Author: DFShow

We Could Do a Lot More to Fight Poverty If We Wanted To

We Could Do a Lot More to Fight Poverty If We Wanted To

Today is the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s war on poverty, so we’ll be getting a lot of retrospectives. CBPP has a whole series of charts here, and they’re worth a look. Child poverty is way down wince 1963, which is a big win, and elderly poverty is down too, which is a big win for Social Security. But at the risk of being a buzzkill, I want to reprint a chart I put up last month. It answers a simple question: if you count income from all the welfare programs we’ve put in place over the past half century, […]

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Report: Fracking Operations Are Contaminating Well Water In 2 States

Report: Fracking Operations Are Contaminating Well Water In 2 States

By Katie Valentine on January 6, 2014 NY Liquefied Natural Gas Complaints of water contamination in two states have been tied to oil or gas drilling, according to an Associated Press investigation. The AP looked at well water contamination complaints in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Texas and found that two states — West Virginia and Pennsylvania — had linked some complaints to fracking. In Pennsylvania, since 2005, more than 100 well-water contamination complaints have been confirmed, meaning that the well water in […]

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Everything You Wanted To Know About The ‘Polar Vortex’

Everything You Wanted To Know About The ‘Polar Vortex’

By Emily Atkin on January 6, 2014 at 1:27 pm ” Everything You Wanted To Know About The ‘Polar Vortex’ ” A person struggles to cross a street in blowing and falling snow Sunday, Jan. 5, 2014, in St. Louis. On Sunday night, a reporter for The Weather Channel stood in a Minnesota snowstorm , talking about local efforts to move homeless children into heated shelters. “How cold is it supposed to get?” the anchor, back in the studio, asked. The reporter replied: “ Colder than Mars .” Indeed, recent temperatures across the U.S. have been Mars-like. Forecasts in […]

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