[snip] All you need to know about the last quarter century. From Peter Beinart, writing in the New Republic: “Under Ronald Reagan, 50,000 children escaped poverty; under Clinton, more than 4 million did.”
[snip] “Since when can being Catholic be reduced to avoiding birth control and dirty movies?” Those appear to be the priorities in Catholic pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan’s planned town of Ave Maria, Florida, writes an unhappy Bryan Cones in U.S. Catholic. “You’d think a Catholic town might require a certain percentage of the housing to be affordable or businesses there to guarantee a living wage and health care for all their workers.”
[snip] The trickle-up theory. According to the International Labor Organization, the number of children in the world doing hazardous work has dropped from 111 million in 2000 to 74 million in 2004. In Latin America, where the rate of decline has been even greater, one reason has been that the government gave money to poor people rather than rich ones. The ILO praises in particular a Brazilian program that pays low-income rural families small stipends to keep children in school.