The N&O yesterday published an article by the far-left NC Budget & Tax Center, a project of the NC Justice Center. The article’s aim was to exploit the tragic Hurricane Florence event in order to advance the Budget & Tax Center’s favorite hobby horses: income inequality and race baiting.
The “solutions” proposed in the article are just the tired and worn out laundry list of welfare programs that tend to make poverty worse.
Failing to expand health insurance, refusing to raise the minimum wage, attacking critical support programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit and SNAP (formally known as food stamps) are all ways in which our leaders have neglected North Carolinians who need help the most.
As I wrote previously on this issue:
For still more perspective, between 1992 and 2015, total state and local public welfare spending in North Carolina topped $570 billion. What sort of return on investment did North Carolina see from spending more than half a trillion dollars to fight poverty? Very little. If anything, poverty has worsened during this time.
Moreover, while highlighting poverty rates of various groups in North Carolina, the article fails to mention the elephant in the room: the undeniable link between fatherlessness and poverty. As I pointed out previously:
North Carolina families are roughly five times as likely to be in poverty when there is no father in the home.
Moreover, for households with multiple children, one of which is under five years old, headed by a married couple, the poverty rate is 15.6 percent in North Carolina. In households in the same situation, except with no father in the home, the poverty rate jumps to a heart-wrenching 60.6 percent.
It is professional negligence to speak about poverty in North Carolina and ignore these facts.
The radical leftists at the NC Justice Center either don’t actually want to reduce poverty or are not interested enough to learn basic economics in order to understand how to reduce poverty. They should not be taken seriously on such matters.
