Free Republic

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...

Last week, the Justice Policy Institute released a study that examined how states' spending on corrections and higher education respectively had diverged over the last twenty years. The report particularly highlighted the effect of the relative changes on the male African American community. Indeed, the subhead of the press release ran "More African American Men Incarcerated Than Enrolled In College," going on to say that "in 2000, there were an estimated 791,600 African American men in prison and jail, and 603,000 in higher education." There are several problems with this characterization: the figures are incorrect, the comparison is misleading and...