Starring comedian Andrew Heaton, EconPop takes a surprisingly deep look at the economic themes running through classic films, new releases, TV shows and more from the best of pop culture and entertainment. Heaton brings a unique mix of dry wit and whimsy to bear on the dismal science of economics and the result is always entertaining, educational and irreverent. It’s Econ 101 meets At The Movies, with a dash of Monty Python.
Since Deng Xiaoping began instituting market reforms in the late 1970s, China has been among the most rapidly growing economies in the world, regularly exceeding 10 percent GDP growth annually. This growth has led to a substantial increase in real living standards and a marked decline in poverty. Between 1981 and 2008, the proportion of China’s population living on less than $1.25/day is estimated to have fallen from 85% to 13.1%, meaning that roughly 600 million people were taken out of poverty.
Wealth and Wealth Creation IS NOT a zero sum game!
There are three kinds of games: win-lose, lose-lose, and win-win. Win-lose games, like basketball, are sometimes called “zero-sum games.” When the Celtics and the Bulls compete, if the Celtics are up, then the Bulls are down, and vice versa. The scales balance. It’s a zero-sum.
Besides lose-lose games, which most of us avoid, there are positive-sum or win-win games. In these games, some players may end up better off than others, but everyone ends up at least the same if not better off than they were at the beginning.
Millions of people think that free trade is a dog-eat-dog competition, where winners always create losers. This is the zero-sum game myth, which leads many to think that the government should somehow redistribute wealth. While some competition is a part of any economy, of course, an exchange that is free on both sides, in which no one is forced or tricked into participating, is a win-win game. When I pay my barber $18 for a haircut, I value the haircut more than the $18. My barber values the $18 more than the time and effort it took her to cut my hair. We’re both better off. Win-win….
…This leads nicely into the third point: wealth is not a zero sum game. This is economist jargon meaning everyone can win. Look again at the chart Gary Burtless put together. You will note that all segments of American society saw their incomes rise except the top one percent. If we had the data to do the chart again through 2014, we would see that everybody had higher incomes than fifteen years ago.
And this win-win idea is not just in terms of income. In a capitalist society, people get rich by making somebody else better off. J. K. Rowling became one of the richest women in the world by writing the Harry Potter series of books. All the people who bought the books believed that the books were worth more than the sale price otherwise they would not have bought it. Thus, J.K. Rowling wins and all her readers win. Both sides of a voluntary transaction are made better off. As long as government coercion is not involved, when you see someone getting rich, you know a lot of people are being made happy….
“I’m hearing from a lot of customers, ‘I voted for that, and I didn’t realize it would affect you.’” (IJ-Review)
Powerline has a great short article about minimum-wage laws pushed by Democrats bumping into the steel reinforced wall of reality:
Via InstaPundit, a lesson in economics for liberals. This time, it’s the minimum wage:
San Francisco’s Proposition J, which 77 percent of voters approved in November, will raise the minimum wage in the city to $15 by 2018. As of today, May 1, [Brian] Hibbs is required by law to pay his employees at Comix Experience, and its sister store, Comix Experience Outpost on Ocean Avenue, $12.25 per hour. That’s just the first of four incremental raises that threaten to put hundreds of such shops out of business. …
Hibbs says that the $15-an-hour minimum wage will require a staggering $80,000 in extra revenue annually. “I was appalled!” he says. “My jaw dropped. Eighty-thousand a year! I didn’t know that. I thought we were talking a small amount of money, something I could absorb.” He runs a tight operation already, he says. Comix Experience is open ten hours a day, seven days a week, with usually just one employee at each store at a time. It’s not viable to cut hours, he says, because his slowest hours are in the middle of the day. And he can’t raise prices, because comic books and graphic novels have their retail prices printed on the cover.
If he can’t stay in business, all of his employees will lose their jobs.
[….]
“Why,” he asks, “can’t two consenting people make arrangements for less than x dollars per hour?”
Exactly. Conservatives should oppose minimum wage laws on fairness grounds. If a person is willing to work for, say, $8 an hour, how dare liberals tell him he must remain unemployed instead? There are many, many people whose best offer of employment will be for less than the $15 an hour that San Francisco will soon mandate. Liberals are, in effect, making it illegal for these people to work, even though they are ready, willing and able to do so.
Minimum wage jobs are overwhelmingly entry level employment. They provide valuable training, experience and opportunity for advancement. Making it illegal for young people, especially, to seek employment at the wage they can command isn’t just economically stupid, it is deeply unfair.
(See also the middle video here about “buying votes.”) The below is a great example of how this “paternalism” has destroyed the black family and left the black community blaming scapegoats. However, to note, this leftist… sorry… Leftist Progressive ideology IS the white privilege you hear about. But it is masked in such a way that those on the Left bolster it while railing against it. It is akin to the atheist without a ground for morals borrowing from the theistic worldview to paint act done as morally wrong… when there is not ontological grounding for them to say such things. Unless God exists, that is.
Dr. Christina Greer, a professor of Political Science at Fordham University said that the US is “a patriarchal, white supremacist country” on Thursday’s Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore on Comedy Central. (Breitbart)
Discover the Networks has this wonderful article, and as much as the above political science professor is a disgrace… the below is mainly geared towards the “slavery” remarks of the host on his way out of the segment:
The rise of the welfare state in the 1960s contributed greatly to the demise of the black family as a stable institution. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among African Americans today is 73%, three times higher than it was prior to the War on Poverty. Children raised in fatherless homes are far more likely to grow up poor and to eventually engage in criminal behavior, than their peers who are raised in two-parent homes. In 2010, blacks (approximately 13% of the U.S. population) accounted for 48.7% of all arrests for homicide, 31.8% of arrests for forcible rape, 33.5% of arrests for aggravated assault, and 55% of arrests for robbery. Also as of 2010, the black poverty rate was 27.4% (about 3 times higher than the white rate), meaning that 11.5 million blacks in the U.S. were living in poverty.
When President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 launched the so-called War on Poverty, which enacted an unprecedented amount of antipoverty legislation and added many new layers to the American welfare state, he explained that his objective was to reduce dependency, “break the cycle of poverty,” and make “taxpayers out of tax eaters.” Johnson further claimed that his programs would bring to an end the “conditions that breed despair and violence,” those being “ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.” Of particular concern to Johnson was the disproportionately high rate of black poverty. In a famous June 1965 speech, the president suggested that the problems plaguing black Americans could not be solved by self-help: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’” said Johnson.
Thus began an unprecedented commitment of federal funds to a wide range of measures aimed at redistributing wealth in the United States.[1] From 1965 to 2008, nearly $16 trillion of taxpayer money (in constant 2008 dollars) was spent on means-tested welfare programs for the poor.
The economic milieu in which the War on Poverty arose is noteworthy. As of 1965, the number of Americans living below the official poverty line had been declining continuously since the beginning of the decade and was only about half of what it had been fifteen years earlier. Between 1950 and 1965, the proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level, had decreased by more than 30%. The black poverty rate had been cut nearly in half between 1940 and 1960. In various skilled trades during the period of 1936-59, the incomes of blacks relative to whites had more than doubled. Further, the representation of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations grew more quickly during the five years preceding the launch of the War on Poverty than during the five years thereafter.
Despite these trends, the welfare state expanded dramatically after LBJ’s statement. Between the mid-Sixties and the mid-Seventies, the dollar value of public housing quintupled and the amount spent on food stamps rose more than tenfold. From 1965 to 1969, government-provided benefits increased by a factor of 8; by 1974 such benefits were an astounding 20 times higher than they had been in 1965. Also as of 1974, federal spending on social-welfare programs amounted to 16% of America’s Gross National Product, a far cry from the 8% figure of 1960. By 1977 the number of people receiving public assistance had more than doubled since 1960.
The most devastating by-product of the mushrooming welfare state was the corrosive effect it had (along with powerful cultural phenomena such as the feminist and Black Power movements) on American family life, particularly in the black community. As provisions in welfare laws offered ever-increasing economic incentives for shunning marriage and avoiding the formation of two-parent families, illegitimacy rates rose dramatically.
For the next few decades, means-tested welfare programs such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, day care, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families penalized marriage. A mother generally received far more money from welfare if she was single rather than married. Once she took a husband, her benefits were instantly reduced by roughly 10 to 20 percent. As a Cato Institute study noted, welfare programs for the poor incentivize the very behaviors that are most likely to perpetuate poverty.[2] Another Cato report observes:
“Of course women do not get pregnant just to get welfare benefits…. But, by removing the economic consequences of out-of-wedlock birth, welfare has removed a major incentive to avoid such pregnancies. A teenager looking around at her friends and neighbors is liable to see several who have given birth out-of- wedlock. When she sees that they have suffered few visible consequences … she is less inclined to modify her own behavior to prevent pregnancy…. Current welfare policies seem to be designed with an appalling lack of concern for their impact on out-of-wedlock births. Indeed, Medicaid programs in 11 states actually provide infertility treatments to single women on welfare.”
The marriage penalties that are embedded in welfare programs can be particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job. As a FamilyScholars.org report puts it: “When a couple’s income nears the limits prescribed by Medicaid, a few extra dollars in income cause thousands of dollars in benefits to be lost. What all of this means is that the two most important routes out of poverty—marriage and work—are heavily taxed under the current U.S. system.”[3]
The aforementioned FamilyScholars.org report adds that “such a system encourages surreptitious cohabitation,” where “many low-income parents will cohabit without reporting it to the government so that their benefits won’t be cut.” These couples “avoid marriage because marriage would result in a substantial loss of income for the family.”
A 2011 study conducted jointly by the Institute for American Values’ Center for Marriage and Families and the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project suggests that “the rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children’s family lives.” The researchers conclude that cohabiting relationships are highly prone to instability, and that children in such homes are consequently less likely to thrive, more likely to be abused, and more prone to suffering “serious emotional problems.”…
[1] Hoover Institution senior fellow Thomas Sowell writes: “Never had there been such a comprehensive program to tackle poverty at its roots, to offer more opportunities to those starting out in life, to rehabilitate those who had fallen by the wayside, and to make dependent people self-supporting…. The War on Poverty represented the crowning triumph of the liberal vision of society—and of government programs as the solution to social problems.”
[2] For instance, “a 1 percent increase in the welfare-dependent population in a state increases the number of births to single mothers by about 0.5 percent,” and “an increase in AFDC benefits by 1 percent of average income increases the number of births to single mothers by about 2.1 percent.”
[3]The marriage penalties that are embedded in welfare programs can be particularly severe if a woman on public assistance weds a man who is employed in a low-paying job. Consider the hypothetical case, as outlined in May 2006 by Urban Institute senior fellow Eugene Steuerle, of a single mother with two children who earns $15,000 and enjoys an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) benefit of approximately $4,100. If she marries a man earning $10,000, thereby boosting the total household income to $25,000, the EITC benefit, which decreases incrementally for every dollar a married couple earns above a certain level, would drop precipitously to $2,200. Similarly, consider the case (also outlined by Eugene Steuerle in May 2006) of a mother of two children who earns $20,000 and thus qualifies for Medicaid. If she marries someone earning just $6,000, resulting in a combined household income of $26,000, her children’s Medicaid benefits are cut off entirely.
Thomas Sowell talks about how the black family was intact and wealthy up until the welfare state:
The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.
Government social programs such as the War on Poverty were considered a way to reduce urban riots. Such programs increased sharply during the 1960s. So did urban riots. Later, during the Reagan administration, which was denounced for not promoting social programs, there were far fewer urban riots.
Neither the media nor most of our educational institutions question the assumptions behind the War on Poverty. Even conservatives often attribute much of the progress that has been made by lower-income people to these programs.
For example, the usually insightful quarterly magazine City Journal says in its current issue: “Beginning in the mid-sixties, the condition of most black Americans improved markedly.”
That is completely false and misleading.
The economic rise of blacks began decades earlier, before any of the legislation and policies that are credited with producing that rise. The continuation of the rise of blacks out of poverty did not — repeat, did not — accelerate during the 1960s.
The poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960, during an era of virtually no major civil rights legislation or anti-poverty programs. It dropped another 17 percentage points during the decade of the 1960s and one percentage point during the 1970s, but this continuation of the previous trend was neither unprecedented nor something to be arbitrarily attributed to the programs like the War on Poverty.
In various skilled trades, the incomes of blacks relative to whites more than doubled between 1936 and 1959 — that is, before the magic 1960s decade when supposedly all progress began. The rise of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations was greater in the five years preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the five years afterwards.
While some good things did come out of the 1960s, as out of many other decades, so did major social disasters that continue to plague us today. Many of those disasters began quite clearly during the 1960s.
In total, Exxon makes about 8 cents on the dollar for everything it does, soup to nuts: Its profit margin for the past 20 quarters averages 8.26 percent. That is, it is worth noting, a good deal lower profit margin than Wired parent company Conde Nast generally achieves, according to the company’s CEO, Charles Townsend. Apple’s profit margin runs about three times Exxon’s. Chip-maker Linear Technology’s profit margins routinely run four times those of Exxon. Energy is a high-volume business, not a high-profit-margin business. (National Review)
It doesn’t matter that theres no evidence that raising the cost of fuel will do anything to alleviate a problem that is rooted in llaklitics instead of science. By requiring refiners to buy a permit, this unelected board is doing nothing more than confiscating capital from ordinary Californians. Even though the cost is passed on at the pump, it will be paid by more than just drivers: the cost of every product that must be transported on California roads will cost more.
And for what? The only clear beneficiary of this hidden tax on fuel are the bureaucrats whose ranks will increase, and the Democrat politicians whose socialist programs will be funded, further solidifying their control over every Californian. This is how government continues to grow faster than the economy at large—and the never-ending growth of government is the greatest threat to our future, and our freedom. Tomorrow, 900 new laws take effect, many of which limit our freedom or raise the cost of living in the most oppressed state in the union….
So let us recap some of the taxes imposed on California drivers per gallon of gasoline (a sorta update to an older post):
State Underground Storage Tank Fee: The state underground storage tank fee is currently 1.4 cents per gallon.
State and Local Sales Tax: An average state sales tax rate of 2.25% percent is used in the calculation of the distribution margin although the actual sales tax rate does vary throughout California.
State Excise Tax: The California state excise tax is currently 35.3 cents per gallon.
Federal Excise Tax: The federal excise tax is currently 18.4 cents per gallon
That adds up to roughly 55-cents per gallon, not including state and local sales tax. This new tax will add a minimum of about 10-cents to this… meanwhile “Evil Big Oil” makes out like a bandit! with their 8-cents a gallon profit margin. Here’s an old 2007 Neil Cavuto discussion about essentially the above… lackluster profit margins for evil oil companies (my 2nd ever uploaded video onto my YouTube channel):
And as Fox already pointed out, these taxes like others will go to pet projects. Now, Jerry Brown’s pet projects versus covering the 500-billion dollars in un-subsidized retirement promises to California workers.
Everyone complains about America’s debt, and rightly so, but how do we get out of it? As Cato’s Michael Tanner explains, spending on entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — has exploded in recent decades. We must slow their growth or they will soon swallow the entire federal budget. In five minutes, learn how America can preserve these programs and get out of debt.
The U.S. government has spent trillions of dollars in recent decades attempting to combat poverty, yet the poverty rate has remained virtually unmoved. Why? As social economist Michael Tanner explains, the “War on Poverty” has both discouraged work and ensnared people in hardship. The “War on Poverty,” it turns out, is actually a “War on Work.” In five minutes, learn the truth about government’s counterproductive efforts to eliminate poverty.
Ronald Reagan did nothing. Barack Obama saved the nation from total collapse.
How else to explain the absence of jobless pitchfork-wielding Americans storming the White House? How else to explain the contrast between the explosive Reagan Recovery and the dud on our hands right now? Fortunately, the left is up to the task. “The secret of the long climb after 1982 was the economic plunge that preceded it. By the end of 1982 the U.S. economy was deeply depressed, with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression. So there was plenty of room to grow before the economy returned to anything like full employment,” said left-wing economist, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in 2004. Oh.
An economy that is “deeply depressed,” Krugman insists, or at least he did seven years ago, naturally comes back strong. To what principal factor did Krugman point to in calling the 1982 economy “deeply depressed”? Unemployment. It peaked in the early ’80s at 10.8 percent, even higher than during “The Great Recession” (aka the economy “inherited” by President Barack Obama). In 2010, the unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent, which means the early ’80s still holds the record for the “worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression.”
What most people care about are jobs. By that standard, Reagan faced an even tougher economy. Throw in a higher rate of inflation — 1980’s 13.5 percent average vs. 2011’s 2.6 percent — and much higher prime interest rates — 20 percent vs. 3.25 percent — and the early ’80s looked even grimmer than The Great Recession.
Krugman gives no credit to the Reagan policies of lower taxes, deregulation and a slowdown in the rate of government spending. He believes Reagan’s policies (SET ITAL) harmed (END ITAL) the economy. Krugman approvingly quotes Bill Clinton, who, as a presidential candidate, said: “The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”
Enter President Barack “Hope and Change” Obama, with a Democratic majority in the House and a supermajority filibuster-proof Senate. Out went policies like reductions in income taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains and dividends. In came transfers of money from one pocket to another to “spread the wealth.”
Under ObamaCare, the Democrats placed the entire health care system under the command and control of the federal government. Through a nearly $1 billion “stimulus” package, Democrats spent money on “shovel-ready” projects with a promise to “save or create” 3.5 million jobs. To rein in “greed” and to fight “climate change,” the Obama administration imposed billions of dollars’ worth of new regulations on businesses. Through “quantitative easting,” the Federal Reserve effectively printed money to keep interest rates low, a widely disputed policy designed to encourage banks to lend and businesses to borrow.
So where is it? When do we see the massive bounce-back from this “deeply depressed” economy, at minimum the kind of bounce-back that occurred in the ’80s in spite of the allegedly harmful policies of Reagan?
Krugman’s analysis of the Reagan recovery — a deep recession equals sharp recovery — tells us that the economy should be storming ahead, especially given Obama’s enlightened leadership. But in the seven quarters following the end of this recession, gross domestic product growth has averaged 2.8 percent. In the seven quarters following the Reagan recession, GDP growth averaged 7.1 percent.
“For some, even catastrophe under Obama can be blamed on George Bush. After all, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented third term in 1940, after two terms in which the unemployment rate never fell below 10 percent and was above 20 percent for 21 consecutive months. FDR also inspired the will to believe— and he also had Herbert Hoover on whom to blame all the country’s troubles.” ~ Thomas Sowell
A new history of the Great Depression is emerging. One that acknowledges the role that government played in causing and prolonging it, and the constructive role that free enterprise could have played, if it were given the chance. In this video, UCLA economist Lee Ohanian explains how Herbert Hoover, widely misunderstood as a champion of the free market, actually turned what should have just been a recession into a depression due to his mistrust of the market.
…Let’s start at square one, with the stock market crash in October 1929. Was this what led to massive unemployment?
Official government statistics suggest otherwise. So do new statistics on unemployment by two current scholars, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, in their book “Out of Work.”
The Vedder and Gallaway statistics allow us to follow unemployment month by month. They put the unemployment rate at 5 percent in November 1929, a month after the stock market crash. It hit 9 percent in December— but then began a generally downward trend, subsiding to 6.3 percent in June 1930.
That was when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed, against the advice of economists across the country, who warned of dire consequences.
Five months after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, the unemployment rate hit double digits for the first time in the 1930s.
This was more than a year after the stock market crash. Moreover, the unemployment rate rose to even higher levels under both Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, both of whom intervened in the economy on an unprecedented scale.
Before the Great Depression, it was not considered to be the business of the federal government to try to get the economy out of a depression. But the Smoot-Hawley tariff— designed to save American jobs by restricting imports— was one of Hoover’s interventions, followed by even bigger interventions by FDR.
The rise in unemployment after the stock market crash of 1929 was a blip on the screen compared to the soaring unemployment rates reached later, after a series of government interventions.
For nearly three consecutive years, beginning in February 1932, the unemployment rate never fell below 20 percent for any month before January 1935, when it fell to 19.3 percent, according to the Vedder and Gallaway statistics.
In other words, the evidence suggests that it was not the “problem” of the financial crisis in 1929 that caused massive unemployment but politicians’ attempted “solutions.” Is that the history that we seem to be ready to repeat?
The stock market crash, which has been blamed for the widespread suffering during the Great Depression of the 1930s, created no unemployment rate that was even half of what was created in the wake of the government interventions of Hoover and FDR….
“Governments are good at creating work, but they are not good at creating value-generating jobs,” is the conclusion from this insightful 3-minute clip from Professor Steve Horwitz. Too often the jobs that politicians ‘create’ are simply to their own benefit. Critically, Horwitz explains that transitions (from agriculture to manufacturing to service to information for instance) are temporarily painful but relatively quickly re-allocated. If, however, politicians attempt to prevent this transition – to stall the free market’s signals – this will halt innovation, growth, and create more poverty (ring any bells). Creating meaningful valuable jobs (something we saw earlier today is not occurring) does not appear too complex – “the best job-creation program in human history is the free market and the entrepreneurship it generates” – it simply means our politicians must get out of the way.
…In “FDR’s Folly,” author Jim Powell spells out just what the Roosevelt administration did and what consequences followed. It tried to raise farm prices by destroying vast amounts of produce — at a time when hunger was a serious problem in the United States. It imposed minimum wage rates that priced unskilled labor out of jobs, at a time of massive unemployment.
Behind both policies was the belief that what was needed was more purchasing power and that this could be achieved by government policies to raise the prices received by farmers and workers. But prices do not automatically translate into greater purchasing power, unless people buy as much at higher prices as they would at lower prices — which they seldom do.
Then there were the monetary authorities contracting the money supply in the midst of the biggest depression in history — when the economy was showing some signs of revival, until their monetary contraction touched off another big downturn.
With policy after policy and program after program, “FDR’s Folly” traces the high hopes and disastrous consequences. It would be funny, like the Keystone cops running into one another and falling down, except that millions of people were in economic desperation while this farce was being played out in Washington.
Perhaps worse than any specific policy under FDR was the atmosphere of uncertainty generated by incessant new experiments. Billions of dollars of investment were needed to create millions of jobs for the unemployed. But investors were reluctant to risk their money while the rules of the game were constantly being changed in Washington, amid strident anti-business rhetoric.
Some of the people who most admired and almost worshipped FDR — poor people and blacks, for example — were hurt the most by amateurish tinkering with the economy by Roosevelt’s New Deal administration…
Over the past 50 years, the purpose of the American government has radically transformed. Whereas its main goal in domestic matters used to be to protect liberty, it is now an entitlements machine, transferring over $2 trillion per year from some people’s pockets to others. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute explains how the explosions in social security, medicare, medicaid, and other welfare programs are changing the American character for the worse–from one that is focused on individual responsibility and giving, to one that is focused on grabbing as much of the pie as possible.
Marriage plays a big role in this equation, via American Thinker:
…Just this week, CNS news published an alarming fact: 86 million full-time, private-sector workers sustain 148 million benefit-takers. Specifically, “The 147,802,000 non-veteran benefit takers outnumbered the 86,429,000 full-time private sector workers 1.7 to 1.”
Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (see note below), poor children living in single-parent households constitute almost two thirds of all poor children (65 percent). That figure stands in stark contrast to the time before liberal social welfare policies went into effect in 1960, when only 25 percent of all poor children lived in single-parent households….
Three things one can do to stay out of poverty: 1) finish high school, 2) Get Married ([2.a] and stay married), and 3), go to church. These three factors are anti-poverty when practiced in unison.
