If you told recovering alcoholic and drug addict Hermon Blount a year ago that he’d soon be getting up 3 or 4 days a week at 5:30 a.m. to run, he may not have believed you. That was before he decided to quit drinking and using drugs in exchange for something better. Part of Blount’s ongoing recovery process can be attributed to the early morning workouts he does with a national, nonprofit organization called Back On My Feet (BoMF). BoMF exists to promote self-sufficiency for formerly homeless and often drug-addicted … More
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Multiple reports of welfare abuse have hit the headlines in recent weeks, from a million-dollar lottery winner receiving food stamps to a Massachusetts drug dealer attempting to use welfare cash to post bail and an Alabama nightclub advertising a “Food Stamp Friday” party. These examples highlight the need to reform a welfare system that is contributing to a culture of entitlement. A crucial element of reform is tackling the ballooning costs of the welfare state, which has become the fastest growing part of government spending. In a hearing on Tuesday … More
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Nearly 40 percent of women in the United States have never been married, an all-time high, according to new data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Beyond lower marriage rates, a high divorce rate and increasing numbers of children born outside of marriage indicate that marriage in America is struggling—or rather that more Americans are struggling to form and maintain marriages. But these trends in marital decline are not created equal. Lower-educated (without a high school diploma) and now a growing portion of moderately educated (high school graduates) adults … More
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“Either he doesn’t get it, or he doesn’t care,” Sheila Jackson, parent of a D.C. Opportunity Scholarship recipient, said upon hearing the news that President Obama’s budget eliminates funding for the popular program. Jackson sounded torn about which was worse. “I was appalled,” she told Scribe. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program provides low-income families in one of the worst public school systems in America with vouchers to attend private schools of their choice. More than 1,600 students are benefiting this year alone. Jackson’s daughter, Shawnee, has had a scholarship since … More
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In my last post, I challenged a common assumption about equality and justice—that inequality per se is inherently unjust, and therefore that the gap between rich and poor is as well. In what follows I contest another popular notion touted by redistributionists—that unequal wealth as such causes hardship for the poor. As I argue in my recent National Affairs article, [T]he implicit assumption behind the case for the injustice of income inequality is that the wealthy are the reason why the poor are poor, or at least why they cannot … More
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If there’s one thing Saturday Night Live is good at in an election year, it’s lampooning politicians—whether it’s been Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford, Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton, or Dan Akroyd as Bob Dole. But last weekend, SNL offered up an unusually insightful bit of non-presidential social commentary—this time taking a swipe at America’s coddled, self-esteem-driven, success-less culture. You’d be better off watching the clip from the show (it’s much funnier than this summary), but in the interest of keeping it simple, a skit last week featured two talk … More
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The greatest tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., is not to name a street in his honor or celebrate a national holiday. It is to recognize and support those who are working to carry out his vision, those who empower those facing the greatest obstacles through personal relationships that restore the fabric of civil society—without the need for federal government intervention. As former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp once said, “We need an anti-poverty agenda based on democratic capitalism, not socialism and on private ownership, … More
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Last week, the Associated Press reported that, based on the Census Bureau’s new poverty measure, half of America is now poor or low-income. Forget about Occupy Wall Street’s ballyhooed 99 percent of Americans who aren’t “rich.” Now we’re supposed to believe 50 percent of us are poor or close to it. Of course, that all depends how you define “poverty” or “near poverty.” And by the definition of this new measure, quietly ushered in by the Obama Administration, “low-income” in some areas of the country can now mean up to … More
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