Monica Potts

Via Columbia Journalism Review, Graham Summers has a fantastic post up at Zero Hedge, wherein he crunches the numbers on just how hard it is for the average American family, a two-child household, to get by. Summers uses median income, average prices for houses and cars, and a pretty low health-insurance premium contribution to figure […]

Last week, New York Times columnist David Brooks confessed that he rooted for Duke to win the NCAA championship because he thinks rich people work harder than poor people do. Meanwhile, those on the news end at his paper reported that lawmakers are rethinking the 1996 welfare reform law. The goal of the reform was […]

Friday’s New York Times featured a story about a change in funding in President Obama’s 2011 budget that eliminates line-item funding for the nonprofit Reading Is Fundamental. The literacy organization will now have to compete at the state level with many other groups, and it will have to spend time and money to change its […]

Florida legislators look likely to pass a law that would require middle-schoolers to take and pass a civics test before moving on to high school. Expanding civics education has been on state lawmakers’ minds since former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor gave a speech urging them to do so, according to the Miami Herald: […]

Sometimes, the Associated Press makes you wonder from what planet they are reporting. Sometimes, the facts are simply wrong or confused. Other times, the facts are laid out in such an inflammatory way that people will be able to take from them what they will. Today, under the headline “Nearly half of US households escape […]

Change.org’s Poverty in America blog asks a great question: Why do we think young poor people are lazy? The stereotype, of course, is that 20-something college graduates are just slackers living off their parents. But that ignores the realities of a terrible job market in which they’re often competing with older, more experienced workers. It […]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report that younger women had fewer children in 2008, probably because of the recession. Doctors suspect, of course, that younger women probably delayed childbirth for financial reasons. Meanwhile, the birth rate continued to rise for women in their 40s. (It has been rising for years, partly […]

I moved to D.C. for this job from Connecticut, where I was a reporter for a daily newspaper. The demands of both my job and living in a suburban city dictated that I buy a car. My costs and frustrations went up, my fitness level went down. When looking for housing in D.C., my top […]

Under the Obama administration, officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development have said they want a more balanced housing policy for low-income families that doesn’t neglect renters just to expand homeownership. That goal was reflected in Obama’s budget, and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found today that the president’s proposed increase […]