John H. McWhorter, a black social conservative, wrote about welfare after Katrina:
Meanwhile, the most grievous result of the new consensus was black American history’s most under-reported event, the expansion of welfare. Until now, welfare had been a pittance intended for widows, unavailable as long as the father of one’s children was able-bodied and accounted for, [...]

ACORN, the radical left-wing group that claims to help the poor through aggressive street tactics, shakedowns, and intimidation, should be receiving a lot more attention. After all, Barack Obama worked with them for years. This is equivalent to if John McCain spent years working with the John Birch Society (except if the John Birch Society [...]

I wrote recently that US subsidies, to divert the use of corn to ethanol production, are helping drive up world food prices. Joining what mainstream food experts have been saying, I wrote , “With the new worldwide spike in food prices partly blamed on US ethanol subsidies, it is just a bad idea to be [...]

Instead of using corn to make Ethanol, this is a much better way to go:
Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland [...]

Primary care doctors who accept Medicare and Medicaid patients are often doing charity work. If the federal government is going to fund an insurance program for the retired and the poor, then they should reimburse doctors at the going rate. Otherwise doctors are in the difficult position of having to make a choice between turning [...]

Is this our future?
A recent Seattlepi.com article notes the increase of out-of-wedlock births among Hispanic women. This birthrate is quickly catching up to the culturally embedded 70% out-of-wedlock birthrate of black American women. … Prediction: In a few generations, what’s left of the dysfunctional black American population will begin to merge with its counterparts among [...]

The Democrats have gotten their minimum wage increase. In the range of domestic policy changes that the Democrats want, this is a fairly harmless policy at least to the middle class. Teenagers working at the country club for the summer now get paid more. I oppose a minimum wage increase because it just adds more [...]

I had never thought of this. Two economists who between them have won the Nobel Prize and the Clark Prize explain (via Pejman Yousefzadeh):
Income inequality in China substantially wid­ened, particularly between households in the city and the countryside, after China began its rapid rate of economic development around 1980. The aver­age urban resident now makes [...]

Having a higher IQ, on the average, means that you will make more money each year than people with lower IQs. This has been validated in various studies. Having a higher IQ enables you to do better in school, get into better colleges, get a better job, and solve tasks more quickly and creatively at [...]

In recent years there has been a movement in the US to rely more on giving housing vouchers to the poor rather than building new public housing projects. Perhaps if those nasty housing projects are counted on less for housing the poor, and we just write them checks to pay their rent instead, then we [...]

A recent article in the International Herald Tribune reports about poor whites in England. As with all news media reports on the lives of the poor, there is no questioning the fundamental pillars put in place in the 20th century to sustain the anti-poverty welfare states. The news media is conservative in this way: [...]