April 23, 2025

Pope Francis Was No Friend Of The Poor

April 23, 2025/ Francis Menton

Pope Francis passed away two days ago, on Easter Monday. He had been the leader of the Catholic Church for just over 12 years.
He presented himself as a well-intentioned and deeply religious man, none of which I ever doubted. But good intentions are the paving stones of the road to hell. I often tried to find some positive things about Francis so that I could admire him. But unfortunately I think that his overall impact on the world and on the church was overwhelmingly negative.
Thinking that he was working to uplift the poor and downtrodden of the world, Francis accepted all the most destructive prescriptions of the international Left. I’m sorry, but I don’t find that acceptable in a man claiming to be a major religious leader and asserting moral authority to tell others how to lead a good life.
After a century and more of the destructive horrors of socialism, people in major leadership roles in society have a responsibility to learn about that and understand it and not continue to spread it.

October 27, 2023

The Food Insecurity Scam Is Even Worse Than The Poverty Scam

October 27, 2023/ Francis Menton

Periodically I post updates here about how more and more government money thrown at so-called “anti-poverty” programs never seems to reduce measured poverty even by a little. I call this phenomenon the “poverty scam.”
The persistent high rate of supposed “poverty” — in the face of well over a trillion dollars of annual spending supposedly intended to cure it — is then repeatedly used to sucker the voters and the Congress into another round of increases in the spending, none of which will ever reduce poverty as measured.
My latest post on this subject was on September 16, occasioned by the issuance from the Census Bureau of its “poverty” statistics for 2022. (That latest issuance of poverty statistics showed a large uptick in measured poverty despite an approximately 8% increase in the spending supposed to cure it.). For dozens of more posts on this subject, go to the Poverty tag in the Archive section.
And yet, among the categories of federal statistics that are cynically crafted to deceive and manipulate the public to support advocacy for growth of programs, there is a category that is even worse than “poverty,” and that is the category of “food insecurity.”

September 16, 2023

September 16, 2023/ Francis Menton

As I have written many times, I don’t think that the federal measure of “poverty” in the United States was originally created with fraudulent intent to deceive the voters.
However, as the measure of poverty has evolved over the years, the thing deemed “poverty” by the statistics no longer bears any meaningful resemblance to what normal people think of as poverty. Rather than measuring anything that might resemble actual physical deprivation, the statistics have evolved into an artifact to manipulate the voters. In a post about a year ago I described what I call the “poverty scam” as follows:
[T]he government cynically manipulates the poverty statistics so that the official measured rate of poverty never goes meaningfully down, no matter how much taxpayer money is spent, thus manufacturing a fake basis to hit up the people for ever increasing funding at regular intervals.
Over the past week or so we have just been treated to the umpteenth iteration of this poverty scam.

January 05, 2023

January 05, 2023/ Francis Menton

Here’s a question where I’ll bet you think the answer ought to be completely obvious: Should the purpose of government “anti-poverty” programs be to help the beneficiaries rise from poverty and become successful and independent, or alternatively should the purpose of such programs be to entice the recipients of aid into a life of permanent dependency upon government handouts?
From the earliest days of the anti-poverty programs back in the 1960s, the programs were sold to the public as being a temporary boost by which the poor could be helped to escape from poverty and achieve self-sufficiency. And yet, about six decades in, the rate of poverty never seems to go down, and the number of program beneficiaries grows inexorably. Did something change along the way?
The answer is yes.

December 21, 2022

December 21, 2022/ Francis Menton

Throughout the agencies of our federal government, an important function is to issue data and information about the state of the country.
These data cover a vast array of topics such as population, demographics, income and poverty, the state of the economy, the GDP, employment and unemployment, activities of foreign adversaries, weather and climate, energy production and use, and much, much more. The Congress and states use this information in making important public policy decisions, and the people use it to make decisions for their everyday lives. Not the least of those decisions is how to vote.
So is the information issued by the government basically honest and reliable for important decisions? Or, instead, is the output of official information cynically manipulated and corrupted by a government interested mainly in perpetuating and increasing its own power?

November 08, 2022

November 08, 2022/ Francis Menton

Today is Election Day. At the federal level, all seats in the House of Representatives and one third of the Senate are up for election.
Also up for election here in New York, as in most of the states, are all state-wide elective offices, as well as all seats in both houses of the State Legislature. Currently the Democrats hold all of the state-wide elective offices (Governor/Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Comptroller), as well as super-majorities in both houses of the Legislature (106 of 150 seats in the Assembly and 43 of 63 seats in the State Senate).
Of the New York races, the only one that has been subject to extensive public polling is the race for Governor.