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Robert Rector posts on the failure of the war on poverty. We’ve spent $22 trillion and 14% of the nation is still living in poverty.
Today, the U.S. Census Bureau will release its annual report on poverty. This report is noteworthy because this year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the War on Poverty. Liberals claim that the War on Poverty has failed because we didn’t spend enough money. Their answer is just to spend more. But the facts show otherwise.
Since its beginning, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution.
The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs. These programs provide cash, food, housing and medical care to low-income Americans. Federal and state spending on these programs last year was $943 billion. (These figures do not include Social Security, Medicare, or Unemployment Insurance.)
Over 100 million people, about one third of the U.S. population, received aid from at least one welfare program at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient in 2013. If converted into cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the U.S.
But today the Census will almost certainly proclaim that around 14 percent of Americans are still poor. The present poverty rate is almost exactly the same as it was in 1967 a few years after the War on Poverty started. Census data actually shows that poverty has gotten worse over the last 40 years. …
And from the Sleuth Journal we learn that small business ownership is at an all time low.
According to the Federal Reserve, the percentage of American families that own a small business is at the lowest level that has ever been recorded. In a report that was just released entitled “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2010 to 2013: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances“, the Federal Reserve revealed that small business ownership in America “fell substantially” between 2010 and 2013. Even in the midst of this so-called “economic recovery”, small business ownership in America has now fallen to an all-time low. If the economy truly was healthy, this would not be happening. And it isn’t as if Americans are flooding the labor market either. As I detailed yesterday, the labor force participation rate in this country is at a 36 year low. That would not be happening if the economy was actually healthy either. The truth is that the middle class in America is dying, and this new report from the Federal Reserve is more evidence of this very harsh reality.
In order to build wealth, middle class Americans either need to have their own businesses or they need good jobs. Sadly, the percentage of Americans that own a business continues to decline steadily. In the report that I mentioned above, the Federal Reserve says that the proportion of U.S. families that have an ownership interest in a small business fell from 13.3 percent in 2010 to a brand new all-time low of 11.7 percent in 2013.
This is one of the factors that is increasing the gap between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us in this country. And of course another of the major factors is the steady decline in good paying jobs. …
The same progressive policies that make life dangerous for small business, are the policies that make cities like New York uninhabitable for the middle class. Kevin Williamson has the story.
A New report being released today by the Census Bureau finds that Manhattan has the highest level of income inequality in the United States. That is not entirely surprising, though it would also not have been surprising if it had been San Francisco or another progressive fiefdom. For all the rhetoric about wicked 1 percenters and inequality, progressivism is a luxury good, and progressive-dominated enclaves are generally pretty okay places to live if you have a fair amount of money, but sort of stink if you’re in the middle or at the lower end of the earnings curve.
Because most Americans experience New York City as tourists or in television shows and movies, it is easy to forget that the hometown of Wall Street and a very large population of obnoxious celebrities is a poor city: New York City is not only poorer than the New York State average, its median household income is, in absolute dollar terms, lower than that of such dramatically less expensive areas as Austin, Texas, or Cleveland County, Okla., where the typical household income is a few thousand dollars a year more than in New York City but the typical house costs less than a third of what the typical New York City home costs — and 17 percent of what the average Manhattan home costs. (And it’s a house, not a two-room coop.) …
… What is particularly salient about the progressive governance of places such as New York City and San Francisco is not the income inequality coincident with it — which has many causes, only some of which are directly related to public policy — but the myriad ways in which misgovernment makes these cities such hostile places to live for people of relatively modest means.
As indicated above, the income figures by themselves hardly tell the story. The median household income in the city of New York is a few hundred dollars a year more than the median household income in the state of Texas, but in practical terms the average New York City household is much worse off. …
Salon tells us about Alibaba.
The Chinese company Alibaba is going public at 9:30 AM ET on Friday. It is poised to be the largest IPO in history, expected to raise $21 billion. According to Fortune, the offering price will be in the range of $60 to $68 per share.
Unless you’ve spent the last several months eagerly waiting for this IPO, or have spent any time in China, it is possible you may not be familiar with Alibaba, or the implications of it going public.
Alibaba is China’s largest e-commerce company. (A primer on the company can be found here.) According to CNBC, it is used in 80 percent of all Chinese online commerce. The 15-year-old company is a combination of Amazon and eBay, along with some of the functions of Google, but it also has other components, including a PayPal-like system called Alipay. According to Pando Daily, it has also recently backed an Uber competitor.
Not only will this IPO make founder Jack Ma an exceedingly wealthy man; it also introduces the brand to the American public, establishes a level of credibility and sets an interesting precedent for future tech IPOs, some of which are waiting in the wings.
Past tech-related IPOs have been fair or underwhelming — as was the case in April of this year with China’s Twitter-like social media site Weibo. American social media companies Facebook and Twitter were also categorized as having “troubled” or “failed” IPOs. (Although in the case of Twitter that description is more controversial.) So what does this mean for Alibaba?
There are some reasons to be optimistic, yet also a few lingering concerns, which will all come to a head at the opening bell. Salon spoke to Professor Anthea Yan Zhang, a professor of Strategic Management at RiceUniversity’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business to gain some insight on the upcoming IPO. …
WaPo posts on Biden’s hat trick of stupidity.
Vice President Biden’s Wednesday kicked off with an acknowledgment that he had used a “poor choice of words.” By day’s end, he had put foot in his mouth again. Twice.
Biden opened the door to the possibility the United States could commit ground troops to fight the Islamic State in Iraq, a strategy the Obama administration has painstakingly avoided raising. That came shortly after he walked back his use of the word “Shylocks” and his use of the anachronistic term “Orient” to describe Asia.
Even for the gregarious and outspoken vice president, whose candor has all too often gotten him into hot water, the trio of eyebrow-raising remarks in about a 24-hour span was something to behold. Two of the “he said what?” moments came in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state where anyone thinking about running for president, a possibility Biden has not ruled out, needs to make a good impression. …