What Do Low-Income Communities Need?
31st March 2012
Megan McArdle points out that poor people are poor because they do things that poor people do.
Poor people are people who make decisions. They are not a combination of circumstances that can be tweaked to make them stop acting like poor people. They like babies and sleeping in for the same reasons you do. And they are generally asked to give up those things in return for much less reward than the middle class people who cluck at them for their bad decisions. (The poor and near poor face some of the highest marginal tax rates in the country due to loss of benefits. For some reason, the GOP has not put much of its policymaking effort into rectifying this supply-side nightmare.)