Majority Of Public School Students Poor

[From article]

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.
The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches in the 2012-2013 school year. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-in-poverty/2015/01/15/df7171d0-9ce9-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html

Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty
By Lyndsey Layton

January 16 at 5:00 AM

Single Parent Families And Poverty

[From article]
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 was rare among blacks.
[. . .]
The black illegitimacy rate in 1940 was about 14 percent; black illegitimacy today is over 70 percent, and in some cities, it is over 80 percent.
[. . .]
Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation's population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it's 22 times that of whites. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Coupled with being most of the nation's homicide victims, blacks are also major victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault, rape and robbery.
[. . .]
If it is assumed that problems that have a devastating impact on black well-being are a result of racial discrimination and a "legacy of slavery" when they are not, resources spent pursuing a civil rights strategy will yield disappointing results.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns082714.php3

Blacks Must Confront Reality

By Walter Williams
Published August 27, 2014

Reinventing The Wheel, By Denying It Exists

Marc McGovern, Cambridge City Councilor, Chairman of Spending Other People's Money Committee

Former social worker, vigorous advocate for the psychiatric industry, Cambridge City Councilor McGovern promotes income distribution for poor residents of Cambridge. He does not advocate that public officials contribute part of their taxpayer salaries to help ease poverty. Politicians seldom spend their own money, when they can spend other people's money. McGovern cites statistics as politicians love to do, without explaining what they mean. The City Councilor uses uncertain certitude when he says, "As anyone residing in Cambridge knows, it takes far more to reside in our city." More than what? Where? How much does it cost to live in a homeless shelter, or on the streets? 

He elaborates on the "effects" of poverty, saying they are well documented. But he ignores a well documented fact that politicians refuse to recognize. The fact that single parent families are more likely to live in poverty than two parent families. The rate of single parents of black American families is an outrage in the USA. This is not a new problem. Daniel Patrick Moynihan recognized it many years ago. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams often write about it. Here's the latest from Williams.

[From Williams' article]
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 was rare among blacks.
[. . .]
The black illegitimacy rate in 1940 was about 14 percent; black illegitimacy today is over 70 percent, and in some cities, it is over 80 percent.
[. . .]
Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation's population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it's 22 times that of whites. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Coupled with being most of the nation's homicide victims, blacks are also major victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault, rape and robbery.
[. . .]
If it is assumed that problems that have a devastating impact on black well-being are a result of racial discrimination and a "legacy of slavery" when they are not, resources spent pursuing a civil rights strategy will yield disappointing results.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns082714.php3

Blacks Must Confront Reality

By Walter Williams
Published August 27, 2014

[From McGovern's article]
A recent study completed by the Cambridge Community Development Department indicated that Cambridge has a poverty rate of 14.4 percent for individuals and in certain subgroups, such as black and Latino, the poverty rate is as high as 30 percent. It is important to keep in mind that this study uses the federal standards of poverty. By federal standards, an individual earning less than $11,670 and a family of four earning less than $23,850 in combined income is living in poverty. As anyone residing in Cambridge knows, it takes far more to reside in our city.
[. . .]
The effects of poverty are well documented. Health issues, mental health issues, hunger and poor nutrition, homelessness and housing instability, substance abuse, crime, poor education, are all impacted by poverty. Children living in poverty are more likely to die in infancy, more likely to have hospital stays, more likely to repeat a grade in school, more likely to drop out of school, and more likely to engage in violence or other maladaptive behaviors. A community can be judged on how well it cares for its most vulnerable. In Cambridge, we do a very good job caring for those in need, we have many programs designed to support our neighbors, but we can do better.
[. . .]
The goals of the Income Insecurity Commission are as follows.

http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/article/20140916/NEWS/140917204

GUEST COLUMN: A tale of two cities – Income insecurity right at home
By Councilor Marc McGovern
Posted Sep. 16, 2014 @ 2:03 pm
CAMBRIDGE Chronicle

When Rich Become Poor; When Poor Become Rich

[From article]
Former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are worth between $10 and $50 million, according to their financial disclosure forms – but taxpayers will still pony up nearly $1 million this year to fund their post-White House lifestyle.
Like the three other living former presidents, Jimmy Carter and the two George Bushes, Clinton receives a $201,000 annual pension. But that just scratches the surface of the government benefits he shares with his wife Hillary.
The total for 2014 also includes $157,000 for staff salaries and benefits, $414,000 for office space and $9,000 for phone bills.
In all, The Washington Post first reported, taxpayers are providing Clinton with $944,000 in post-presidential pay and benefits.
That tab was $1.28 million in 2002, the year after he left office, according to a Congressional Research Service report cited by the Post and the Washington Free Beacon.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2667949/Taxpayers-spend-944-000-support-multimillionaire-Bill-Clintons-post-presidential-lifestyle-2014.html

Taxpayers will spend $944,000 to support Bill Clinton's lifestyle in 2014 as he claims he and Hillary are not 'out of touch' because they 'talk to people in our town'
Bill Clinton said Tuesday his wife's claim that they were 'dead broke' after his presidency was 'factually true'
He and Hillary are not 'out of touch,' he insisted, because they go to the grocery store and 'talk to people in our town'
An April Congressional Research Service report found that the federal government has spent $15.9 million on Bill Clinton's retirement since 2001
He got $1.28 million in benefits the year after he left office
Clinton said Tuesday that attacking his wife as a wealthy elite in the run-up to the 2016 election is 'the wrong debate'
This year Clinton's costs include a $201,000 pension, $157,000 for staff salaries and benefits, $414,000 for office space and $9,000 for phone bills
Former president George W. Bush spends even more, costing taxpayers $1.28 million this year and averaging 4 per cent more per year than Clinton
The government inexplicably budgeted $102,000 for Bush's telephone expenses in 2014, and planned to spend $135,000 more on furniture, computers, office supplies and other miscellany
By DAVID MARTOSKO, U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR
Daily Mail (UK)
PUBLISHED: 16:08 EST, 24 June 2014 | UPDATED: 17:00 EST, 24 June 2014

* * *

[From article]
There are two sorts of stock human dramas that play out in every age of history. The first concerns people who were once rich but are now discovering they are poor. The second is their opposite; people who were once poor who suddenly realize they are rich.
[. . .]
The problem of course is what happens when the long-rich go broke. The once-rich-now-bankrupt become worse than bust, they become ridiculous. A modern example is John Kerry who is making a beggar’s tour of the Middle East.
[. . .]
Kerry is almost a central-casting perfect picture of a degenerate aristocrat. Just as Chelsea doesn’t do money, neither does Kerry do Foreign Policy. He at least does artistic gestures. Only the other day Kerry made an important announcement. Speaking at a the Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies Pride event at the State Department, he declared “I’m working hard to ensure that by the end of my tenure, we will have lesbian, bisexual and transgender ambassadors in our ranks as well.”
[. . .]
What Old Money and Power finds hardest to accept is that perhaps their scruffy, uncredentialed and coarse opponents might not only be their equals, but their superiors. One is beginning to suspect that the terror masters are better men — not better or more capable men than normal Americans — but better men than the aristocrats.
[. . .]
The men in the White House are like grifters who inherited a great fortune and have unexpectedly come into clothes, cars, houses and jets without the slightest clue how they were earned.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/06/24/our-ruling-class/

Our Ruling Class
June 24th, 2014 - 4:39 pm
By Richard Fernandez

Journalists, Academics Ignore Facts on Family Breakdown

[From article]

In the past four years, our two academic professional organizations—the American Political Science Association and the American Educational Research Association—have each dedicated annual meetings to inequality, with numerous papers and speeches denouncing free markets, the decline of unions, and "neoliberalism" generally as exacerbating economic inequality. Yet our searches of the groups' conference websites fail to turn up a single paper or panel addressing the effects of family change on inequality.
Why isn't this matter at the center of policy discussions? There are at least three reasons. First, much of politics is less about what you are for than who you are against, as Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, noted in his popular 2012 book "The Righteous Mind." And intellectual and cultural elites lean to the left. So, quite simply, very few professors or journalists, and fewer still who want foundation grants, want to be seen as siding with social conservatives, even if the evidence leads that way. 

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303603904579493612156024266

Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families
Intellectuals fretting about income disparity are oddly silent regarding the decline of the two-parent family.
By ROBERT MARANTO And
MICHAEL CROUCH
April 20, 2014 5:38 p.m. ET

$20 Trillion Spent In War On Poverty. Poverty Won

[From article]
Fifty years after President Johnson started a $20 trillion taxpayer-funded war on poverty, the overall percentage of impoverished people in the U.S. has declined only slightly and the poor have lost ground under President Obama.
Aides said Mr. Obama doesn’t plan to commemorate the anniversary Wednesday of Johnson’s speech in 1964, which gave rise to Medicaid, Head Start and a broad range of other federal anti-poverty programs
[. . .]
President Obama’s anti-poverty efforts “are basically to give more people more free stuff,” said Robert Rector, a specialist on welfare and poverty at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“That’s exactly the opposite of what Johnson said,” Mr. Rector said. “Johnson’s goal was to make people prosperous and self-sufficient.”
[. . .]
Mr. Rector said the war on poverty has been a failure when measured by the overall amount of money spent and poverty rates that haven’t changed significantly since Johnson gave his speech.
"We’ve spent $20.7 trillion on means-tested aid since that time, and the poverty rate is pretty much exactly where it was in the mid-1960s,” he said.
[. . .]
other factors have contributed to persistent poverty, including a tripling in the number of households led by single parents.
Mr. Rector said too many government anti-poverty programs still discourage marriage, factoring into statistics that show more than four in 10 children are born to unmarried parents.
“When the war on poverty started, about 6 percent of children were born outside of marriage,” he said. “Today that’s 42 percent — catastrophe.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/7/obamas-rhetoric-on-fighting-poverty-doesnt-match-h/

Obama’s rhetoric on fighting poverty doesn’t match his policies
By Dave Boyer
The Washington Times
Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Study: Marriage Reduces Poverty; Politicians Have Misguided Focus

[From article]
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank based in Washington DC, said the U.S. was 'steadily separating into a two-caste system with marriage and education as the dividing line'
He wrote in his conclusion of the study: 'Being married has roughly the same effect in reducing poverty that adding five to six years to a parent’s education has.
'Marriage remains America’s strongest anti-poverty weapon, yet it continues to decline.
'As husbands disappear from the home, poverty and welfare dependence will increase, and children and parents will suffer as a result.
[. . .]
Legislators in the U.S., however, appear more intent on promoting gay marriage instead of shoring up traditional heterosexual marriage for the benefit of children.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2204263/Growing-married-parents-important-good-education-escaping-poverty.html

Growing up with married parents is as important as a good education to escaping poverty
A stable home 'raises child's chances of escaping the poverty trap by 82 per cent'
By SIMON CALDWELL
Daily Mail (UK)
PUBLISHED: 17:50 EST, 16 September 2012 | UPDATED: 01:39 EST, 17 September 2012

Over $10K is not poverty?

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-elderly-poverty-20101017,0,164638,full.story

For the elderly, poverty level doesn't cut it
UCLA study tells a much different story of what it costs California seniors to get by: twice as much as the federal government's estimate, which is based on 1950s spending patterns.
By Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
October 17, 2010