The Wealth of the Super Eight - They Earned It and it's Not Bad for the Rest of Us!

Eight richest men are worth the same as HALF the rest of the world: Their £350billion haul is equal to the wealth of 3.6billion people

Excerpt:

The eight richest billionaires have as much wealth as half the world’s population. Analysis by Oxfam shows the tycoons have together amassed fortunes totalling £349.8billion. The planet’s poorest 3.6billion have the same sum between them. ‘This concentration of wealth at the top is holding back the fight to end global poverty,’ the report says, also claiming that executive pay in the UK is out of control.

Comment: Image source from the article. Bernie Sander's view (any surprise?)

Grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality is not just an American issue. It is a global issue. We can do better. We must do better.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) January 13, 2017

The other side ... while inequality has increased, extreme poverty has also decreased. Source

Global Extreme Poverty
1990: 37.1% of the world’s population
1999: 29%
2012: 12.8%
2015: 9.6% #Davos

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) January 18, 2017

Save the Black Children - Get Married!

The Poverty Cure: Get Married - Black children bear the brunt of single parenthood’s harms.

Excerpt:

71% of African-American infants are born to unmarried women, compared with 29% for white women. The birth of a child doesn’t motivate many African-American couples to get married: 66% of black children are not living with married parents. Nor does it keep their unmarried biological parents together. About seven in 10 white children, from newborn to 18 years of age, are living with their biological parents, compared with one in three black children.

This matters because—as family-structure researchers Sara McLanahan and Isabel Sawhill note in the Future of Children, “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide variety of outcomes.” Cohabitation is not a replacement for marriage.

On average, cohabiting couples stay together for only 18 months. Two in three children born to cohabitating couples will see their biological parents break up by age 12, compared with only one in four in married-couple families. That fact is vital because family instability is a major source of poor outcomes for children.

It turns out that the effects of family instability are measurably worse for boys than for girls—and worst of all for African-American boys. In a landmark new study, a research team headed by MIT’s David Autor and Northwestern University’s David Figlio find that relative to their sisters, boys born to poorly educated unmarried mothers have higher levels of truancy and behavioral problems throughout elementary and middle school, are less likely to graduate from high school, and are more likely as juveniles to commit serious crimes. Many of the gaps between brothers and sisters are larger for blacks than for whites.

... we should never imagine that efforts by government and civil society, however effective, can fully substitute for the influence of stable, intact families. True equal opportunity for African-Americans will take not only programs to boost black incomes, neighborhoods, schools and job opportunities, but also mothers and fathers living and working together to raise their children.

Comment: Another sad note: According to 2010 census data, African Americans make up 12.6% of the U.S. population2 but the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that black women accounted for 35.4% of all abortions in 2009 (source Google). Chart below source. Cake topper photo source.

Moonshine or a mosquito net

Moonshine or the Kids?

Excerpt:

The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can’t afford the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for each of their three school-age kids.

“It’s hard to get the money to send the kids to school,” Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed.

But Mr. Obamza and his wife, Valerie, do have cellphones and say they spend a combined $10 a month on call time.

In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. By his calculation, that adds up to about $12 a month — almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.

I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.

...

Well-meaning humanitarians sometimes burnish suffering to make it seem more virtuous and noble than it often is. If we’re going to make more progress, and get kids like the Obamza children in school and under bed nets, we need to look unflinchingly at uncomfortable truths — and then try to redirect the family money now spent on wine and prostitution.

Comment: A good article on the limits of charitable help! Giving this family $ 10 per month (an amount of which would be amazingly easy for all of my readers) might make us "feel good" but it would not solve the Obamza's real needs. Only the gospel can radically change the heart and only a change of heart will change Mr Obamza's priorities! (A math lesson may be in order too! If he spends $ 1 per night drinking that would seem to be more like $ 30 per month, not $ 12)

Importing Poverty

Importing Poverty: We can't ignore the facts. Only an act of willful denial can separate immigration and poverty.


Excerpt:

Why is it important to get this story straight?

One reason is truthfulness. It's usually held that we've made little, if any, progress against poverty. That's simply untrue. Among non-Hispanic whites, the poverty rate may be approaching some irreducible minimum: people whose personal habits, poor skills, family relations or bad luck condemn them to a marginal existence. Among blacks, the poverty rate remains abysmally high, but it has dropped sharply since the 1980s. Moreover, taking into account federal benefits (food stamps, the earned-income tax credit) that aren't counted as cash income would further reduce reported poverty.

We shouldn't think that our massive efforts to mitigate poverty have had no effect. Immigration hides our grudging progress.

A second reason is that immigration affects government policy. By default, our present policy is to import poor people. This imposes strains on local schools, public services and health care. From 2000 to 2006, 41 percent of the increase in people without health insurance occurred among Hispanics. Paradoxically, many Hispanics are advancing quite rapidly. But assimilation—which should be our goal—will be frustrated if we keep adding to the pool of poor. Newcomers will compete with earlier arrivals. In my view, though some economists disagree, competition from low-skilled Hispanics also hurts low-skilled blacks.

We need an immigration policy that makes sense.

Consider also: The Poor in America