Did Welfare Reform Increase Extreme Poverty in the United States?

Two decades ago, on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, popularly known as welfare reform, into law. At the time, liberals proclaimed that the bill would slash the incomes of one in five families with children and push 2.6 million people into poverty.[1] Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously predicted that the bill would leave children scavenging in the streets, “sleeping on grates, picked up in the morning frozen.”

In fact, reform cut welfare caseloads by over 50 percent, employment of the least-skilled single mothers surged, and the poverty rates of black children and single-parent families dropped rapidly to historic lows.[3] Doomsday prophets were utterly discredited. Reform was very popular with the public.

Remarkably, 20 years later, Moynihan’s alarm about “children sleeping on grates” has been revived. The left now contends...

Read more at Heritage.org
Hat tip: John H. Detweiler - "According to chart two, 89% of families living in extreme poverty have cell phones." Read More......

Energy Poverty Around the World

The global warming/climate change industry has been aggressively pushing renewable energy, wind, solar, and biofuels for a long time even though the economies of various industrialized countries need much more energy than what renewables generate.
Read more at the Canada Free Press Read More......

Climate Alarmists Unnecessarily Condemn Poor to Continuing Energy Poverty

Poverty and energy poverty go hand in hand. It is estimated that three billion people [1] still rely on solid fuel (firewood, cornstalks, etc.) for cooking, which, according to the World Health Organization, causes four million deaths per year from the indoor air pollution.
Read more at CNS News Read More......

Relief of Poverty: Four Centuries of Futility

More than 400 years ago, the British adopted the Poor Law system, under which local communities were made responsible for the relief of poverty. For the next four centuries the Poor Laws were amended again and again, as the following argument went to and fro: Was the system providing necessary relief or was it in various ways interfering with the natural workings of the labor market by subsidizing idleness and encouraging indolence.
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A higher minimum wage doesn't reduce poverty, says ... the federal government

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.
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Obama Blames Rich People Like Him For The Country's Poor

Welfare: President Obama talked this week about poverty, a subject he should know a lot about, since he's done such a good job of expanding it. Instead, he offered only fact-challenged and badly misguided ideas.


Earlier this week, Obama was part of a panel discussion on poverty hosted by Georgetown University and attended by Catholics and evangelical Christians.


He started off OK. "I think we can all stipulate that the best anti-poverty program is a job," he said, and "we don't dispute that the free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history."


Read more at Investor's Business Daily


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The Inconvenient Truth about Ghetto Communities’ Social Breakdown

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina. Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.


Read more at National Review Read More......

Unexpectedly: The New York Times discovers that many don’t have to work in the age of Obama

You already knew that Mitt Romney was right about just about everything.

He was right when he called Russia America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” With Moscow occupying sovereign foreign territory in Europe for the first time since 1989, and as American tanks and possibly even nuclear weapons are headed back to the European front, the 1980s called and they clearly got their foreign policy back.

He was right to warn about the expansion of Islamic extremists into formerly obscure places like Northern Mali. Despite being mocked by the unduly self-assured for his insistence that Islamic radicalism in North Africa was a threat to global security, France introduced troops into that country in 2013 at the behest of Mali’s president in order to quell the raging conflict between Islamist insurgents and government forces.  He was right about Detroit.

Read more at Hot Air Read More......

Chart of the greatest and most remarkable achievement in human history, and one you probably never heard about

AEI: Everybody’s featuring their “graphs and charts of the year,” like The Atlantic and the Washington Post (be sure to see Vice-President Joe Biden’s “Graph of the Year” on Amtrak ridership). Well, the chart below could perhaps qualify as the “chart of the century” because it illustrates one of the most remarkable achievements in human history: the 80% reduction in world poverty in only 36 years, from 26.8% of the world’s population living on $1 or less (in 1987 dollars) in 1970 to only 5.4% in 2006. (Source: The 2009 NBER working paper “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” by economists Maxim Pinkovskiy (MIT) and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Columbia University).

What accounts for this great achievement that you never hear about?

AEI president Arthur Brooks explains in the video below, summarized here:

It turns out that between 1970 and 2010 the worst poverty in the world – people who live on one dollar a day or less – that has decreased by 80 percent (see chart above). You never hear about that.

It’s the greatest achievement in human history, and you never hear about it.

80 percent of the world’s worst poverty has been eradicated in less than 40 years. That has never, ever happened before.

So what did that? What accounts for that? United Nations? US foreign aid? The International Monetary Fund? Central planning? No.

It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.

I will state, assert and defend the statement that if you love the poor, if you are a good Samaritan, you must stand for the free enterprise system, and you must defend it, not just for ourselves but for people around the world. It is the best anti-poverty measure ever invented.

Source: American Enterprise Institute Read More......

California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude

California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.

As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates,  the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as  the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.

Read more at the Daily Beast Read More......

CATO: 2013 Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In 1995, the Cato Institute published a groundbreaking study, The Work vs. Welfare Trade-Off, which estimated the value of the full package of welfare benefits available to a typical recipient in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. It found that not only did the value of such benefits greatly exceed the poverty level but, because welfare benefits are tax-free, their dollar value was greater than the amount of take-home income a worker would receive from an entry-level job.

Since then, many welfare programs have undergone significant change, including the 1996 welfare reform legislation that ended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and replaced it with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program. Accordingly, this paper examines the current welfare system in the same manner as the 1995 paper.

Welfare benefits continue to outpace the income that most recipients can expect to earn from an entry-level job, and the balance between welfare and work may actually have grown worse in recent years.

The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work. Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour. If Congress and state legislatures are serious about reducing welfare dependence and rewarding work, they should consider strengthening welfare work requirements, removing exemptions, and narrowing the definition of work. Moreover, states should consider ways to shrink the gap between the value of welfare and work by reducing current benefit levels and tightening eligibility requirements.

Read the Analysis of the Total Level of Welfare Benefits by State (PDF) by Michael Tanner, Senior Fellow, and Charles Hughes, Research Assistant, of the CATO Institute Read More......

Sowell: Two Different Worlds

Excerpt from Thomas Sowell's article, Two Different Worlds:

Wealth is ultimately the only thing that can reduce poverty. The most dramatic reductions in poverty, in countries around the world, have come from increasing the amount of wealth, rather than from a redistribution of existing wealth.

Read the full article at Townhall.com... Read More......

The Bad Luck President

By Dr. Milton R. Wolf at The Washington Times - America’s misfortune is nothing if not Obamanomics: [Excerpt] “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded - here and there, now and then - are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’“ ✧ Mr. President, you didn’t run into bad luck. You created it. ✧ America is indeed blessed, but it’s not by some accident that previous generations were able to create the most prosperous nation in the history of humankind. Our founding principles of constitutionally limited government, individual liberty and free-market capitalism have unleashed the powerful American engine of prosperity. This engine is fueled by individual players’ investments of labor and capital, and both are supplied directly in proportion to their confidence of realizing reward. Read more at the Washington Times... Read More......

Rich Man, Poor Man

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VDH: Behind the D.C. Slugfest

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE/CORNER, Victor Davis Hanson - "Barack Obama will be remembered not so much for being the nation’s first African-American president, or even the man who ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden, or even for his Obamacare, but as the president who grew government the largest, ran up the largest deficits during any presidential tenure, and laid out most candidly and confidently the argument of why the United States is an intrinsically unfair society and how that must be remedied by government."

Read more at the Corner

Also: Astute comment by Robert Hanson Read More......

Top ten poverty cities

What do the top ten cities (over 250,000) with the highest poverty rate have in common?

1. Detroit, MI - 32.5% - hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1961;
   
2. Buffalo, NY - 29.9% - hasn't elected one since 1954;
   
3. Cincinnati, OH - 27.8% - since 1984;
   
4. Cleveland, OH - 27.0% - since 1989;
   
5. Miami, FL - 26.9% - has never had a Republican mayor;
   
6. St. Louis, MO - 26/8% - since 1949;
   
7. El Paso , TX - 26.4% - has never had a Republican mayor;
   
8. Milwaukee, WI - 26.2% - since 1908;
   
9. Philadelphia, PA - 25.1% - since 1952;
   
10. Newark, NJ - 24.2% - since 1907.

Data Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 American Community Survey, August 2007

Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

It is the poor who habitually elect Democrats---yet they are still POOR.

"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves." -- Rev. William J. H. Boetcker, pamphlet writer, 1916

(Via email, hat tip: Stella) Read More......