Free Republic

Essayist Gerald Early said that the history of the United States will one day be reduced to the Constitution, jazz, and baseball. If someone had made the same summary of Chinese history 30 years ago, the trio would likely have been the Great Wall, Maoism, and famine. Over the past 2,000 years, China has suffered almost one famine per year. Severe drought killed as many as 13 million Chinese in the two-year famine beginning in 1876. The 1927 famine killed as many as 6 million. There were significant famines in 1929, 1939, and 1942. The Great Famine, which began in...

A major concern of progressives is their supposed interest in the fate of the poor. They purport to be the champions of the poor. But the truth is that they need the poor more than the poor need them, in a symbiotic relationship. As much as 75% of the money allocated to the poor is consumed by the vast bureaucracies that administer this aid. [SNIP] What is poverty? The late political scientist Edward Banfield provided four degrees of poverty: destitution, which is lack of income sufficient to assure physical survival and to prevent suffering from hunger, exposure, or remediable or...

In many circles -- including advocates for cleaner air, safer streets, public transit -- it's a major policy goal to get people out of cars. Reduce car use, and you reduce pollution. Reduce car use, and we'll need fewer costly roads and parking garages. Reduce car use and shift more people onto bikes and trains, and maybe we'll all spend less of our lives idling in traffic. That line of thinking, however, seldom considers a group of people for whom more car use might actually be a good thing: the poor. A group of researchers at the Urban Institute, the...

The Tower of David skyscraper boasts a helicopter landing pad, glorious views of the Avila mountain range, and large balconies for weekend barbecues. Yet a 45-storey skyscraper in the center of Venezuela's capital Caracas is no five-star hotel or swanky apartment block: it is a slum, probably the highest in the world. Dubbed the "Tower of David", the building was intended to be a shining new financial center but was abandoned around 1994 after the death of its developer - banker and horse-breeder David Brillembourg - and the collapse of the financial sector. Squatters invaded the huge concrete skeleton in...

If you’re hoping to escape from big city crime, look elsewhere. These places actually defy the stereotype of smaller cities being safer. When you see small towns on TV and in movies, they’re almost always idyllic places where the American dream is thriving and neighbors all know each other. That, and unless you’re watching a whodunnit, no one’s ever the victim of a crime. In reality, small cities are surprisingly similar to all the others, meaning that there are good ones and bad. While the Movoto Real Estate Blog has been writing lately about America’s safest places, we thought we’d...

One phenomenon of the modern economy is affluence that doesn’t feel like it. You work, earn and spend quite a lot, yet it seems you’re getting nowhere. Some new economic analysis helps quantify just how many people might be characterized as the “wealthy poor”— and it’s a surprisingly large chunk of the overall population. A new paper by economists Greg Kaplan and Justin Weidner of Princeton University, and Giovanni Violante of New York University, finds that about 70 million Americans may live in families they describe as “wealthy hand-to-mouth” households. These are families that own assets such as homes, cars,...

President Obama at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Phoenix Awards in Washington, 2011. The relationship between culture and poverty starkly divides not just liberals against conservatives, but also liberals against each other. Yet liberals rarely think through their disagreements publicly, even though — or perhaps because — they pit figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama against their own supporters. Ta-Nehisi Coates is an exception, having written a series of well-received columns (a year ago, a couple months ago, and then yesterday) objecting to President Obama’s regular habit of urging higher levels of personal responsibility in the black community....

It´s a quiet crisis. In a city of plenty, a staggering number of people are struggling to feed themselves and their families. Nearly one in five New Yorkers, 1.4 million people, now rely on a patchwork network of 1,000 food pantries and soup kitchens across the city to eat. That represents an increase of 200,000 people in five years — straining the charities that are trying to help. The two biggest, City Harvest and the Food Bank for New York City, now provide nearly 110 million pounds of food to soup kitchens and food pantries a year. Yet those working

Todd Wilemon, a managing director at NYSE Euronext and a Fox Business contributor, was foolish enough to do an interview on health care with The Daily Show (a program about which I had a bit to say over the weekend), and the results are approximately what one would expect, which is to say, he came off like an inarticulate jackass. The headline quote came when Mr. Wilemon was asked about what poor people who cannot afford health insurance should do. His answer: “Stop being poor.” For that, he is being treated as the second coming of Marie Antoinette (the cartoon...

What does that even mean? That some shall-remain-unnamed Republican colleague literally told her, presumably when asked why he supported the one percent budget cut to the federal food stamp program recently passed in the farm bill or why he did not support extending unemployment benefits or something, that his entire party’s policy platform is based off of its collective and utter indifference to the plight of families in poverty? …Why do I feel skeptical? Via RCP:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) "I asked a Republican friend why his party remains so opposed to extending the vital lifelines for struggling families and really hungry children. This...

Economic study suggests we're heading for a Blade Runner future Earlier this month, a group of economists released the results of a massive study looking at the economic prospects of people from across the United States. What they found was that the U.S. is like a patchwork quilt of different countries, where some regions offer people the economic prospects of a typical developed nation — and other regions are more like a developing country. This study debunks a few myths about the United States, including the idea that wealthy nations have wealthy citizens. It's a powerful reminder that nations are...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wants everyone to know she's not done yet. After a recent wave of retiring veteran Democrats, the former House speaker assertively said Thursday that's no indication she would soon follow in their footsteps. "When it is [time], you'll know," Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. "They go at their pace, [and] I go at mine. We'll miss them — they're fabulous — but, again, it stirs the pot, and lots of people are very excited about the prospect of what comes next for them," said the Democratic leader. "It's a constantly reinvigorated body; that's...

Incredible legerdemain has been coming out of the Barack Obama policy shops. Taking the cake is the administration’s response to the Congressional Budget Office report showing that Obamacare will reducejobs for lower-earners. Here’s the official spin: unfortunates (as we used to call them), bolstered by health insurance provided by the government, will now be able to enjoy some leisure instead of sticking to the drudgery of menial work. Under the umbrella of Obamacare, the poorare free to…find themselves. We might think these justifications of the health-care monstrosity peculiar, but they have a pedigree. The left has been trading on these...

There seems to be a rising chorus—even among some on the right—that marriage is over and we need to give up on the civil institution of marriage. I’m reminded of the blonde starlet, Mae West. This Hollywood celebrity was asked why she didn’t marry one of the handsome young men who always followed her around. “Marriage is a great institution,” said Mae, “but I’m not ready for an institution.” Married or not, Mae West understood marriage better than some federal judges and some policy analysts. When we hear them say “let’s privatize marriage,” what they are really saying is...

There is no material poverty in the U.S. Here are a few facts about people whom the Census Bureau labels as poor. Dr. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, in their study "Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor" (http://tinyurl.com/448flj8), report that 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have one or more computers. Forty-two percent own their homes. Poor Americans have more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France or the...

President Obama is expected to launch his most focused efforts to address the dire prospects of young men of color this week, a demographic far too often swept into cycles of poverty and the school-to-prison pipeline. Obama will unveil details of a new initiative called “My Brother’s Keeper” on Thursday, which will draw on partnerships with foundations and businesses to target young men of color across the country with a range of opportunities and strategies to help bolster their lives. The initiative, which will offer “every young man of color who is willing to work hard and lift himself up...

There is no material poverty in the U.S. Here are a few facts about people whom the Census Bureau labels as poor. Dr. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, in their study “Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor” (http://tinyurl.com/448flj8), report that 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have one or more computers. Forty-two percent own their homes. Poor Americans have more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France or the...

The Congressional Budget Office did not exactly say Obamacare would cost the nation 2.5 million jobs. But what it did say is vindication of what conservatives have preached since Barry Goldwater stood in the pulpit 50 years ago: The more liberal the welfare state, the greater the disincentive to work and the more ruinous the impact upon a nation's work ethic. The CBO has just given us a statistical measure of that truth. The Obamacare subsidies, it said, will cause some to quit work, others to cut back on the hours they work, and others to hold off going...

It turns out that you can bring produce sections to poor neighborhoods, but you can't get poor people to eat healthier food. This comes as a shock to liberals who believe in the comprehensive theory of victimology -- that all problems afflicting people who fall into ethnic, sexual, or other identities regarded as victims are due to external factors, not to their own choices. Patti Neighmond writes for NPR: In inner cities and poor rural areas across the country, public health advocates have been working hard to turn around food deserts - neighborhoods where fresh produce is scarce, and greasy fast...

Take a look at the graph below. From the end of World War II until 1964 the poverty rate in this country was cut in half. Further, 94% of the change in the poverty rate over this period can be explained by changes in per capita income alone. Economic growth is clearly the most effective antipoverty weapon ever devised by man. The dotted line shows what would have happened had this trend continued. Economic growth would have reduced the number in poverty to a mere 1.4% of the population today ? a number so low that private charity could probably...