Free Republic

President Obama's upbeat assessment of the economy is not likely to sit well with low-income families living in major urban or metro areas. For them, economic decline is a harsh reality, not "fiction."

The city, in an attempt to save money, planned to stop buying water from Detroit and sign up with a regional water system; in the interim, it was getting its municipal water from the Flint River, which is as much a garbage dump as it is a body of water. Residents complained that the water smells of chemicals, that it isn't the right color, etc. Children's lead levels are dangerously high, and an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease may also be linked to city water. The city knew about this, and did approximately nothing in response until the problem was well...

That intact families are more economically solvent than fractured ones has long been observed outside of academe. Arguably, as with many other policy questions, on this one as well, academics tend to be the last to notice. The Fall 2015 issue of The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy features an article by Glenn T. Stanton on "Family Formation and Poverty: A History of Academic Inquiry and Its Major Findings." Stanton is the director of Global Family Formation at Focus on the Family. His 20-page treatise takes us through half a century of seminal research on families and...

Republican Presidential candidates will have an opportunity to show voters an alternative to the half-century War on Poverty at a policy forum January 9 that recalls a legendary public servant who empowered individuals over the welfare state. Jack Kemp, former Cabinet Secretary, Congressman and Buffalo Bills quarterback, left a void in conservatives' ability to connect with people on both an emotional and practical level about the plight of the homeless, the addicted and the unemployed. Fortunately, the Jack Kemp Foundation, which is hosting the "expanding opportunity" forum in the key primary state of South Carolina, has preserved official correspondence and...

We reach the end of the year with yet another tale of crazy, one percenter wingnuts trying to claim that jacking up the minimum wage won’t do much to alleviate the issues facing the poorest Americans who the Democrats are seeking to help. This time the hateful claims are coming from… a study published by the federal government. Increasing the minimum wage is an inefficient way to reduce poverty, according to a Fed research paper that comes amid a national clamor to hike pay for workers at the low end of the salary scale.David Neumark, visiting scholar at the...

The latest dilemma facing economists is why "unequivocally good" low oil prices haven't sparked excuberant consumer spending across America. We have discussed the simple (though awkward for the establishment) answer many times - soaring costs for 'shelter' and healthcare have hoovered up every penny saved (and more); and now, a new study proves it- exposing the reality that many Obamacare customers pay more than 10 percent of their incomes toward coverage (and some paying considerably more). The shocking findings show that, as CNBC summarizes, One in 10 Obamacare customers who earn between just two and five times the federal poverty...

Two of the oldest and most venerated public policy institutes in Washington, D.C., the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, have produced a new joint report dealing with the issue of fighting poverty in America. The report, "Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream," is noteworthy for a number of reasons. One is that it reflects a consensus view between long established Washington institutions representing opposite sides of the political spectrum, with AEI being right of center and the Brooking Institution left of center. But also noteworthy is the nature of...

ISLAMABAD - Tashfeen Malik - who the FBI says pledged allegiance on Facebook to the Islamic State before helping her husband kill 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. - was born in Saudi Arabia to a middle-class Pakistani family mainly associated with agriculture or private businesses. Her father, Gulzak Malik, previously lived in the Karor Lal Esan locality of District Layyah in Pakistan's tumultuous Southern Punjab province. Tashfeen Malik, 27 years old when she was killed Wednesday in a rented SUV in a shootout with law enforcement, went to that province several years ago to study pharmacy in Multan city...

When is the last time you heard Hillary Clinton talk about poverty? How about Barack Obama? Or Bernie Sanders? Granted, they use the word "middle class" a lot. But when is the last time you heard them talk about what they want to do for the "poor"? I can't remember. Take housing. On any given day about 565,000 people in the United States are homeless. That problem isn't going away any time soon. In fact, at the current rate of progress it will take 40 years before the homeless disappear from our shelters and streets. I don't recall any Democratic...

Socialist Pope Francis announced today that the world is “near suicide” if no climate change deal is reached this week in Paris. The freewheeling Argentinian also blamed the West for African poverty. 75 million Africans were paid bribes in the last year. – which had nothing to do with the West.

Did you celebrate World Toilet Day? The recent holiday is a good reminder to rejoice as you read this article on your phone, maybe even while sitting comfortably on a modern, porcelain toilet, which flushes with water so crystalline clean you could, in hard times, drink it without too much fear of dying. (We do not recommend doing that, by the way.) Going to the toilet wasn't always such a pleasant, risk-free experience for everyone, and even today, many people in America still go without proper sanitation. As recently as 1990, the rural stereotype of dropping trou in a shack...

This is by far the best thing I have ever seen on the issue of immigration. Numbers and immigration.

In a full-court press, liberal Catholic media are trying to push the U.S. bishops to amend their election guidelines to focus more on care for the poor and immigration than issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and religious liberty. The U.S. Bishops are meeting now in Baltimore, and for the moment seem determined to stay the course, insisting especially on issues such as religious liberty and man-woman marriage. The Bishops' election guide , called "Faithful Citizenship, " ... suggests the relative importance of certain issues vis-à-vis others. The first two "serious moral questions" in the Bishops' guide are abortion and...

'First, do no harm" is a guiding principle for physicians, warning against interventions that would make a patient's life worse. Regulatory agencies should follow it too, as they can harm millions of patients. The Obama administration's final "Clean Power Plan" is a prime example. Finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency in August, the regulation requires states to sharply reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, closing low-cost power plants and replacing them with more expensive sources. While President Obama touts the supposed health benefits, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy recently admitted that "low-income minority communities would be hardest hit" by the regulation.

As a general rule, when scholars call your work "garbage" and "nonsensical," either you've struck a nerve or made a horrible blunder. When it comes to a Vox attack on our recent National Review Online article, "America's Unexceptional Poverty Rate," we think it's more the former than the latter. Nonetheless, we appreciate the critique from Vox's Dylan Matthews, as it raises important and reasonable questions, both about our methodology and about the larger social policies issues at stake. Let's tackle the methods first. What we attempted to do in our Education Next article, "America's Mediocre Test Scores," and in...

Since 1964 the United States Governments (Federal and State) have transferred over five trillion dollars from the middle class and the rich to the poor. Are the poor better off today or have they become more enslaved and dependent on government? How much is five trillion dollars? A billion dollars is one thousand million dollars. A trillion dollars is one thousand billion dollars, thus five trillion dollars is five thousand billion dollars. That amount is inconceivable to the human mind. That is how much government has taken from the middle and rich class and transferred it to the poor. This...

Archdiocese of Washington The Paradox of Poverty -- A Homily for the 32nd Sunday of the Year Msgr. Charles Pope • November 7, 2015 • The first reading in today's Mass, from 1st Kings, speaks to us of the paradox of poverty. And the paradox is this: it is often our poverty, our neediness, that provides a doorway for God to bless us with true riches. It is our emptiness that provides room for God to go to work.Yes, in our riches we have "too much to lose." To the rich and worldly minded, the Gospel seems too demanding. But...

Microsoft multi-billionaire Bill Gates averred that freedom and democracy will need to be sacrificed if we are to avert climate disaster. "Left to their own devices, common people don’t see the need for action to prevent global warming," Gates lamented. "They are too prone to place having a job, food on the table, and a comfortable home ahead of working against global warming." Gates advised "a top down imposition of socialism to overcome individual resistance to the measures deemed essential for taming runaway climate change. Only socialism can stifle prosperity sufficiently to achieve the reductions in human activities that contribute...

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,What you are about to see is more evidence that the growth of poverty in the United States is wildly out of control.  It turns out that there is a tremendous amount of suffering in “the wealthiest nation on the planet”, and it is getting worse with each passing year.  During this election season, politicians of all stripes are running around telling all of us how great we are, but is that really true? As you will see below, poverty is reaching unprecedented levels in this country, and the middle class is...

Bernie Sanders often claims that America has the highest child-poverty rate of any advanced democracy in the world. He uses this fact to justify his call for a European-style social-welfare state. But what if it’s simply not true? In a new article for the journal Education Next, we demonstrate that when cross-national poverty rates are calculated appropriately, it becomes clear that America is rather unexceptional, at least on this score. We have a significantly lower proportion of children living in poverty than Ireland and the United Kingdom, and about the same as Germany and even Finland. How can that...