Free Republic

<p>The Sustainable Development Goals are set for adoption by the 193 U.N. member states shortly after Pope Francis brings his activist message to the world body on Friday — a message sure to include calls to pull back from the abyss of a heating world and to spread global wealth among the neediest.</p>

Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony. With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false, and deeply reactionary. They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak — if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.

What Hillary Clinton and her husband, Bill, pay in local property taxes on two luxury homes ($104,303) is twice the income of an average family. She earns more for a 20-minute speech to an industry trade group than a dozen fast-food workers make in a year. Her book royalties last year brought in $5 million, part of the couple's $30.5 million in income. The Clintons are far from the "dead broke" couple, as she has described, who left the White House saddled with debt after Bill Clinton's presidency. In fact, they now rank comfortably among the top one-tenth of the...

Tomorrow, the U.S. Census Bureau will release its annual poverty report. Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. has a small social-welfare system and far more poverty, compared with other affluent nations. But noted liberal scholars Irwin Garfinkel, Lee Rainwater, and Timothy Smeeding challenge such simplistic ideas in their book Wealth and Welfare States: Is America a Laggard or Leader? Garfinkel and his colleagues examine social-welfare spending and poverty in rich nations. They define social welfare as having five components: health-care spending; education spending; cash retirement benefits; other government cash transfers such as unemployment insurance and the earned-income tax credit...

Exodus 1:11 NIV 11 So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. What happened to the great American melting pot? It has been drained and divided for a political agenda. The Dems have divided America into different groups and factions to fight against the unifying of America to advance their Marxist agenda. They have preached a steady diet of hatred and envy for fifty years and now the violent groups have begun a vicious open season on the fabric of society. The only way...

The photographs of the body of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy, vividly convey the human tragedy on Europe's borders - but not the complexity. Many are fleeing war, but many are fleeing poverty. This Great Migration was not expected because, for years, politicians believed that there would be less of it as poor countries became richer. Give aid, not shelter, ran the argument. "As the benefits of economic growth are spread in Mexico," Bill Clinton once assured Americans, "there will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home." When Jose...

An IRS audit released this week shows that nearly half a million ObamaCare enrollees were able to claim more than $235 million in excess subsidies that they will never have to pay back, thanks to a quirk in the law that leaves the program vulnerable to potentially billions in excess subsidy payments.

By one dismal measure, America is joining the likes of Third World countries. The number of U.S. residents who are struggling to survive on just $2 a day has more than doubled since 1996, placing 1.5 million households and 3 million children in this desperate economic situation. That's according to "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America," a book from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that will be released on Sept. 1. The measure of poverty isn't arbitrary -- it's the threshold the World Bank uses to measure global poverty in the developed world. While it may be the...

Housing, education and job training, and other anti-poverty programs have cost some $22 trillion since Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the War on Poverty (WoP) some 50 years ago. Blacks made up some 40% of those living in poverty at the start of the program and now make up some 30% – though that figure may be misleading due to the increasing number of Hispanics living in poverty. In public housing alone, blacks constitute nearly 50% of the occupants. Forty-eight percent of public housing households are black compared to only 19 percent of all renter households.6 Taking income into account does not...

Poverty, Anyone? Why the First Evangelical Counsel Is a Gift for Us All Msgr. Charles Pope • August 16, 2015 • There are three evangelical counsels in Christianity: poverty, chastity, and obedience. Each, of course, presents challenges, but all are rooted in a similar goal: detachment. In obedience, God gives us the grace to free ourselves from pride and willfulness. In chastity, God gives us the grace to order and moderate our sexual passions according to our state in life, thereby reducing our obsession with their energy. And in poverty, God gives us the grace to suppress our greed and...

Those that run food banks all over America say that demand for their services just continues to explode. It always amazes me that there are still people out there that insist that an “economic collapse” is not happening. From their air-conditioned homes in their cushy suburban neighborhoods they mock the idea that the U.S. economy is crumbling. But if they would just go down and visit the local food banks in their areas, they would see how much people are hurting. According to Feeding America spokesman Ross Fraser, 46 million Americans got food from a food bank at least one...

The poverty that poor African Americans experience is often different from the poverty of poor whites. It's more isolating and concentrated. It extends out the door of a family's home and occupies the entire neighborhood around it, touching the streets, the schools, the grocery stores. A poor black family, in short, is much more likely than a poor white one to live in a neighborhood where many other families are poor, too, creating what sociologists call the "double burden" of poverty. The difference is stark in most major metropolitan areas, according to recent data analyzed by Rutgers University's Paul Jargowsky...

Food banks across the country are seeing a rising demand for free groceries despite the growing economy, leading some charities to reduce the amount of food they offer each family. U.S. food banks are expected to give away about 4 billion pounds of food this year, more than double the amount provided a decade ago, according to Feeding America, the nation's primary food bank network. The group gave away 3.8 billion in 2013.

When it comes to alternative energy, no state has done more than California to discourage its citizens from using conventional energy and switching to "renewables." But the cost of these policies has been brutal for some. That's especially true for electricity, which accounts for about a quarter of all global-greenhouse emissions in the state. A new study by economist Jonathan A. Lesser, for the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment at the Manhattan Institute, finds that higher prices are having a big impact. "As a result of the state's green-energy policies, Californians' electricity bills have risen and appear likely...

President Obama is surreptitiously colluding with radical anti-growth environmentalists to force ideologically driven carbon-emission controls on the energy industry that will devastate the U.S. economy, congressional investigators have discovered. As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew up rules aimed at limiting carbon emissions from power-generation plants, "key stakeholders — including the American public — had little to no influence over the debate while powerful environmental activist groups were given unprecedented access to and influence over administration officials," the Washington Times reported yesterday. Collusion between the EPA and the green's isn't exactly breaking news. They've been doing it for years, but...

The first question any logical person would pose upon hearing the Cecil the lion story should be along the lines of whether or not that lion meat (presuming it is edible) was used to feed the people of Zimbabwe. Too bad the story didn’t attract any logical people, those who might give two cents about the suffering of the people, not the animals of Africa. For Western, middle-class and celebrity animal-rights activists, it is simply easier to leave Africa to the Africans, many of whom don’t really get why killing a lion in a nation largely without running water is...

A first-of-its-kind car-sharing program will give residents of Los Angeles' neglected neighborhoods access to carbon-free transportation.Electric vehicles have helped people save money and curb their greenhouse gas emissions. But for those with less cash to spare, those benefits have been largely out of reach. Now a first-of-its-kind E.V. car-sharing program in Los Angeles aims to put the city’s low-income residents—some of whom have to walk a mile to the closest bus stop—behind the wheel of convenient and carbon-free transportation. “It will help improve the lives of every Angeleno in these neighborhoods by offering them options they don’t have,” said Matt...

Only Hillary Clinton could try to get away with slamming her Republican opponents for siding with the wealthy at the same time disclosing she’s filthy rich. Just $141 million for her and Bill Clinton since 2007, a figure that makes even the one-percenters envious. But Hillary’s different from other rich people because she wishes she had less money. If only her heartless GOP opponents would let her. “They want to give me another tax cut I don’t need instead of putting middle-class families first,” she said. Another thing that makes Hillary Clinton understand the middle class better: She pulled herself...

Three universities contributed to a study that shows that children are faring badly in the Obama years, although they stop short of questioning the official unemployment rate. The 2015 Kids Count Data Book, published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that “In 2013, nearly a third of children (31 percent) were living in families where no parent had full-time, year-round employment. The child poverty rate has remained stubbornly high. At 22 percent in 2013, it was still several percentage points higher than before the recession.” The report goes on to note that “In 2000, 9 percent of children lived...

Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s choice to replace Lisa Jackson at the Environmental Protection Agency, has been chastised for having lied to Congress, in claiming that EPA did not use “dangerous manmade climate change” to justify new 54.5 mpg standards for cars and light trucks. She’s also been implicated in the agency’s practice of using fake emails to hide questionable dealings and activities. These issues highlight attitudes toward ethics, law and public policy that prevail at EPA and too many other government agencies. However, that attention should not distract from other important matters. Ms. McCarthy may be the worst of the...