New report: Number of poor kids in public schools growing fast

Interesting. This would suggest to me that some time of parental choice would be the answer. If poor parents are able to send their kids to any type of school (public, private, parochial) it would even out this imbalance..

Good to see you guys are finally on board with scholarships for low-income children to move them out of public schools.

Funny, Rob, that has been tried and tried to the tune of trillions — but the more money that has been spent, the more poverty there has been. When you create incentives to be dependent wards of the state, that’s what they’ll be. More money for entitlements or a continued commitment to the “war on poverty” with no exit strategy is exactly the nostrum we don’t need to help the poor.

How do you propose we pay for the “sustained application of new and large quantities of public resources?”

It seems we have already been down that road. Looking just at North Carolina, countless billions have been spent to “alleviate poverty” through your wealth redistribution schemes over the last several decades, and the poverty rate has remained pretty constant.

I would like to see any research showing a correlelation of nations with higher levels of government wealth redistribution experiencing higher wealth creation and lower poverty.

It also amazes me how “progressives” can look at the pleas of poor families for any option out of the public schools and say no.
You can cite your flawed studies all day, but how about we let parents decide if their children will be better off in a school different that the one their child is assigned to.

Over the long term, investments in social programs have produced positive impacts. Most famously, poverty rates among the elderly have dropped sharply, owing largely to Social Security and Medicare.

In the short term, however, a steady disinvestment in social programs has undercut their ability to help folks — a fact reflected in such problems as like declining health insurance coverage for children.

Past experience shows the impact that such investments can make. Contemporary experiences, meanwhile, show that inadequate investments yield inadequate results.

No “huh” there.

No doubt Brian you feel that the best way to deal with poverty is to pass out Ayn Rand novellas.

Unfortunately for you, there’s a slightly more popular philosophy that Americans are digging these days. It’s found in the New Testament, usually summed up in these simple words: “Love thy neighbor, help the poor.”

There’s also this little parable about some sheep and a Shepard, and one of the sheep getting lost . . . well just check out the New Testament, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Is it any wonder that the Middle Class is shrinking when the Left believes that any family that makes less than $80,000 a year is in poverty and in need of free healthcare and other government handouts yet anyone who makes more than $80,000 a year is not paying enough in taxes and are nothing but wealthy, greedy capitalists?

I still would like to see a response to my two main questions:
“How do you propose we pay for the “sustained application of new and large quantities of public resources?” and “I would like to see any research showing a correlelation of nations with higher levels of government wealth redistribution experiencing higher wealth creation and lower poverty.”
Neither of these have been addressed.

As to this comment: “What’s clear is that an expanding economy has one reliable impact: the rich get richer. And they do so on the backs of a large and growing underclass.” It makes for a nice bumper-sticker slogan, but defies logic and evidence. Check out this article:
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2007/10/31/are_the_poor_getting_poorer

Some highlights:
“For the most part, long-term poverty today is self-inflicted. To see this, let’s examine some numbers from the Census Bureau’s 2004 Current Population Survey. There’s one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of their under-5-year-olds are poor. There’s another segment of the black population that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor…..
What do you think distinguishes the high and low poverty populations? The only statistical distinction between both the black and white populations is marriage. There is far less poverty in married-couple families, where presumably at least one of the spouses is employed. Fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.”

and..

“Poverty is not static for people willing to work. A University of Michigan study shows that only 5 percent of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in 1975 remained there in 1991. What happened to them? They moved up to the top three-fifths of the income distribution — middle class or higher. Moreover, three out of 10 of the lowest income earners in 1975 moved all the way into the top fifth of income earners by 1991. Those who were poor in 1975 had an inflation-adjusted average income gain of $27,745 by 1991. Those workers who were in the top fifth of income earners in 1975 were better off in 1991 by an average of only $4,354. The bottom line is, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting richer.” (In other words, the “poor” have seen much greater gains than the “rich”)

Another point not yet addressed is that trillions of dollars in “anti-poverty” programs have failed to reduce the poverty rate.

What is “silly” is the inability to answer the primary questions mentioned in the first place. That is – how do you intend to pay for all this? How do you explain the trillions spent in the US to allegedly fight poverty resulting in stagnant or growing poverty rates? What evidence is there showing trends that nations with larger wealth redistribution experience higher rates of growth and lower poverty?
Your link to the EPI data fails to address any of these questions. First off, it is merely a snapshot and misses any trendlines or overarching causation. Second, it doesn’t specify as to whether the different nations use different standards for “poverty.” Third, it leaves out the majority of the earth’s population – much of which lives in third-world nations. Let’s look at the economic institutions in the poorest nations and I suspect we will not find many beacons of capitalism. Lastly, the report loses any credibility when it claims the living standards for the “poor” in the US is lower than the “poor” in other nations – a notion that has been discredited thoroughly.

If I didn’t want answers to the questions – I wouldn’t have asked them. So far, you’ve made no attempt to do so.