After reading ment thread in which her online friends plaining about poor people’s self-defeating behavior, Linda Walther Tirado wrote an articled titled “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts,” which chronicled her struggles with near abject poverty. I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it’s rare to have a poor person actually explain it...

The Obama Administration seems to think that moving money from one place to another constitutes economic stimulus. A Washington Times editorial points this out. First, the administration is pushing food stamps, or SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), as a way to get the economy moving. “I should point out,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on MSNBC two years ago, “when you talk about the SNAP program or the food-stamp program, you have to recognize that it’s also an economic stimulus...

Continuing our roundup of ment on Evangelii Gaudium, here’s Acton’s Director of Research and Author of Tea Party Catholic Samuel Gregg joining host Al Kresta on Ave Maria Radio’s Kresta in the Afternoonto discuss Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation, with particular emphasis on its economic elements. This interview took place on Monday, December 2nd. ...

Yesterday I began a series of posts which attempts to explain why the working poor tend to make terrible financial decisions and how they think about money differently than other economic classes. In my initial post I wrote, Imagine that instead of having to deal with consumption smoothing decisions, at most, several times a year, you had to deal with them several times a month, or even several times a week. Now also imagine there is no workable solution that...

Joe Hargrave argues that John Locke and Pope Leo XIII have more mon than you might imagine: It isn’t often that John Locke is mentioned in discussions of Catholic social teaching, unless it is to set him up as an example of all that the Church supposedly rejects. After all, Locke is considered one of the founders of a liberal and individualist political tradition that was rejected by the papacy in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, a closer examination...

Increasingly, Americans who adhere to a religion are told they cannot “force their beliefs” on others. Simply stating publicly that one doesn’t believe gays have the right to marry can cost you your career. Literally hundreds of lawsuits are now in motion against the government because employers do not want to be forced to violate their religious beliefs by paying for employees’ contraception and/or abortions. Richard W. Garnett ponders this topic in today’s Los Angeles Times. Garnett takes the reader...

is an international network of organizations and individuals seeking to ground mon battle against global poverty in a proper understanding of the human person and society, and to encourage solutions that foster opportunity and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit that already fills the developing world. In order to continue to educate and inform people about entrepreneurial solutions to poverty, PovertyCure is hosting the PovertyCure Film Festival and Feature Documentary Preview on December 12, 2013 in New York City. According to PovertyCure,...

Earlier this year I argued for a plan that would privatize the DIA, allowing for the City of Detroit to cash in on a measure of the collection’s worth to satisfy creditors and simultaneously protect the DIA’s artwork from being parceled out in bankruptcy proceedings. At the time, I had doubts about the practicability of the idea. I figured that even if such a path were to be pursued that the DIA would likely end up torn apart like a...

No, it’s not a Sherlock Holmes book. It’s reality: American is losing doctors. When most of us have a medical concern, our first “line of defense” is the family physician: that person who checks our blood pressure, keeps on eye on our weight, looks in our ears and our throat for infections, and does our annual physicals. And it’s these doctors that are ing scarce. In American Spectator, Acton Research Fellow Jonathan Witt takes a look at this issue. My...

“All good, enduring reformation begins with ourselves and takes its starting point in one’s own heart and life,” writes Herman Bavinck in The Christian Family. “If family life is indeed being threatened from all sides today, then there is nothing better for each person to be doing than immediately to begin reforming within one’s own circle.” Such a process of reformation plex and varied, and is somewhat unique for each of us. But for the moment, I’d like to focus...