Poverty

Understanding homelessness

Featured image Last week the Discovery Institute has posted the video below by Christopher Rufo with the explanation that it will help us understand the crisis of homelessness from the inside-out—what drives it, what perpetuates it, and why nothing seems to help. Rufo is director of the Discovery Institute Center on Wealth & Poverty. The Discovery Institute YouTube channel is here. In this video Rufo breaks down the dominant narrative and explains »

Hillbilly Elegy, the movie

Featured image Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance is one the most worthwhile books I’ve read in recent years. It’s a riveting account of Vance’s family as it moved from the hills of Kentucky to an Ohio steel town — Middletown — where it struggled to fulfill some semblance of the American Dream. Hillbilly Elegy is also a sociological study of Middletown and its “hill” population. The story had special resonance for me »

Portlandia Forever

Featured image Having spent a lot of time in Portland (I probably acquired a quarter of my rather too large library at Powell’s City of Books, where I’ve been coming out the front door with heavy full bags since 1977), I always regarded the TV show “Portlandia” as a documentary rather than fictional satire. Clearly the show needs a gritty reboot, with an episode that tries to lampoon the “Wall of Moms” »

Thoughts about thoughts from the ammo line

Featured image I recommend this week’s column by Ammo Grrll and agree with the insights she pulls from her pantry. However, her concluding insight raised a question for me. Here’s her conclusion: [W]hat the grievance peddlers are left with is a wholesale attack on “whiteness” itself. This might work with a few intimidated college students and guilty liberals, but it is not going to be a winning strategy for the vast majority »

Paul Ryan to push for Obama’s legacy “jail break” agenda

Featured image Paul Ryan has made it clear that he considers himself the Republican Party’s “shadow nominee” for president. As such, he’s trying to lock the contenders for the real nomination into positions he favors — positions that, in some cases, are out-of-step with those advocated by the GOP frontrunners and difficult to reconcile with conservatism as we have long known it. This, it seems to me, was the purpose of Ryan’s »

Census: Economy Is Going Nowhere

Featured image The Census Bureau released its income and poverty numbers for 2014 today. The poverty rate was up slightly and median family income, inflation-adjusted, was down slightly, but both numbers were essentially flat. U.S. News goes out on a limb: The numbers may explain some of the political furor going on in the country, said Lawrence Mishel, president and CEO of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “Anyone wondering why people in »

“White privilege” and how to spread it around [With Comment by John and Update by Paul]

Featured image The concept of “white privilege” has become a staple of left-wing think, especially on college campuses. But is it a meaningful way to talk about race? Only, I would argue, in a limited sense that those who bandy the term about probably don’t have in mind. Whites as a class aren’t “privileged” economically. Nearly all white children had better obtain knowledge and skills, and then be prepared to work hard »

Economic mobility and government activism

Featured image Michael Gerson wrote today about “the rhetoric of mobility” — in other words, the way liberals and conservatives talk about the issue of economic mobility. He finds the rhetoric of both sides, as the well views behind it, wanting. Gerson’s piece is thoughtful, as usual. But it should be of concern to conservatives who worry that “reform conservatism,” a movement with which Gerson is associated, may to some extent represent »

Barack Obama, pathetic at three levels

Featured image Yesterday, as John noted, President Obama took a swing at Fox News during a conference on poverty. Obama said: Sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top or to make folks mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, who don’t want to work, lazy, undeserving, got traction. And look, »