Free Republic

The $8 detail in the Globe’s Spotlight series on race in Boston is not a typo. The median net worth for non-immigrant African-American households in the Greater Boston region is $8, according to “The Color of Wealth in Boston,” a 2015 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School.

In 1950, female-headed households were 18 percent of the black population. Today it's close to 70 percent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children lived with the biological mother and father. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. Herbert Gutman, author of "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925," reports, "Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents." Also, both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present...

Former HUD-OIG Special Agent In Charge Indicted on Mortgage Fraud Charges Herschell Harvell, Jr., 53, Conyers, Georgia, made his initial appearance in federal court on charges of making false statements to a bank to obtain a mortgage loan and conspiring to obstruct an investigation into his real estate transactions by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Inspector General (HUD-OIG). Until he was terminated in 2013, Harvell was the Special Agent in Charge of HUD-OIG’s Atlanta office, which encompasses several southeastern states. Harvell’s co-defendant and nephew, Tavus A. Wright, 32, Milledgeville, Georgia, also made his initial appearance...

That’s rather bad news because it not only tells us that poverty is ubiquitous, but that the birth rate is swinging deeper into its trenches, meaning more people carrying fewer people. Or to put it another way, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a thousand Detroits being subsidized by ten thousand suburbs of government employees and those suburbs being subsidized by the printing presses of Washington. According to researchers from the George Washington University (GWU) School of Public Health, in 2010, almost half of all births in the United States were paid for by Medicaid, and that...

A lesson in economics. Learning from Obituaries.... It seems that every couple of days New Orleans loses one of its treasured ENTREPRENEURS . Lets get the players straight before we go on with this. interpretation of data not verified but... LARMONDO "FLAIR" ALLEN His Companion (NOT married with children: Kawanner Armstrong His Sons : Christian Allen Kwan Allen Larmondo Allen, Jr. His Daughters: Deidra Allen Larmenshell Allen Lamonshea Allen Larmomdriel Allen Larmerja Allen Korevell Allen AT AGE 25 - He had 9 Children. (Could Kawanner Armstrong Possibly Be The Mother Of All Of His Kids?) His Father: Burnell Thompson His...

Parents across the metro area, in different school districts, have similar stories to tell when it comes to the way their children were treated after reporting they were bullied. “The other kid jumped in and had the boxcutter up and threatened to stab her over and over again,” Tina Williams said. “And he said, ‘I wouldn't stab a girl, but I'd stab a b**** and I'm looking at one right now,’ when he looked at my daughter.” “At lunch I am kind of afraid that they are going to threaten me again,” said Williams' daughter, Kayla. “She's heard jackass, b****,...

Play Video Video:Too Young for Birth Control? ABC News Play Video Video:Designer Babies FOX News AP – Graphic shows number of births in the U.S. since ATLANTA – Remember the baby boom? No, not the one after World War II. More babies were born in the United States in 2007 than any other year in the nation's history — and a wedding band made increasingly little difference in the matter. The 4,317,119 births, reported by federal researchers Wednesday, topped a record first set in 1957 at the height of the baby boom. Behind the number is both good and bad...

While the state has seen demographic shifts in suburban school districts, the isolation and intense concentration of minority students in the 31 Abbott school districts is worse today than it was 20 years ago.  That's the basis for a "friend of the court" brief filed jointly by the New Jersey Black Issues Convention and the Hispanic Directors Association, two influential umbrella organizations. They are among nine groups challenging the state's overhaul of the school funding formula that guaranteed additional aid to the state's neediest districts. Locally, Paterson, Passaic and Garfield are classified as Abbott districts.   The court is scheduled...

The Census Bureau last week released its latest estimate of the U.S. poverty rate... The 2005 poverty rate of 12.6 percent...was substantially higher than the 11.1 percent level back in 1973... The results seem to suggest a prolonged failure of national policies to address poverty. However, the problem here lies less with actual living conditions than with the flawed and misleading poverty measure .... Today's poor households are more likely to have telephone and television sets than non-poor households in 1970; much more likely to have central air conditioning than the typical home of 1980, almost as likely to have...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Four years into an economic recovery, the number of people living in poverty has finally stopped climbing. Household incomes edged up slightly in 2005, but 37 million people were still living below the poverty line, about the same as the year before, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. It was the first year without an increase in poverty since 2000, just before President Bush took office. The numbers immediately became political fodder, with a little more than two months to go before midterm congressional elections that will determine whether Republicans continue to control the House and the Senate....

What Was Really Great About The Great Society The truth behind the conservative myths By Joseph A. Califano Jr. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers' money. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line...