Free Republic

In a column from December of 2015, the Wall Street Journal’s Mary O’Grady unveiled a rather inconvenient fact that poverty warriors on the American left and right would perhaps prefer remain hidden: from 1980 to 2000, when the U.S. economy boomed, the number of Mexican arrivals into the U.S. grew from 2.2 million in 1980 to 9.4 million in 2000. The previous number is a clear market signal that the U.S. is where poverty has always been cured, as opposed to a condition that requires specific U.S. policy fixes. O’Grady’s statistics came to mind while reading a recent New York...

Operation Food Search is launching an expanded summer program this week, providing free meals to children under the age of 18 who would normally eat breakfast and lunch at school. Some of the meals will come from food truck-like vans. Starting Monday and continuing through Aug. 11, program leaders plan to distribute more than 100,000 meals to hungry children in St. Louis and St. Louis County, exceeding last year’s record. The summer program, now in its sixth year, has grown from providing 5,000 meals in 2012, Executive Director Sunny Schaefer said....

More than 36 percent of teenage girls in America are depressed or have suffered a recent major depressive episode, according to a study published in Translational Psychiatry. For boys, the rate is 13.6 percent. What are we doing to the kids? It isn't just one study. Research throughout the last several decades has shown a consistent pattern of rising anxiety, depression, suicide and suicide attempts among American adolescents. A 2001 paper published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that the suicide rate tripled between 1950 and 1990. The rise in depression and other psychological suffering cannot be written off...

The number of people homeless in the US city of Los Angeles has soared in the past year, a new report shows, despite efforts to combat the problem. The homeless population in the city grew 20% while the numbers for the wider Los Angeles County were even higher at 23%, the figures revealed. Experts say soaring rents and a high cost of living are major factors. Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn described the figures as "staggering". "Homelessness in LA County has grown at a shocking rate," she said in a statement. "Even as work is being done to get...

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high Oh your daddy’s rich and your ma is good-lookin’ So hush, little baby, don’t you cry. — Lyrics to “Summertime,” sung by Ella Fitzgerald Ella Fitzgerald knew a lot about the haves and have-nots. She grew up poor and at 17 had been homeless and hungry for a year before she was “discovered” at The Apollo in Harlem in 1934. Think of the millions of hungry children in rich America today who might never be “discovered” or are kept from realizing their talents. And for them...

Because if you have power to change your situation, then you don't need to rely on them There is nothing liberals hate more than the suggestion that people with problems in their lives have the power to solve those problems, on their own, by making changes in their lives. They freak out at any such suggestion and paint it as “blaming the victim.” But it is really not that at all. It is simply a recognition that people make their own decisions and form their own attitudes, and that they have the power to change those decisions and attitudes if...

Former U.S. Democrat Representative Corrine Brown was found guilty on 18 of 22 charges for fraud and tax evasion during trial verdict Thursday in federal court in Jacksonville. Brown was found guilty of taking tens-of-thousands of dollars from her One Door for Education Foundation, a charity for poor and impoverished children, and putting the money into her personal accounts for use in maintaining an indulgent lifestyle. She was also found guilty of conspiring within the scheme to defraud donors to the foundation, and guilty of attempts to impede/obstruct the investigation.

Venezuela is no stranger to protests, but the recent uprisings have rocked the country and stirred questions about the nation’s future.This past week, the “mother of all protests” has seen upward of 2 million Venezuelans take to the streets demanding an end to the notoriously corrupt Maduro regime.Beginning on what would be the 207th anniversary of the country’s independence from Spain, frustrated Venezuelans have taken to the streets demanding change. So far, three Venezuelans have been killed in the marches, hundreds have been injured, and 500 have been arrested.In the span of just over 20 years, President Nicolás Maduro, his...

American Indians are the poorest of all of America's ethnic groups. Why? After all, the government has granted them massive reservations and created entire agencies to look after them. Well, maybe that's why. Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of "The New Trail of Tears," explains. We've all heard about how many bad things the U.S. government did to American Indians in the past. But what about today? Like most people, the only time I hear about today's American Indians is when people are outraged about sports mascots or team names, like the Washington Redskins. But sports teams' names are the least...

“Jobs and free mass housing ... These are fundamental rights and the situation of extreme poverty demands it,” a Kadamay representative told teleSUR. Representatives of homeless families who occupied thousands of vacant government-built homes for over a month delivered a firm “wake-up call” to the Philippine Senate Tuesday, telling officials that the wretched social conditions and government neglect forced them to act. Now, the group is demanding jobs and free mass housing — or they'll have no choice but to continue their campaign of redistributing idle homes to the needy. “They said those who occupied the Bulacan houses were lazy,”...

If budget-cutters in Washington decided to eliminate food-stamp benefits to New Yorkers, the city’s politicians would be denouncing the cruelty of the “Republican war on the poor.” Yet Mayor Bill De Blasio and the city council are already inflicting the same sort of pain on low-income New Yorkers by denying them access to one of the nation’s most effective anti-poverty programs: Walmart.When he was mayor, Michael Bloomberg supported Walmart’s efforts to open a store in New York, but the company faced unremitting resistance from unions and elected officials, and it gave up the fight once de Blasio moved into Gracie...

LEXINGTON, MS (Mississippi News Now) - More than 100 jobs could soon be coming to the city of Lexington in Holmes County. Emerald Transformer announced today it will open a new factory on Bowling Green Road. More jobs, more tax dollars and more exposure - that's what folks here in Lexington hope Emerald Transformer can do for their small town. Signs are going up and the company officials prepare to breath new life into this 100,000 square foot building. Holmes County board president James Young and his team said for years, the Lexington warehouse has sat empty. "This is something...

April 12 (UPI) -- Some Venezuelans pelted President Nicolas Maduro with rocks and eggs during a pro-government military event, a moment shown on state television....

In 1787, Russian Empress Catherine Romanov the Great visited Crimea. Her tour guide was her lover Prince Grigory Potemkin. The Prince's estates in Crimea were shoddy and run down. To give her majesty the impression that all was well and that Crimea was pristine and beautiful, he erected portable settlements and facades along the river that her boat would be travelling. The deception worked, The middle aged aristocrat impressed the Middle aged Empress and Prince Grigory curried favor with the empress. In reality, behind the facade, Grigory's subjects lived in abject poverty and misery. An Austrian delegation toured Potemkin's...

Social Security... The SSI program. Liberals hail it as the toast of socialism. Liberals promulgate SSI as proof that government cares. The social secuirty program cares, the program is there to help those who cannot help themselves and that welfare state is superior to Christian charity. According to New York Times columnist and leftist Charles Blow, "Social security is the gift of Washington to the American people. It is what makes America a higher standard in freedom and prosperity." Just like everything printed by the Bolshevik News media including the Times and its left wing mouth pieces, nothing could be...

A man who owns 3 homes — including a recent purchase of a $600,000 vacation home — took to Twitter yesterday to criticize Americans because we’re a nation that “worships wealth rather than caring for the poor.” In response, the snark was running hot and heavy as the twitterverse destroyed the socialist Senator from Vermont.PollySpin @PollySpin Sell all you have and use the money to care for the poor. I have faith in you Bernie, YOU can do it!!! 12:34 PM 18 Mar 2017 lc65265 @lc65265 @BernieSanders Says the man who owns 3 homes one which cost over $600,000. I’m...

Princeton economics professor emeritus and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton has been running around making an extraordinary claim: “Being really poor in America is in some ways worse than being really poor in India or Africa," he recently told the National Association for Business Economics. Asked about those comments in an interview with the Atlantic, Deaton doubled down: "If you had to choose between living in a poor village in India and living in the Mississippi Delta or in a suburb of Milwaukee in a trailer park, I'm not sure who would have the better life." This claim was qualified—Deaton is...

A panel of black political commentators on CNN imploded Thursday into a screaming match as they discussed the effect of President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts could have on the black community. As the panel discussed the cuts, Paris Dennard, a Trump supporter, pointed out that HBCUs, the acronym for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, were not included in the list of proposed cuts. But host Don Lemon found the HBCU argument to be less important than other social programs. “So a lot of people say HBCUs are important,” Lemon declared, “but there are a lot of people watching here...

DENVER — Each morning Yadira Sanchez and her three children awaken to the roar of traffic and the plumes of exhaust that spill from the highway that cuts through their neighborhood. Now, Ms. Sanchez and her family are confronting a plan to triple the width of this state’s main east-west artery, sending tens of thousands more cars by their door. Denver was the fastest-growing large city in America in 2015, with a population of nearly 700,000, and the scene of a tech and marijuana boom that has drawn 1,000 new households a month. But as in other cities, its highways...

With no solution to the food crisis in Venezuela, some people have begun looking for new strategies to make life easier on those that have to eat trash to sustain. Controversial Priest and opponent to President Nicolás Maduro’s administration Father Jose Palmar posted on social media this week about labeling discarded waste so those looking through it for food can do so more easily and “with dignity.” Palmar called on Venezuelans to celebrate Lent by identifying bags where food has been discarded for those with no where else to turn. That way, they don’t have to dig through non-edible items...