Media

A new report from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards looks at economic well-being in Canada and the Provinces over a nearly 30-year period. Instead of using Gross Domestic Product to determine economic well-being, however, the new report uses a different indicator called the Index of Economic Well-Being (IEWB). The Index looks at four variables when determining economic well-being:

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who a few months ago said Blacks were "getting tired" of the president's unresponsiveness to Black unemployment, is now on the bandwagon. In response to the American Jobs Act (AJA), the Hill blog quoted the Congresswoman saying, "[President Obama] heard [the Black community].

Today is the opening day of Climate Week NYC, a week long event that brings together high-level government officials, advocates and businesses to promote a “clean industrial revolution.” While only in its third year, Climate Week has successfully brought diverse interests together to plan for a massive scaling up of clean-energy technologies to create jobs and economic growth while making the natural and built environment more sustainable.

Audi runs ads in hopes of selling cars. That’s what ads are supposed to do. But, in yesterday’s New York Times, a full-page ad for the Audi A6 appeared twice and it not only aimed to sell cars, it promoted the idea that wealthy Americans can buy protection from the public decay likely to surround us all as our cities, our states, and our nation reduce investment in our public systems and structures. (A similar ad is also running on television, which you can watch below.)

Both groups also saw the wealth they acquired evaporate almost over night. Hispanics lost 66 percent of their wealth and Blacks lost 54 percent.

One last point about the new poverty numbers, which is that they show that elderly poverty remains a major problem in the United States.

Conventional wisdom holds that seniors are doing just fine in the U.S. and that this is one area where the war on poverty was a big success. Well, not quite. Yes, elderly poverty rates are way down from forty years ago thanks to increased Social Security payments and government health programs.

As we continue to mine the new poverty statistics over here from the Census Bureau, here is a statistics that many people will find surprising: The poverty rate for naturalized U.S. citizens is 10.8 percent, while that for native born Americans is 13.7 percent. (The figure for foreign born residents is a very high 25.1 percent.)

For decades we've been hearing that government spending helps to cause poverty by keeping people dependent and by depressing economic growth.

This is not only nonsense, but new Census data shows that the exact opposite is true: Poverty tends to be higher in those states with small government.

It's hardly news when House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan distorts the facts about fiscal policy -- his supposed area of expertise -- but it still surprises me nonetheless.

Consider this whopper from a recent interview: