New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to spend $1.4 billion of his state’s resources to solve the persistent problem of poverty in central Brooklyn. The money would go to programs aimed at providing affordable housing, job training, anti-violence programs, recreational space, even obesity.

We have seen this play before, not only in Brooklyn, where the Bedford-Stuyvesant area defied virtually all anti-poverty programs and was an eyesore for decades before gentrification, not government, began its improvement at the beginning of 2000.

Moments before the wedding, Grant Funk turned to his bride and said, “I don’t know if I love you, but I know God wants us to get married.”

It was a rocky start to a marriage that after 35 years is going strong—and a reflection of Funk’s growing pains from a traumatized kid who didn’t know love to a pastor who loves on the traumatized Alaska Native youth. Once a broken-spirited Southern boy, Funk now stands on the shoulders of many individuals who took a chance on him—most of all his wife Lenna, a lifelong optimist who married him despite the red flags. 

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Dr. Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development–designate, told a story from his childhood. He said his mother used to work cleaning beautiful homes. One day she asked him if he would rather live in those nice houses or the house in which he and his brother lived in Detroit. She told him that only he could decide the type of home he would eventually live in by how much he studied in school and the choices he made for his life.

WASHINGTON—Compassion International, a Christian nongovernmental organization that aids 145,000 impoverished Indian children, has three weeks left in the country unless officials give it a reprieve.

“We’ve simply run out of funds,” Stephen Oakley, the group’s senior vice president and general counsel, told the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee today.

The book I positively reviewed in the Aug. 20 issue of WORLD Magazine, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, is getting a lot of press attention now, and I understand why. Since journalists who live in the liberal echo chamber often don’t know anyone who’s voting for Donald Trump, they’re trying to understand how some smart people can be, in big media estimation, so stupid.

WASHINGTON—Twenty years after the last major welfare reform, U.S. poverty rates have shown marginal improvement. But according to policy experts, future changes need a new target: men.

“We don’t believe there’s anybody in our caseload who has had an immaculate conception,” said Eloise Anderson, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. “We really want to go after fathers.”

On Aug. 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed bipartisan legislation to reform the welfare system.

“Today, we are ending welfare as we know it,” he proclaimed.

WASHINGTON—Bad statistics drive a false narrative about American poverty levels, researchers at the Heritage Foundation said today.

“Our normal trope is we’ve spent $24 trillion dollars on the War on Poverty and the poverty rate is exactly where it was in 1967. The reason for that is garbage data,” said Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation poverty expert. “The fact of the matter is, even the government can’t spend trillions of dollars and have no impact on anybody’s living standard.”