately $40 trillion on welfare and redistribution programs of one sort or another – and that number doesn’t include expenditures for Social Security or Medicare. The program started out slow, but has steadily picked up steam so that today the United States spends over a trillion dollars on welfare programs every year. To put that $1 trillion in perspective, that is more than the GDP of every country on the planet except for the...

Bubba threw a pity party on the Today Show. For those of you who didn't catch the MSM newser news, probably just about everyone these days, here is a link to the video. You might want to have a box of tissues handy ... cause this short clip is a real tear jerker!

...After seeing CNN's story Friday on Charles Gladden -- a man who works in the Senate cafeteria but lives on the streets -- Nathan Morris, the co-founder of musical group Boyz II Men, started an online call to arms to help. Using a crowd-funding site "Go Fund Me," Morris urged people to make a donation to help Gladden find housing.... ...Gladden, 63, makes about $11 an hour, and takes home about $360 a week. But he said he gives a lot of it to his children and grandchildren, who have their own financial troubles. "I take care of them," he...

A survey targeting local low-income families has found that 40 percent of respondents felt they have very little or no job security, according to results being released this week. That kind of instability makes it challenging to commit to car loans, apartment leases and tuition payments – steps often necessary to improving a family’s economic standing. Of those participating in the survey, more than 1 in 2 has received free groceries or meals and about 1 in 4 has needed help with housing, utilities or health care. The 502 responses reflect the experiences of those who continue to struggle in...

For a sense of the neighborhood in which Freddie Gray grew up, and which has been set partly ablaze over the last several days — the plot of West Baltimore known as Sandtown-Winchester — one need only read the relevant portion of the Baltimore City Health Department’s 2011 Neighborhood Health Profiles. According to the department (which included in its analysis the adjacent neighborhood of Harlem Park), the 10,000-person neighborhood, which is almost entirely black (97 percent), had a median household income of $22,277 as of 2011– 40 percent below Baltimore City’s average. One in five residents age 16 or older...

Baltimore is in a state of unrest and the mainstream media is condemning protestors as vigilantes. In other words, when it comes to black rage and pain, it’s business as usual. Martin Luther King, Jr. said “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Since the beginning of time, riots and have revolution have gone hand in hand. From the Boston Tea Party to Nat Turner to the L.A riots, there has never been revolution without them. To dismiss the riots as just the actions of “thieves” trying to get free stuff is to ignore history. While Whoopi Goldberg and...

Full title: Sheriff Clarke: Why are we surprised at sub-human behavior in American ghettos? Lib policies created it........Outspoken Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr. blasted Baltimore rioters and the left-wing agenda he says created the powder keg that blew up into violence. On Fox News’ “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” Clarke told the host that liberal policies, not the death of accused drug dealer Freddie Gray, are responsible for the violence in the city.

The presidential ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton have become ensnared in an obscure gold-mining project in Haiti, as the Democratic favorite for the presidency begins her second run for the White House. In a story that suggests cronyism, questionable ethics and a blurring of the lines between charity and profiteering, The Daily Mail reported on Sunday that Hillary Clinton's brother, Tony Rodham, sat on the board of VCS Mining when the unlisted, Delaware-based junior was granted a permit to mine gold in Haiti following a massive earthquake on the impoverished island nation in 2010. The permit was the first to...

Gwynnie P is down with the struggle, comrades. She may make $19 million a year, own mansions in London, New York, Brentwood, Malibu, and the Hamptons, charge $550 for her Goop.com “travel backgammon set,” and fly by private jet, but she feels your pain. OK, it’s not as painful as her last $5,200 Thermage session in Santa Monica, but still, she really, really does feel the agony of the ordinary. Last week, the progressive princess celebrity joined the “SNAP challenge.” It’s basically the ice-bucket challenge for bored Hollywood liberals and media-hungry Democratic politicians. For seven days (or at least for...

Back before self-esteem spirit animals and pre-nup voodoo dominated the contents of free-form wedding vows, we had simple yet robust odes like ‘in sickness and in health’ and ‘for richer or poorer.’ The true magic of those words lies in their claim that the deepest reserves of sacrificial love can still be tapped when life’s trials are the most daunting. But there is another angle to consider when ‘for richer or poorer’ is weighed and measured in light of modern data. When it comes to viewing marriage as a kind of lottery ticket, richer stands out as a safe bet....

Perhaps the decisive factors in combating poverty and enabling upward mobility were not economic but cultural — the habits, mores and dispositions that equip individuals to take advantage of opportunities. This was dismaying because governments know how to alter incentives and remove barriers but not how to manipulate culture. The assumption that the condition of the poor must improve as macroeconomic conditions improve was to be refuted by a deepened understanding of the crucial role of the family as the primary transmitter of the social capital essential for self-reliance and betterment. Family structure is the primary predictor of social outcomes,...

Driving through Naypyidaw, the purpose-built capital of Burma, it could be easy to forget that you’re in the middle of one of south-east Asia’s poorest countries. On either side of the street, a seemingly endless series of giant detached buildings, villa-style hotels and shopping malls look like they have fallen from the sky, all painted in soft pastel colours: light pink, baby blue, beige. The roads are newly paved and lined with flowers and carefully pruned shrubbery. Meticulously landscaped roundabouts boast large sculptures of flowers. The scale of this surreal city is difficult to describe: it extends an estimated 4,800...

On February 13, L’Osservatore Romano (English edition) printed a full-page text of Pope Francis’ message to the Milan “Expo of Ideas.” Its theme was: “Nourish the Planet, Energy for Life.” Pope Bergoglio brought up again his now familiar suggestions about how to handle poverty and hunger. Pope Francis recalled his address to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, November 20, 2014). There, he linked together “the production, accessibility, and availability of foodstuffs, climate change, and agricultural trade.” Our “first concern,” however, “must be the individual person, who lacks daily nourishment, who has given up thinking about life . . .and...

In the exposé ‘Poor Kids of Silicon Valley,’ a CNN reporter seems shocked to uncover a high level of child poverty in the affluent Bay Area. CNN concludes that after consulting with “economists and experts,” they learned that a minimum wage hike to $10.10 would significantly help end child poverty. But if CNN actually talked to the most impoverished families, they would have learned that raising minimum wage, the way Oakland just did, results in maximizing single young mothers and their children living in poverty. Most Americans’ perception of Silicon Valley jobs is “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” The hottest tech...