Usually, people associate predatory lending with payday loans. And it’s common knowledge exactly how awful payday loans are: 12 million people — 84 percent of whom have family income under $40,000 — are subject to annual percentage rates (APRs) around 400 percent to borrow just a few hundred dollars. These rates trap borrowers in long debt cycles of constant loan renewals. The typical payday loan consumer will spend almost 200 days — more than half the year — in debt, and two-thirds will renew at least seven times, meaning they ultimately pay more in interest and fees than the original amount they borrowed.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Recently, however, there’s been a significant shift from payday loans to slightly bigger, slightly longer term installment loans. While payday loans are mostly under $500 with two-week terms, installment loans generally range from $500 to $2,000 (though they can reach $10,000 or higher) and offer terms of 6 months to 2 years or longer, with APRs around 100 percent to 200 percent. This shift happened quickly: One of the biggest predatory lenders, Enova International, made 98 percent of its revenue in 2009 from payday loans, but in 2019 only 10 percent came from payday loans compared to 43 percent from installment loans. Although the interest rates are slightly lower than payday loans, and consumers have longer to repay them, installment loans are actually more likely to trap people in dangerous debt cycles because they target the same low-income people but require a much bigger principal to be paid back.

There has been bipartisan legislation to curtail both types of predatory lending. Congress enacted the Military Lending Act in 2006 and expanded it in 2015 to protect service members — 44 percent of whom received a payday loan in 2017, compared to 7 percent of the total population. The bill capped rates on most consumer loans at 36 percent APR for active duty members, their spouses, and their dependents. Meanwhile, 18 states and DC, red and blue alike, have strong rate caps on payday loans that are extremely popular. (Illinois’s House of Representatives actually approved their payday rate cap unanimously, and Nebraska passed theirs with 83 percent ballot approval.) In addition, the vast majority of states have rate caps on at least some installment loans. Forty-five states and D.C. set interest for $500 6-month loans at a median APR of 38.5 percent; 42 states and D.C. set interest caps on $2,000 2-year loans at a median APR of 32 percent.

Predatory lenders want to circumvent these state laws to charge obscene interest rates on Americans everywhere, and the Trump administration was more than happy to draft a new rule that makes that possible. The rent-a-bank rule works as follows: The consumer applies for a loan with the non-bank “fake lender” like Ace Cash Express or OppLoans, which processes that application and sends it to an actual bank. The bank sends money to the consumer and then sells the loan back to the fake lender in exchange for some of the profit. Finally, the consumer pays back their loan to the non-bank lender. The consumer only ever interacts with the “fake lender,” but since the bank technically originated the loan and isn’t subject to the same state interest rate restrictions as non-bank lenders, the fake lender doesn’t have to abide by the rate cap anymore either.

Predatory lenders have been trying to use this rent-a-bank scheme to evade fake lender and anti-usury laws as far back as the early 1800s, but courts and federal regulators have always found it to be illegal. Until the Trump administration reversed course and implemented the new rent-a-bank rule. Now, 42 states and DC currently have at least one predatory lender using a rent-a-bank scheme, and another five have high-cost installment lenders that lend directly to consumers.

The costs of this rule to individual people and families will be enormous. In a state like Iowa, where rates are capped at 36 percent for both $500 6-month loans and $2,000 2-year loans, a $500 6-month installment loan from Check ‘N Go that a borrower is able to fully pay after the first term would cost $90 in fees at the 36 percent APR.  But under the new rule, Check ‘N Go is able to charge 199 percent APR on the same loan, which would cost $497.50 just in fees. Similarly, a $2,000 2-year installment loan repaid after just one term would cost $1,440 in fees at a 36 percent APR but $7,960 in fees at 199 percent APR.

And this example is assuming that borrowers are able to pay off the loans when they’re due, instead of renewing them, which is much more common. After six renewals, that 2-year installment loan at a 199 percent APR will cost $47,760 in fees.

This isn’t just a hypothetical exercise. About 19 percent of the 53 million adults in the US with household incomes under $40,000 will take out a payday loan sometime during the year, and most will end up renewing so many times that they pay more in fees than the principal they originally borrowed. If that percent holds across the states, as many as 4 million adults every year will take out a payday loan in a state where anti-predatory lending laws are being undermined by the rent-a-bank rule.

To add insult to injury, while these non-bank lenders profit by preying on millions of desperate Americans, they’re also demanding special support from the government during the pandemic. When the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was created in March 2020 as part of the CARES Act, payday lenders and their ilk were initially excluded. The lenders threw a tantrum, suing the government for inclusion and convincing a number of lawmakers from both parties — who happen to have received 6 times more in campaign contributions from the payday industry than those not involved — to write a letter urging the Trump administration to provide them with PPP funds, which it ultimately did.

As of July 2020, at least 35 payday loan and debt collection companies and their subsidiaries had received between $9 billion and $23 billion in PPP loans. Meanwhile, they continued to charge low-income consumers 400 percent APR on short-term loans amidst a financial crisis. Some even had the audacity to market “COVID-19 Financial Relief” and “Emergency Funding Relief” loans at 800 percent APR early in the recession. One company, Opportunity Financial — which operated under the name OppLoans but recently rebranded as OppFi — lends directly in 10 states and uses a rent-a-bank scheme in 33 other states to lend at 160 percent APR. OppFi has received 46 complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for their payday lending practices since 2011 and is currently being investigated for potentially violating the Military Lending Act, but last year they took a PPP loan of $6,354,000. Another predatory lender, CashCall, has received a staggering 565 complaints to the CFPB and was successfully sued in separate cases by the CFPB and DC for using a rent-a-bank scheme to charge illegally high interest rates, but still received a PPP loan of $788,600.

The good news is that there are some easy fixes to this problem. In an ideal world, we would have a national 36 percent rate cap that applies to everyone. At 36 percent APR, consumer loans would still be pretty costly but wouldn’t be at predatory usury levels. The bipartisan Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act introduced by Representatives Jesús “Chuy” Garcia (D-IL) and Glenn Grothman (R-WI) in November of 2019, and which is expected to be reintroduced this legislative session, would extend the Military Lending Act’s 36 percent cap to all consumers. This would be overwhelmingly popular with the American public, polling at 70 percent among all voters with no less than 60 percent support in any state and with a majority of those opposed saying that 36 percent is still too high. However, given the makeup of the Senate, this legislation is unlikely to pass, and certainly not quickly.

Waiting for a new comptroller of the currency to be appointed by President Biden and then issue a new rule reversing the rent-a-bank rule will also take some time and could face a threat from lawsuits in a very conservative federal judiciary. In the meantime, millions of low-income consumers will be robbed of billions of dollars in fees from exploitative interest rates.

The much faster and easier solution to the rent-a-bank problem is for Congress to simply use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the rule. This option is time-limited, though; Congress has just 60 legislative days after a rule is implemented to pass CRA legislation. Thankfully, Representative Garcia (D-IL) and Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) took the first step on Thursday March 25 and introduced the necessary CRA legislation to repeal the rent-a-bank rule.

The resolution now needs to pass both the House and Senate and get signed by President Biden soon, likely sometime in May, to prevent millions of low-income people every year from being even further exploited and trapped in debt by predatory lenders.

My husband, on the other hand, was never referred to as an addict, even though he was actually being accused of using one more illicit substance than me — methamphetamine in addition to heroin. It may be hard to understand why something like this matters. After all, don’t people use the word “addict” all the time?

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

There is an ongoing debate among the addiction treatment and harm reduction communities about which terms should be used when referring to drug use and addiction, and in what settings. In 2017, the Associated Press Stylebook updated their recommendations for reporting on addiction and drug use to exclude potentially stigmatizing terms such as “addict,” “alcoholic,” and “drug abuser,” except in the form of direct quotes. Instead, they recommend using person-first language, such as “person with a substance use disorder” or “people who are addicted to opioids.” These changes aligned with updates to the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as well as recommendations by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Others followed suit: a 2018 update to the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s blog specified that they no longer use terms such as “addict” or “substance abuser” (though the institute’s name remains unchanged), and in 2020 dictionary.com updated their website to replace all uses of the word “addict” as a noun with terminology such as “person with an addiction” or “habitual user.” They also updated their definition of the word “addict” to note that some might consider it offensive, and added a lengthy sensitivity note explaining: “addiction is the complicated result of genetic predisposition intersecting with dysfunctional behavior, neurochemical modification, environmental factors, and social influences,” and that many members of the treatment and recovery communities advocate against its use.

Controversy around terms such as “addict,” “alcoholic,” and “substance abuse” has been boiling for years. Many members of the medical, recovery, and harm reduction communities are happy to see changes like this implemented. For example, Olivia Pennelle, founder of Liv’s Recovery Kitchen and a journalist in long-term addiction recovery who covered the language debate for The Fix in 2018, said the dictionary.com changes are “important,” adding: “Only 10 percent of people [with a substance use disorder] get access to treatment…[and] a major factor is stigma. If we can do anything to change that, we should.”

On the other hand, Amy Dresner, also a journalist in long-term addiction recovery who authored an autobiography titled My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean, said she considers the use of language such as “junkie” and “addict” to be empowering when reclaimed as self-identifiers. And she says terms such as “person with a substance use disorder” fail to “convey the horror” of what she experienced during her active addiction.

“All that PC language feels like putting lipstick on a pig and hiding it more…[the changed terminology] sounds better, it sounds like you have empathy but does it really change somebody’s opinion?” she asked.

Recent research backs the moves by dictionary.com and the Associated Press. A series of studies published in the Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence in 2018 found that several terms, including the word “addict,” were associated with negative social perceptions. It also found that these terms produced negative biases significant enough to impact people’s access to healthcare; for example, both treatment professionals and members of the general public were more inclined to recommend incarceration or other punitive measures to those labeled an “addict” or “substance abuser” while a “person with a substance use disorder” was more likely to be deemed in need of medical care.

Robert Ashford, the lead researcher in the language studies, explained a potential cause in a story I wrote for Filter Mag. “[Language is] the primary way we communicate…The cliché ‘words have power’ is the truth.” Regarding language employed in court settings specifically, he added: “It’s not that those [terms such as ‘person with substance use disorder’] are inherently positive; it’s that they are less negative than the pejorative terms that have been created over time. These things have a really strong emotional reaction to most people. We don’t need to do [courtroom actors] any favors by…using language that has come to mean something biased.”

“How you speak about the person you’re representing is how other people will see them and so using the correct language is extremely important,” added Dinah Ortiz, a harm reduction-oriented parent advocate located in New York City. “Language is like a stepping stone, then comes the harder stuff, but it starts with language…if we don’t care about calling a person a ‘junkie,’ a ‘dope fiend,’ a ‘crackhead,’ then we don’t care about that person.”

In my Florida State child services case, my husband and I both received the same charges — neglect and imminent risk of harm — and we both had our parental rights terminated in early 2020. On paper, we shared the same nightmare outcome at the end of a case riddled with misrepresentations of fact, blatant bias, and government overreach at its darkest. But there was a palpable difference in the courtroom between his treatment and mine. While my every word was interrogated with suspicion — I was never even counted as having income despite clearly being able to pay my bills and child support — my husband was rarely questioned. I was criticized for circumstances he and I shared, such as not having a car and relying on his parents for rides to our supervised visits, while he usually escaped mention.

At the disposition for our initial trial, when the judge determined that our daughters were unsafe in our care and should remain with their paternal grandparents while we completed a slew of tasks to try to regain custody, the judge cited as her reasons for issuing these charges against me: “The mother is an extraordinarily educated and gifted individual. You have a gift for language, both oral and written. Unfortunately, the Court finds that you could probably sell ice to an Eskimo.”

Although she issued the same charges against my husband, the judge stated that she “found the father’s testimony essentially credible before this Court,” and mentioned that he acknowledged having a “substance abuse history,” something I likewise acknowledged about myself (though I clarified it as a substance use disorder, as per the DSM IV and V).

While it is impossible to pinpoint my classification as an “addict” versus my husband’s as a “person who uses heroin and meth” as the reason for our differences in courtroom treatment, it can’t be ignored that this experience aligns near perfectly with the outcomes of Ashford’s experiments.

And, as explained by Sheila Vakharia, a former social worker and the current deputy director of the Department of Research and Academic Engagement for the Drug Policy Alliance: “When you refer to someone as an ‘addict,’ and you make salient one person’s single relationship with a drug or several drugs, what happens is you then start to see that person through that lens of that one characteristic or trait, and it can make it hard to see the complexity of a person’s identity.”

Still, it’s hard to know how much, if at all, my case would have changed if I’d not been labeled an “addict” at the outset. Would my daughters be home today? Or would I merely have had a slightly more comfortable courtroom hanging?

“We’re really holding on with raw knuckles,” says Jasmine Henderson, a child care organizer with Ohio Organizing Collaborative. “Ninety percent of working adults in the state of Ohio are working parents. If we lose child care, we pretty much can guarantee that we’re going to lose probably a large number of our workforce in Ohio.”

Nationwide, more than 42 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds have faced a negative career impact due to child care issues, personally or in their household. That burden is falling harder on women: In September, 865,000 women left the U.S. workforce, compared to 216,000 men. Millennial mothers in straight couples are three times as likely as Millennial fathers to name child care closures as the main reason they are unable to work.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The longer it takes for Congress to fund child care in a pandemic relief package, the worse the crisis becomes. As more programs close permanently, millions will be forced to leave the workforce, prolonging the recession and likely resulting in increased racial, geographic, gender, and educational inequities. “It’s about to get worse if we don’t infuse money into child care,” says Henderson.

Multiple bills have been introduced, but each one has stalled in the Senate. In early July, the House passed the Heroes Act, which included $7 billion in funding for the child care industry. It never got off the ground in the Senate, with both the White House and Senate Republicans criticizing it as too liberal. In late July, the House passed the Child Care is Essential Act, (S. 3874/ H.R. 7027), which would provide the $50 billion actually needed to stabilize the industry. While House members have urged Congress to include the act in any upcoming stimulus package, Senate Republicans continue to denounce House-proposed stimulus packages as too costly. October 1, the House passed an updated version of the Heroes Act, designating $57 billion in total for child care stabilization and to subsidize child care costs for families. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is refusing to bring it to a vote.

Before the pandemic, the child care crisis was slowly gaining attention as policymakers built the case for a publicly-funded child care system to replace the underfunded patchwork that exists today. In 2017 and 2019, Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Bobby Scott introduced the Child Care for Working Families Act, (S.568/H.R.1364), which would provide low-income families with free child care, limit what middle-income families pay, build more centers, and support livable wages for early educators. During the 2020 primaries, several Democratic candidates made child care the centerpiece of their campaigns, from Elizabeth Warren’s universal child care plan to Kirsten Gillibrand’s Family Bill of Rights.

The pandemic has turned the demand for reform into a rallying cry for parents, providers, and advocates, with countless articles and prominent figures demanding a better system. If lawmakers do not address the now-deepened crisis, it is unlikely that they will remain favorable with their constituents, especially those belonging to younger generations. The Center for American Progress [Editor’s Note: TalkPoverty is a project of the Center for American Progress] found that 72 percent of young voters want Congress to provide funds to child care providers who are facing financial ruin during the pandemic.

Even after this immediate crisis is resolved, a long-term solution to rising child care cost will remain an essential issue. Survey data from Next100 and GenForward reveal Millennials and Gen Zers named the cost of child care — alongside student loan debt and lack of affordable housing — as a key factor affecting Millennial and Gen Z decisions to have children.

This is at least in part due to how poorly the current system serves many populations. Pre-pandemic, Black, Latinx and Indigenous families were paying larger percentages of their paychecks to afford limited child care options, and were more likely to experience job disruptions due to problems with child care. Furthermore, the child care crisis was already disproportionately affecting children with disabilities; and, pre-pandemic 60 percent of rural families were living in child care deserts.

“Let’s be clear,” Henderson states, “if you’re in the fight for racial justice and equity, [child care] is your fight…when we talk about the cycle of poverty and the intimacy it has with racism, sexism, et cetera, we are absolutely talking about [child care].” Whether politicians are courting younger generations or not, stabilizing child care and funding it properly is key to gaining greater support from racial and economic justice movements.

That extends to supporting early educators. The child care industry is 93 percent women, early educators are 2.5 times more likely than the overall workforce to be Black women and Latinx women, and 1 in 5 early educators is an immigrant. Early educators only earn a median of $11.65 per hour, with Black early educators earning an average of 78 cents less per hour than white early educators. More than half of all early educators live in families that rely on public income supports, such as food stamps. Even pre-pandemic, Henderson says, “Providers were already tired. Most of the parents were already overworked.”

As early educators and families continue to do everything they can to care for children in the face of this crisis, it cannot be underscored enough that lawmakers need to intervene urgently and substantially with federal funding. If they don’t, this crisis will only escalate.

As of now, providers meeting pandemic public health requirements are facing an average of 47 percent cost increases — costs too high for providers to shoulder alone and even higher than what most families already cannot afford. A National Association for the Education of Young Children July survey of nearly 5,000 child care providers revealed that without support from Congress, two out of every five respondents — and half of child care businesses that are minority-owned — are certain that they will close permanently. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation survey found that approximately one in five working parents remain uncertain if they will be in a position to return to their pre-pandemic work situation due to a lack of child care.

With the industry on the brink of collapse, and the economy struggling to restart without it, the time to delay is gone. Henderson made the stakes clear: “Now, there’s this urgency to survive.”

The results show the enormity of the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on family economic situations across the country, and the extent to which so many people have been left without the help they need.

Nearly half of American adults lost household income, and millions still haven’t gotten benefits

Since the start of economic shutdowns in March, about 113 million adults (46 percent of the population) experienced a loss of employment income for themselves or a member of their household. That fell harder on lower income households: More than half (52 percent) of households making under $35,000 lost employment income, as opposed to 31 percent of households making more than $200,000. And, just as systemic racism in the health care system means that people of color are disproportionately likely to contract and face complications from COVID-19, people of color are also more likely to bear the economic brunt of the pandemic. More than half of people who described themselves as Black, Hispanic or Latino, or two or more races or other races lost income, and 47 percent of Asian adults lost income. White adults were less likely to lose income — only 41 percent did.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

About 50 million adults have applied for unemployment benefits in less than six months, compared to about 37 million in 18 months during the Great Recession. What’s worse, almost 12 million people who applied for benefits have not received any. Poorer homes that were already living paycheck-to-paycheck were least likely to receive support: One third of households with incomes under $25,000 that applied for unemployment insurance haven’t received benefits. And, once again, people of color were less likely to receive the unemployment benefits they applied for: 30 percent of Black adults and 31 percent of adults of two or more races or other races who filed for unemployment insurance haven’t gotten their benefits. In comparison, 24 percent of Hispanic or Latino adults, 22 percent of white adults, and 20 percent of Asian adults also haven’t received any unemployment benefits.

Teleworking has been correlated with good health and high wealth

In addition to the mass layoffs and furloughs, the increase in telework has been the other major shift in the employment landscape: About 86 million adults now live in a home where at least one person shifted from in-person to telework.

There was a strong correlation between reports of good to excellent health and having shifted to working from home, with 47 percent of those in excellent health saying someone in their household made the switch to telework. In contrast, only 18 percent of people reporting poor health said that members of their household were able to make that same change.

This shift to telework has also proven beneficial primarily for those with higher incomes. Just 14 percent of homes making under $35,000 per year had an adult who was able to move at least partially to telework, compared to 72 percent for households bringing in more than $200,000.

Without additional support, more than half of the country is struggling to pay household expenses

All of this economic disruption, and the government’s inability to reach everyone with the aid they need, has left a lot people struggling to pay for everyday things. More than half of American adults — 134 million, or 56 percent of the population— said they had at least a little difficulty paying for usual household expenses in the last week. Homes with children were also much more likely to report spending difficulty: 64 percent compared to 50 percent of those without kids. Households that lost income were twice as likely to have used food stamps (SNAP) and more than three times as likely to have borrowed money from friends or family to cover usual spending needs in the last week.

All of this data points to one thing: People need help. Previous household pulse surveys, when Americans still had access to the $600 boost to unemployment benefits, already showed hardship increased significantly (inability to pay rent and food insecurity, particularly among families with children, were reaching dangerous proportions).

Now that the $600 boost has expired, there is no place in the country where a typical family can live on unemployment insurance alone. Tens of millions of people across the nation still need help getting through the coronavirus crisis. Congress must, at the very least, extend the $600 boost to unemployment insurance to quickly get substantial help to those who need it most in this crisis, and ensure that people are getting the benefits for which they’re eligible.

During that time some of us did push-ups, others laid on their cots and read, some used the time to write letters or look at their legal work; a few napped, and most of us did a mixture of them all until the jail unilaterally decided that it was safe for us to come back out.

Social isolation is the current fate of most people in this country, and we are all tussling with the dual stressors of our newfound isolation and fear of the virus. But the millions of people in jails throughout the U.S. who can’t afford bail are facing a form of isolation that’s much more severe. If you think it’s hard to share your apartment with your spouse, trying stepping into your bathroom for the next two weeks, along with hundreds of other people, all while a pandemic is preventing your family from being with you during this time of crisis. And that’s just to get your day in court.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Even before the current crisis, states like Alaska, California, and New Jersey had taken the humane position of ending cash bail, so that those awaiting trial no longer have to pay up in order to leave jail while they wait to see if they are proven guilty or innocent. New York followed suit in January, but rolled back key bail reforms last week via a budget package.

Now that the country is battling coronavirus, it’s even more important to end cash bail. Jails are full of public health hazards: A large number of people share a small space, often with limited access to soap, so infectious diseases can spread rapidly. In addition, the prison population is aging quickly — the number of incarcerated people over 55 has ballooned by 400 percent since 1993 — increasing the risk of serious illness. Holding people before trial increases the likelihood that they’re exposed to the novel coronavirus, making them more likely to spread COVID-19 in the prison and after their release.

We’re already seeing this spread take place. As of April 6, more than 600 prisoners and staff members at Rikers Island have tested positive for COVID-19. Four staff members and one incarcerated person have died. Nearly 300 prisoners and staff have tested positive in Cook County, Illinois, and at least two two inmates have died of the virus in Louisiana. And while some cities, like Los Angeles, are responding by releasing, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has opted to place all 167,000 federal prisoners under lockdown. While the world is in search of a vaccine, the commonsense reaction would be to reduce places of contagion.

Still, some are opposed to bail reform, citing a jump in crime numbers from the first two months after New York ended the practice as evidence of the need to repeal bail legislation. Lawmakers in Alaska attempted to roll back their bail reform legislation after just a couple of months. Law enforcement and the bail bonds industry have mounted claims of an uptick in crime in the brief implementation of the new laws. Their underlying argument is that the world of criminals has been studying new bail laws and conspired to take advantage by committing more crimes while awaiting their day in court. Lies and fear cajole the public into believing that bail reform is criminal justice reform going too far. Even progressive Democrats backpeddled.

Less than six months is not enough to prove ending money bail causes any increase in crime.

New Jersey ended cash bail in 2017 and has seen major crime and pretrial populations fall by double-digit percentages. Offenses like robbery and homicide are down by 30 percent, and there were “6,000 fewer people incarcerated under criminal justice reform on October 3, 2018 compared to the same day in 2012.”

But now those statistics are backed with something: The tiniest shred of experience. The country has gone through self-imposed quarantines, governmental prohibitions on gatherings of groups larger than 10, and containment zones that could make it easier to understand the experience of incarceration even without studying those numbers.

Should innocent until proven guilty people, like you, be isolated in a cage?

Have we forgotten the motivation behind bail reform in America? A 16-year old child, Kalief Browder, committed suicide because of the trauma associated with his indigence. He spent two years in jail because he could not afford bail. Prison beat his soul physically and emotionally. The country was horrified. Jay-Z made a documentary about him. There was a collective awakening that the concept of money bail was an arcane law that penalized poor people who came into contact with the criminal legal system. Elected officials were championing the cause for bail reform. And yet for some reason, we stopped.

The inhumanity of the notion that bail reform will be rescinded, especially in the era of COVID-9, should compel us to question our civil society. We should want fewer people contained in the petri dish of incarceration in order to prevent the spread of the disease, and in order to prevent people who literally cannot escape their surroundings from being infected. There’s simply no reason to be holding people in cells where they could contract the disease simply because they are too poor to get out.

Humans are not viruses. And no segment of humanity should be considered dispensable, convicted or not. Ending money bail is efficient and humane and should be allowed more than a just a few months to prove its overall success.

On March 9, Cuomo announced a solution to one element of the supply problem in the wake of New York’s declared state of emergency: The state would start producing its own sanitizer, branded NYS Clean, to get around price gouging and supply issues. To start, 100,000 gallons a week will be distributed in government settings such as schools and prisons (more on that in a moment) as the state increases the speed of production. Cuomo even threatened to make the sanitizer available for commercial sale to counter price gougers, some of whom have already been fined for taking advantage of the public health emergency.

It’s the kind of bold statement designed to make a splash, but there’s little acknowledgement of who is responsible for making the product at speeds that allowed the state to ramp up production so quickly. The product is manufactured by Corcraft, which is the brand name for products produced by  the New York State prison system. “Employees” at Corcraft are incarcerated people making an average of $0.62 an hour.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Corcraft and entities like it across the nation benefit from a literally captive workforce. 50,000 people are incarcerated in New York’s state prisons, and while not all of them work for Corcraft, many do, producing things like license plates, desks, textiles, janitorial supplies, and even eyeglasses. These products are in turn sold to government agencies, educational institutions, first responders, and select nonprofits by Corcraft as a “preferred source.” These entities have to “look to Corcraft first” as a supplier, even if they’re opposed to the use of incarcerated labor.

Across the nation, incarcerated workers generate billions in revenue for the prison system, making pennies on the dollar and in some cases nothing at all for their work. While some might consider it slavery, it’s entirely legal under the 13^th Amendment, which permits slavery or involuntary servitude “as punishment for a crime.” Nationwide, incarcerated people pave roads, maintain state parks, fight fires, grow crops, and manufacture scores of items.

Here’s a real bitter twist: According to Keri Blakinger and Beth Schwartzapfel at the Marshall Project, incarcerated people aren’t necessarily allowed to use hand sanitizer in jails and prisons. These workers are making a product they aren’t permitted to protect themselves with, even as conditions in jails and prisons can be extremely dirty, with even basic sanitation challenging. Sinks may be broken, sometimes no soap is provided so incarcerated people have to buy it from the commissary, and facilities are crowded.

This is already a dangerous combination for the spread of infectious diseases such as hepatitis a — which is spread through unwashed hands — and influenza. Many prisoners are also trying to manage chronic illnesses like diabetes and HIV, which can make them vulnerable to infection. The response to concerns about infectious disease may be to “quarantine” sick people in isolation, an unhealthy and dangerous approach to controlling infectious disease that comes with significant mental health effects.

As New York’s Department of Corrections implements COVID-19 policies such as screening visitors, it repeats public health recommendations for “all individuals within its facilities” —  wash frequently with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, use hand sanitizer when water is not available, keep your hands away from your face, and stay home when you are sick — all of which may be, to put it mildly, a challenge for incarcerated individuals.

Incarcerated people are commonly called upon to take personal safety risks for those who are not in jail or prison, as in the case of firefighters across the West who work alongside professionals in better gear, knowing that their training may not be transferrable to jobs on the outside thanks to their criminal records. Still, asking people to whip up 75 percent alcohol hand sanitizer for the health and safety of civilians while they’re struggling for scraps of soap in the midst of a public health emergency is truly a new low.

Access to tools to prevent the spread of disease and to protect people who are particularly susceptible to COVID-19 — such as those living in institutions like jails and prisons — is vital. There’s ample guidance from experts on highly effective ways to protect ourselves, but people in carceral settings can’t access the basic things required, such as sanitation supplies and tissues so they can cover their mouths and noses when they sneeze or cough.

If there’s an outbreak in a prison setting (something that may be inevitable in a confined, unhealthy, unsanitary environment), it will be because of the refusal to make changes to the rules in order to allow people to protect themselves.

Lately it’s gotten worse. A letter earlier this month made me feel suddenly lightheaded as my vision started to fade. As I sat on the floor, my mind raced through all of the potential bad news the envelope could contain for a disabled Supplemental Security Income recipient like myself.

Many more people could soon be in the same position, more often. A new proposal from the Social Security Administration would cut $2.6 billion dollars over the next decade from the two core programs it runs that comprise the disability safety net: Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). The cuts would start with letters — 2.6 million more of them.

A letter is the first notice a disabled recipient of SSDI or SSI gets that they’ve been selected by Social Security to undergo a “continuing disability review” (CDR). As the agency puts it, CDRs are used to “determine if disabled beneficiaries still meet the medical requirements for eligibility.” In other words, a CDR is a kind of “are you still disabled enough for SSI or SSDI” audit.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

After the audit, if Social Security believes a beneficiary’s medical condition has improved such that they no longer meet Social Security’s stringent criteria for disability, their benefits are terminated. It is now much easier for Social Security to say that a disabled person has medically improved thanks to a 2017 rule change that allows the agency to disregard medical evidence from a beneficiary’s own doctors. Benefits are also terminated if the disabled person does not respond to the CDR.

The Social Security Administration is proposing a dramatic ramp up in the number of CDRs it conducts, adding an additional 2.6 million of them over the next decade. And that’s not the only change Social Security wants to make to the CDR process.

When an applicant is approved for disability benefits, Social Security assigns them to a category that determines how often they must go through a CDR. If Social Security thinks a disabled person’s medical condition is expected to improve, they set a CDR for every 6 to 18 months. If it’s possible the medical condition will improve, they set a CDR for every three years. And if the person’s medical condition is not expected to improve, they set a CDR for every 5 to 7 years.

Social Security officials want to create a new category, “medical improvement likely,” that will get a CDR every two years. And they propose to move hundreds of thousands of people from less frequent CDR categories into the new category.

The vast majority of disabled people receiving SSDI and SSI are not represented by counsel through the CDR process. The maximum amount that SSI will provide to a disabled beneficiary is just 74 percent of the federal poverty level — currently $12,490 for an individual. As of November 2019, the average SSDI benefit was just $14,855 per year. Most SSDI and SSI beneficiaries simply do not have the money to hire someone to help them navigate the CDR process. Instead, they find themselves facing the byzantine, and all too often hostile, bureaucracy of the Social Security Administration on their own — something that I find daunting even with the benefit of a law degree.

Social Security is also proposing to focus the targeting of those CDRs on disabled children, people with certain medical conditions such as leukemia, and disabled older adults. Under the new rule, many disabled children would face a mandatory CDR at six years old and another mandatory CDR at 12 years old.

In both adults and children, the rule would change the category of certain mental health conditions including anxiety-related disorders, depressive, bipolar and related disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and impulse control disorders to a CDR every two years.

But Social Security has not provided estimates of how many disabled people from each of those groups will be impacted. In fact, Social Security hasn’t released any estimates of how many people will be impacted, period, only the number of CDRs it expects to undertake. (A single person could face multiple CDRs in that time period.)

Kathleen Romig, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained by email that “SSA provides no estimates of the number of people who would be affected. No number of people who will be subject to additional reviews. No number of people who will be terminated.”

Instead, Social Security just published the projected cuts of $2.6 billion. That leads Romig to believe the agency has data it isn’t releasing: “They DO have a number of program dollars saved — in fact, two numbers, one for SSDI and one for SSI. I think it stands to reason that SSA has estimated how many disability beneficiaries would be cut off and they are withholding it. I’ve never seen the estimated number of people left out of a proposed rule; it’s a vital piece of information.”

The rule is open for public comment on regulations.gov until January 31, 2020.

This was the first of three SNAP-related rules introduced by the administration this year. If all three are finalized, they will have a cumulative effect of taking critical nutrition assistance from more than 3 million people.

The Trump administration’s attack on SNAP is nothing new; for decades, presidential administrations as well as members of Congress have been attempting to push people off SNAP, as seen under the Reagan administration, in 1990s welfare reform, and 2018’s farm bill. Selecting ABAWDs as a target was no coincidence; the policy is complicated and confusing, and though it has extremely high stakes for those affected, their voices are rarely heard.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

More than that, though, it’s a rule ripe for generating arguments about personal responsibility, hands up instead of hands out, and the “dignity of work.” This talking point made a return appearance in a press release from Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) and an op-ed from Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, who has apparently never labored under the oppressive eyes of a ruthless algorithm at an Amazon warehouse, or defended himself against violent customers attacking him over a McDonald’s counter.

Conservative policymakers rely on language like this to drive home the idea that programs like SNAP, along with housing vouchers, Medicaid, and other elements of the social safety net, are handouts encouraging dependence rather than part of the social contract. In cuts to programs like these, the argument is that without stricter guidelines, poor people will “lazily” rely on benefits.

This framing can also be seen in incidents like a flashy campaign to highlight corporate tax dodging that stigmatized public benefits, rather than focusing on the need for corporations to pay not only taxes, but fair wages.

Some may defensively and correctly note that many people subject to work requirements are already working; in 75 percent of SNAP households with someone who is subject to existing work requirements, for example, someone has worked and/or will work within a year of receiving SNAP. Furthermore, some people considered able-bodied for the purposes of SNAP are in fact disabled.

It’s also important to be aware that the overall quality of jobs in the United States has gone down. In some cities, as many as 62 percent of workers are employed in “low-wage” jobs. 30 percent of low-wage workers live at or below 150 percent of the poverty line. And while Perdue commented on Twitter that “there are currently more job openings than people to fill them,” getting a job in a nation with very low unemployment can actually be challenging, particularly for people with limited education or trade skills and obligations that may not show up on SNAP paperwork.

Ample evidence dating to the 1970s, when they were first implemented with then-food stamps, demonstrates work requirements are ineffective when it comes to meeting the stated goal of fostering independence; “work or starve,” as NY Mag put it, does not result in systemic change. While people subject to work requirements may experience a moderate uptick in employment, it fades over time, suggesting the effects are not lasting.

In some cases, people actually grew poorer over time; the current ABAWDs requirements have people working 80 hours a month, but accept volunteering and training programs in addition to work hours, which are not necessarily avenues to making enough money to survive. When participants are involved in voluntary, rather than mandatory, work and training programs, on the other hand, they’re much more likely to experience improvements.

Meanwhile, SNAP contributes about $1.70 to the economy for every dollar spent, and can help insulate workers from shocks like recession and job loss. These benefits are tremendous poverty-fighting tools. Making SNAP harder to get will make it difficult to get people onto SNAP quickly when unemployment starts to spike, hurting local economies in addition to making it hard for families to feed themselves.

SNAP is not the only program being targeted with work requirements. Multiple states have pushed for Medicaid work requirements, though thus far every one has backed down or faced a legal challenge. Programs such as SNAP and TANF, notably, already have work requirements, they just aren’t stringent enough in the eyes of some critics.

There’s no evidence to support punitive measures like these. They do not improve employment rates or fiscal independence. It’s important to acknowledge this, but not at the cost of the larger point: SNAP exists to bolster access to nutrition in the United States through a variety of means, whether allowing people to pick up what they need at the grocery store or certifying children for school lunch eligibility.

SNAP doesn’t just need to be defended; 62 percent of voters actually believe the extremely popular and effective program should be expanded. The United States should increase the availability and quality of benefits, and eliminate bizarre and restrictive limitations on the program, such as the ban on hot food. When people lack access to stoves or microwaves, refusing to allow them to buy hot foods is cruel, and undermines the USDA’s own goal to “do right and feed everyone.” And it should streamline SNAP benefits — something under attack with the USDA’s proposed rule around Standard Utility Allowances (SUAs), which would make it harder for people to get SNAP benefits when they need them.

The nation must change the way it talks about programs like SNAP; they aren’t something to be ashamed of, or evidence that someone has failed. They are instead evidence of a belief that everyone deserves access to a standard of living that meets their needs, freeing them to lead their best lives.

For Giving Tuesday, the media find no obvious villain: Donating to nonprofits — or, as Giving Tuesday calls it, doing good — counters the overindulgence of Black Friday. However, positioning Giving Tuesday as the antidote to Black Friday is erroneous because both days stem from the same monster: widening disparities in income and wealth.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

The vilification in Black Friday reporting casts shame upon the crowds that wreak havoc on stores in the name of snagging a deal. Take these headlines, for example: “What Turns Black Friday Shoppers Into Raging Hordes?” “The Human Costs of Black Friday, Explained by a Former Amazon Warehouse Manager.” “Why Black Friday Shopping Is Especially Dangerous in Tennessee – And How To Be Safe.”

However, the culprit behind Black Friday hysteria is more systemic than individualistic. Companies intentionally employ misleading tactics, such as creating a sense of faux scarcity and marking up the original price of products so the discount price seems better, to appeal to potential customers. The perception of limited temporality concerning the sales compounds this sense, strengthening the urgency and fear of missing out for many shoppers.

Meanwhile, stagnant wages, expensive health care, student loan debt, the racial wealth gap, and the gender wage gap, in addition to a host of other inequitable institutions, have left the average person in the United States in a state of financial precarity. Blaming these people for taking advantage of one of the few moments they may have to afford a new phone, kitchen appliance, or toy for their child not only ignores their victimization by the system, but fails to acknowledge that wealthier individuals actually spend more on Black Friday than do the people vilified in the day’s popular portrayals.

Giving Tuesday, which the 92nd Street Y and United Nations Foundation launched in 2012 as a Twitter hashtag, is the apparent salve to rampant consumerism. People can absolve their conscience of the post-splurge guilt and regret by donating money or volunteering time to a charitable cause. “When you give, you feel happier, more fulfilled, and empathetic,” wrote Asha Curran, Chief Innovation Officer and Director of the Belfer Center for Innovation and Social Impact at the 92nd Street Y, in 2017.

Centered at the core of Giving Tuesday is “the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world.” People give back, ushering “in the holidays’ charitable spirit” and powering a movement that has grown over the years and has the potential to raise half a billion dollars this year.

However, as “a day that encourages people to do good,” Giving Tuesday is not as inclusive as it states. The mean gift size during Giving Tuesday in 2018 was $105, an amount that is not insignificant for a cash-strapped individual. Those who are able to participate in Giving Tuesday, whether that be by donating money or volunteering time, are not representative of the marginalized communities in need of investment. In fact, charitable giving has increased for upper-income households while decreasing for middle- and lower-income households — a trend that tracks the expanding wealth gap.

While donations from individuals and organizations offer relief for nonprofits working in under-resourced communities, a funding system in which groups must vie for the limited goodwill of some benevolent donor does not address the roots of inequity, inequality, and injustice. Similar to how stores promote deals to bring in potential customers for Black Friday, nonprofits market their cause to potential donors for Giving Tuesday.

A quick look at Giving Tuesday pages shows how the campaign plays into this competitive dynamic as nonprofits are listed as products to be filtered and added to an online gift bag and on leaderboards showcasing the most successful fundraising hauls. Donations are transactional: $50 provides shelter for a night, $100 “provides one month of meals” to a sheltered family, $250 “provides a day of therapeutic child care services” for a sheltered child. Giving Tuesday puts a price tag on critical services for marginalized communities, and wealthy donors determine if the price is right.

Expanding inequality in income and wealth has resulted in a society in which the top 1 percent commands more money and political power than the bottom 50 percent. Bemoaning the greed of Black Friday while praising the altruism of Giving Tuesday ignores the structures that give life to both.

For the average person in the United States, uncertainty and instability dictate their experience; faulting them for perpetuating a splurge-heavy holiday season fails to recognize their existence at the mercy of low wages, staggering debt, privileged corporate interests, and more. Nonprofits and community organizations are in a similar position: When the government fails to support them, they become hostage to privatized benevolence.

Instead of congratulatory applause for donors on Giving Tuesday, let’s reevaluate the cruel cycle in which society denies marginalized communities access to comfort and opportunity, denigrates them for attempting to carve out access, expects nonprofits to compete for money that will assist the marginalized communities, and then thanks wealthy donors for their performative generosity.

In 2020, Allegheny will begin applying a similar algorithm to every family that gives birth in the county, with the goal of linking families in need to supportive services before a maltreatment case is opened. But some critics insist that it will be just another way for government to police the poor.

The new program is called “Hello Baby.” The plan is to eventually apply it across the county, but the January launch will begin in only a select few hospitals. Like the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, the Hello Baby algorithm analyzes family data to apply an individual family score.

Emily Putnam-Hornstein, who helped design both programs, told TalkPoverty that Hello Baby uses slightly different data than the child maltreatment algorithm, which was criticized for targeting poor families because much of the data used was available only for people who used public services.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

“This is a universal program,” explained Putnam-Hornstein. “In the [child services] model the county was being forced to make a decision after an allegation had been received; in this case we’re taking about more proactively using data … so we wanted that to be built around universally available data.”

But these exclusions don’t guarantee that the data will not end up targeting low-income families again. “They rely on data where the county has the potential to have records for every family,” said Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. “The county acknowledges they will probably use data from [Child Protective Services], homeless services, and the criminal justice system, so yes, theoretically everyone can be in that, but we know who’s really going to be in it.”

An overview provided by the county online cites “birth records, child welfare records, homelessness, jail/juvenile probation records” as some of the “available service data” incorporated into the predictive risk algorithm, indicating that Wexler’s assessment was absolutely correct. Although that data is potentially available about anyone, several of these systems are known to disproportionately involve low-income people and people of color.

Putnam-Hornstein said via email that the Hello Baby process is “truly voluntary from start to finish.” A family can choose to drop-out of the program or discontinue services at any time.

The option to drop out will be presented at the hospital, when families are first told about the program. A second notification, and chance to opt-out, will then be made by postcard. If a family doesn’t respond to the postcard, they are automatically included in the next phase of the program, which involves running available data through the system to determine how much social support each family needs.

According to Putnam-Hornstein, scores will be generated about four to six weeks after birth for families that do not choose to opt out (or who are too busy to realize they want to). Once a family is scored, what happens next varies based on which of three tiers they fall into.

Under the “universal” tier, the most basic approach, families receive mail notifications about resources available throughout the county. Families grouped in the second, “family support,” tier will receive a visit from a community outreach provider and an invitation to join one of 28 Family Support Centers located around the city of Pittsburgh.

The “priority” tier engages families with a two-person team made up of a peer-support specialist and a social worker who will work closely with the families to identify their needs and partner them with appropriate providers. It is designed to be an individualized program that grants families access to the full range of support services available on a case-by-case basis. That could mean helping a parent navigate the complexities of applying for housing assistance or ensuring timely placement in a substance use treatment program. The county said in its promotional material — which was reinforced by Putnam-Hornstein over the phone and by email — that choosing not to engage with any aspect of the program will not lead to any kind of punitive action.

But parents who need supportive services still have reasons to fear intervention from child services. The reality is that any program putting families in contact with social service and medical providers means, by default, also putting those families at greater risk of being reported to child services by placing them in more frequent contact with mandated reporters.

A mandated reporter is someone who is legally required to report any suspicions of child maltreatment they encounter. The intention is to ensure timely detection of as much child abuse and neglect as possible, but data have not shown that an uptick in mandatory reporting equates to more child safety.

In Pennsylvania, nearly anyone who regularly interacts with children in a professional or semi-professional capacity is legally considered a mandated reporter. An unfortunate side-effect of the mandated reporter system is that even though a referral program like Hello Baby is not directly involved with child services, participating families will always be haunted by the possibility of coming under investigation.

Putnam-Hornstein assured that family’s scores will not be retained or shared with child services, even for families under investigation — but noted that “it is possible that child welfare workers could infer the level of risk if the family has voluntarily agreed to participate in Hello Baby Priority services and a child welfare worker learned that when gathering family history.”

It’s clear that the new program is not designed to get families involved with child services, although it is spearheaded by the Department of Human Services, which oversees the Office of Children, Youth, and Families that conducts child maltreatment investigations and responses. Rather, Hello Baby was created with the goal of offering a more equitable way to expedite service referrals for families with new children who need them.

“Universalizing the assessment of social needs at birth is the only way to avoid discrimination,” said Mishka Terplan, an obstetrician and addiction medicine physician, who was not talking specifically about the Hello Baby program. He observed that patients with obvious social needs, such as those suffering from acute addiction, were often screened and referred for other issues, like postpartum depression or housing assistance, while other parents’ needs were going undetected and unaddressed. “That seemed unfair,” he lamented. Terplan believes that universal screening programs would eliminate both the disparity between services rendered, and reduce the stigma attached to needing behavioral health treatment and other social supports.

Hello Baby’s creators hope that offering families these programs before there is a child maltreatment complaint can help keep them out of the system altogether. But by using imbalanced data points like child welfare history, homeless services, and county prison history to auto-generate scores, it assumes poverty as the main basis for family need. While poverty does generate certain needs, it is not the only indicator for the whole range of unique social supports that new parents require, such as mental health screening or child care assistance.

A system that continues to embed data that target the poor may only end up automating the social inequities that already exist, while placing vulnerable families under increased scrutiny by mandated reporters for the child welfare system — even if it intends to serve as a universal screening process that helps families avoid punitive interventions.

“As long as the system confuses poverty for neglect, any form of such screening is extremely dangerous,” said Wexler.

These moves, in communities in which tech companies have extracted special tax treatment and other benefits for decades, are supposedly meant to increase “affordable” housing stock. But for many area workers, including those at tech companies, the new housing will remain out of reach.

Apple’s plan calls for $2.5 billion in spending, including $1 billion in an affordable housing investment fund and $1 billion in first-time buyer mortgage assistance. It is the most generous of recent rollouts. Facebook committed $1 billion to the construction of 20,000 units, use of land owned by the company, and construction of housing for “essential workers” like teachers and firefighters. Google similarly offered $1 billion, primarily in the form of land. Meanwhile, philanthropic ventures such as The Bay’s Future, driven by tech company executives, are also pledging to wade in to the fight for affordable housing in the Golden State.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

“It’s a good thing these companies stepped forward,” said Jeffrey Buchanan of Silicon Valley Rising, a coalition campaign that includes unions and local advocacy groups. “There’s a huge need for financing” of the type that these commitments will provide.

But the problem of housing in the region isn’t just one of money, he explained. It also involves policy, better wages, and responsibility on the part of companies rapidly building up their campuses without adding complementary housing to prevent displacement — and ensure their own workers are housed.

Research indicates California needs 3 million new housing units by 2025; the Bay Area alone needs at least 187,000 units across all income levels according to the most recent state projection. 41.5 percent of households in the Bay Area are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing. 25,000 workers a day endure “super-commutes” of more than 90 minutes as they struggle to get from affordable communities to work in Silicon Valley.

In its recent “Out of Reach” report, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition found that the Bay Area’s housing wage — the amount of money you need to afford a two-bedroom apartment — ranges from $41 to $91 per hour. Statewide, workers need to work 116 hours a week at minimum wage to afford housing.

Meanwhile, a deeper look at many of the tech companies’ proposals furnishes vague details, though much talk of “affordable housing.” Many of the plans explicitly state the intent to produce mixed-income housing, rather than 100 percent affordable developments, something developers argue is usually necessary to make a development viable, especially in areas with high construction costs.

The definition of “affordable housing” in the Bay Area may surprise those who aren’t California residents. Low-income housing, defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as 80 percent of the area’s median income of $136,800, is still $129,150 for a family of four, and households making $80,600 are considered “very low-income.” “Extremely low-income” is $48,350.

The percentage of set-asides for affordable units varies; Facebook recently pledged 225 of 1,500, or 15 percent, of a planned Menlo Park development’s units for “affordable” housing. Notably, inclusionary zoning requirements in some Bay Area cities, like San Francisco, already force developers to include a set number of affordable units or pay in-lieu fees, and developers also benefit from incentive programs for constructing affordable housing. Thanks to state and federal policy, noted Buchanan, these units will eventually expire, with pricing jumping up to market rate.

While housing affordability for those outside the tech industry who feel squeezed by mounting costs driven by high tech company income is a significant issue, it’s a problem within the industry too, where all tech workers are not created equal. For employees in technical roles — such as developers, site reliability engineers, and more — it’s possible to afford to buy or rent housing units. Likewise for those in high-level non-technical roles, including attorneys, marketing executives, and some managerial positions.

But for the workers in the non-technical pipeline, including assistants, operations personnel, researchers, and customer service representatives, there’s a tremendous pay disparity — one that is exacerbated for contract workers, who are becoming a growing part of the tech workforce because of their low cost and shielded liability. Those workers are sleeping in their cars in the parking lots of their employers because they cannot afford housing, cleaning toilets, cooking food, driving buses, and providing security at marginal pay. When they’re not at companies like Facebook and Google, some are taking up shifts elsewhere, driving for ride shares, and hustling to pay the rent.

The tech companies’ plans lean heavily in to the popular argument that the affordability crisis in the Bay Area is one of availability; building housing, at any price point, is supposed to relieve this pressure. Advocates across the state are also pushing for rollbacks of density restrictions that limit the height and number of units that can be built, and promoting the of accessory dwelling units — also known as in-laws or granny units — to rapidly increase access to housing. Buchanan notes a growing interest in the use of co-housing — community living that integrates public and private spaces in a planned development — as well as community land trusts, which steward land to promote affordable housing, retaining ownership of the land while encouraging affordable development that gives residents a stake in their homes.

Not all advocates are convinced that this approach, known as filtering or trickle-down housing, is effective. Some raise concerns about the risks of displacement and gentrification, describing this as “a problem of equity and access,” not simply a question of housing units by the numbers. “YIMBYs,” wrote a collective from the LA Tenants Union, referring to boosters who push for filtering, “do not support empowering and protecting tenants through policies like right to legal counsel, just-cause eviction, and rent control. They overwhelmingly ignore the possibility of increasing supply with public or social housing.”

The policy struggles over housing highlight that simply building more isn’t always an option, speaking to deeper systemic problems that make it hard for people to find safe, sanitary, affordable housing in their communities. And even if building more housing is possible, say community organizations, that’s only one part of the solution to a complex problem.

Companies like Facebook and Apple are pledging to collaborate closely in public-private partnerships with policy-forward solutions, while still implying that privatizing public services is the only way to fix them. As long as tech companies dodge taxes, accept handouts and incentives, and receive preferential treatment, while relying on large philanthropic gestures to distract from their business practices, it’s hard to determine how much they can truly contribute to local economies.

#PayUpHollywood is an initiative spearheaded by Writers Guild of America (WGA) board member (and former Hollywood assistant) Liz Alper and Dierdre Mangan, supported by a number of my IATSE 871 union sisters, including Amy Thurlow, Debbie Ezer, Jessica Kivnik, and Olga Lexell. The hashtag has sparked a discussion of the low pay and long hours that assistants have long endured as “paying their dues.”

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

#PayUpHollywood has made a lot of noise on social media, exposing widespread workplace issues that plague Hollywood assistants. In addition to stagnant wages, assistants are discussing working unpaid holidays, being pressured not to report overtime, paying for staff lunch overages out of pocket, eating personal computer and software costs, struggling with student loan debt, a lack of sick leave, and other egregious workplace problems.

When you set about breaking into Hollywood, you usually take a job as a production assistant. From there, you specialize, becoming a wardrobe assistant, camera assistant, casting assistant, or, like me, a writers’ assistant. Behind every red-carpet gala, behind every award-winning close-up, behind every pulse-pounding action sequence, there is an army of us.

All have a couple things in common: We desperately want to make it in our chosen trades and we don’t make very much money. Television writers’ assistants make $14.57 an hour for a job that functionally requires a college degree. As Thurlow told Variety, “The issue really is that wages have been stagnant for so long that the gains we’ve made just aren’t enough in the face of cost-of-living increases.”

Writers’ assistants are the court stenographers of the TV world, responsible for capturing everything discussed on a daily basis and filtering it into notes that can become an outline that can become a television episode. Script coordinators are paid a couple bucks more ($16.63/hour) for the herculean task of ensuring that every version of every script is formatted correctly, typo free, and contains no names or brands that it shouldn’t.

If the writers’ assistant is the stenographer, the script coordinator is the on-call nurse. I say on-call because it is not unusual for them to be compelled to their computer at 3 a.m. after a new draft has been prepared on set in Toronto, Budapest, or Dubrovnik.

For decades, the expectation has been that people will toil away at these jobs for years as they build up the experience and connections necessary to become a writer. In theory, that may sound like a nice apprenticeship for a bright-eyed post-collegiate. In reality, this means that people in their late-twenties and thirties are making near minimum wage as they have children and put down roots in one of the most expensive cities in the world. A one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles costs an average of $1,360 per month.

These jobs require 60 hours a week or so for writers’ assistants and usually more for script coordinators. You are expected to develop your own writing in your spare time or you “must not really want it.” Many assistants work additional jobs, supplementing their income as Uber drivers and Starbucks baristas, along with 13 million other Americans.

Then there is the schmoozing that is required to rise up the ranks, which often involves a few craft cocktails a couple nights a week. After all, if you don’t have access to the influential alumni networks of Harvard or USC, you’ll have to cobble together your own group of allies if you ever want to make it in this town. Remember, it’s all about who you know.

While you’re at it, you might want to take some classes at UCB or UCLA Extension or enter your script into some contests to up your odds. That will cost you too. Oh, and have you thought about making a short film and submitting to festivals?

Women on #PayUpHollywood are discussing additional financial challenges they face in the chic world of Tinseltown. Thurlow told me: “I would also say needing to look cute and trendy, especially as a woman, is also a barrier. Everyone talks about how casual the industry is but there’s still a certain expectation. One job I had, my boss shamed me for using a tote bag instead of a proper work bag.

Breaking into Hollywood, it turns out, is very expensive.

There is a perception that this “dues paying” creates an environment where the hardest working and most talented rise to the top. The reality is that those who have the financial privilege to work a low wage job for years without being forced out by economic circumstances are more likely to get the elusive rewards. The  dirty open secret of Hollywood is that a lot of the survivors make it through the well-kept gates thanks to financial subsidies from their parents or well-off partners.

Caroline Hylton, a script coordinator, told me, “Most of the people who can afford to hang on are the ones whose parents are helping out, or footing the entire bill — and that’s rarely minorities, and certainly not anyone from a low-income background. Income inequality is where this problem starts. Diverse voices can’t all be the offspring of the privileged.”

Hollywood is set up to prevent the poor from breaking in. While Hollywood has been focusing on diversity fellowship initiatives (which, for what it’s worth, are great), the best way to change the look of white male Hollywood would be to remove the financial barriers to entry. Any study of poverty will tell you that it disproportionately impacts women and people of color.

One of the best ways to lower these financial barriers is unionization. For example, 75 percent of the members of my union — IATSE (The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) Local 871 — are women, but only 36 percent of staffed TV writers are women.

Not only do union members make more money than their non-union counterparts, but expanded benefits like health care can make the difference between keeping our head above water and drowning in debt. Writers’ assistants and script coordinators recently received some much needed relief. Last year, both crafts joined IATSE (The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) Local 871. Under our first contract, we won modest wage increases and many assistants got quality health care for the first time. More importantly, these assistants now have a safe space to discuss workplace issues and strategize improving working conditions.

Though 871 and other IATSE locals represent thousands of assistants in various departments, there are thousands more in need of union protection.

Of course, it is my hope that IATSE will organize every one of these workers, but American labor laws are stacked against workers who want to form a union. Corporations often stamp out unionization efforts through legal means — such as forcing workers to attend anti-union meetings with their boss — and even illegally firing workers for supporting a union. Moreover, Donald Trump’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — the agency that enforces U.S. labor laws — is making it harder for the workers to join together in unions and bargain for a fair contract.

High industry turnover makes organizing production assistants even more difficult since these workers jump on and off of productions, switch departments, get promotions, or simply leave the industry. But, hopefully, as more assistants unionize, we can fight for protections for the most vulnerable and precarious entertainment workers.

Though there is still a long way to go, we are making strides. The most valuable thing a union does is bring workers together. When we come together, workers see that what they’re experiencing isn’t specific to them. You aren’t a bad worker; you are in a bad system. You aren’t worthless; the system makes everyone feel that way. Once you get a taste of what solidarity looks like, you aren’t afraid to ask for more.

The expectation is that overworked and underpaid assistants will be adequately nourished by the promise of future success. But you can’t eat your dreams.

The NCAA’s Board of Governors is the main body charged with developing and overseeing the policies that regulate more than 460,000 student-athletes across 1,200 institutions. The board is comprised of 25 (mostly male) college and university presidents, athletic directors, and other professionals, such as former White House chief of staff Dennis McDonough and billionaire businessman Kenneth Chennault. While the board’s decisions often directly affect the lives of student-athletes, student-athletes do not have a say in the selection of board members or a vote in association-wide matters. As a result, they must depend entirely on individual board members having their best interests at heart. But evidence suggests that may not always be the case.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Student-athletes work tirelessly to perform at the highest levels of athletic competition while simultaneously endeavoring to graduate on time and prepare for future careers. Their efforts generated more than $1 billion for the NCAA and its member institutions in the 2016-17 school year alone. But while many coaches and commissioners took home seven- and even eight-figure salaries, student-athletes did not receive a penny of compensation beyond their scholarships, which do not always cover the full expenses associated with attending college.

The exploitation of student-athletes also produces serious adverse health outcomes, including debilitating knee and ankle injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease. Many student-athletes, especially Black student-athletes who are often concentrated in high-profile, revenue-generating sports, such as football and basketball, also struggle to graduate on time. It does not need to be this way.

In an ideal world, the NCAA would empower student-athletes to unionize and bargain collectively for safer working conditions, better health care benefits, improved academic and professional opportunities, and even compensation. But given the NCAA’s recent history of union busting and refusal to recognize student-athletes as employees, it appears unlikely that the organization would take such a step voluntarily. However, they can and should still provide student-athletes with a formal voice in their association-wide decision-making process by expanding the Board of Governors to include current student-athletes.

Reserving seats for student-athletes on the Board of Governors would guarantee the NCAA considers their concerns and perspectives at the highest levels of governance.

Expanding the Board of Governors is not unprecedented. In the wake of the 2017 NCAA corruption scandal, in which the federal government brought fraud and bribery charges against multiple college basketball coaches, the association added five independent voting members to its board to bolster public trust, increase the diversity of perspectives, and “help ensure the future health and well-being” of its student-athletes. These additions included Grant Hill, who played basketball at Duke 25 years ago and now owns the Atlanta Hawks.

Some could argue current student-athletes may have fresh ideas on how to ensure the health and wellbeing of student-athletes, but they were conspicuously absent from the list of new members.

Providing student-athletes with decision-making authority is not unprecedented. As recently as 2015, the NCAA yielded to pressure from student-athletes by providing them with limited voting powers on the divisional level. Today, they play an important role in Division I, Division II, and Division III governance, including decisions about championship administration, sport oversight, and strategic planning. Student-athletes also serve on several association-wide advisory committees. But they are excluded from the Board of Governors, which approves and monitors the NCAA’s budget, initiates and settles litigation, and establishes policies that affect the entire association.

The Board of Governors reluctantly took an important step towards ending rampant exploitation in college athletics when it voted to allow student-athletes to profit from their own name, image, or likeness. But the vote was long overdue and could easily have gone the other direction. This decision came in the wake of mounting public pressure, including statewide legislation in California and pending legislation in the U.S. congress. Student-athletes have a personal stake in association-wide matters. Their bodies, futures, and even their lives are on the line – they deserve a voice in the decision making process. It’s time to end their systematic disenfranchisement.

This massacre, followed by subsequent relocation to Fort Humboldt, resulted in the death of nearly one half of the pre-contact Wiyot population — estimated at close to 2,000 people. Today, the tribe has returned to near its ancestral territory, after long legal fights to gain federal recognition, with close to 600 Wiyot people living locally.

Eureka’s return is believed to be the first time a local government has returned land to a tribe in the U.S. Eureka City Council member Kim Bergel described the return as “the right thing to do.”

Eureka’s actions are significant politically, spiritually, and also economically. While Duluwat Island is relatively small, returning the land takes the tiniest step towards rectifying the injustices that the United States has committed towards Wiyot peoples. It signifies a desire to help Wiyot peoples rebuild their community and nation after centuries of dispossession and genocide.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

From 1776 to 1887, the United States transferred nearly 1.5 billion acres of land into American control. Initially, this was done through treaty and executive order or through forcible removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands, often putting them on reservations. While this made up the majority of land seizures, the seizure of land also included the 1887 Dawes Act, otherwise known as Allotment, which sought to individualize Indian land ownership, converting Indigenous peoples into models of homesteading farmers. The Act would cause Indigenous-controlled land to go from 138 million acres in 1887 to just 48 million acres by 1934.

The seizure of lands and territories and the creation of reservations is a significant reason why Indigenous communities have such concentrated poverty in the United States. Imagine being forced to move from the only home you have ever known to a place you have never been, with fewer resources to succeed there, and then being told that the lifestyle that has helped you prosper is “uncivilized,” and that to survive, you need to embrace a completely new worldview. Not exactly a model for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For many, the taking of land coincided with an effort to eradicate Indigenous peoples in general. Peter Burnett, the first governor of California, remarked as such when he told the nascent legislature in 1851 “that a war of extermination will continue to be waged between races, until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

To exterminate a whole group means not just the physical killing of a community. It means the destruction of a worldview, a home. This extermination created Allotment. It created boarding schools that sought to “kill the Indian, and save the man.” It created Indian termination policy, which sought to terminate tribes, relocating and assimilating Indigenous peoples. All of these American policies created the conditions for the intense poverty that Indigenous peoples face today.

These processes of extermination have not resulted in the erasure of Indigenous peoples in the United States – far from it. They have altered the ways in which Indigenous peoples interact with the world, though. Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa/Yurok/Karuk), assistant professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University, notes two things in this regard: First, that the world that contemporary Indigenous peoples inhabit is a post-apocalyptic one. Second, that this post-apocalypse alters Indigenous peoples’ abilities to thrive socially, communally, politically, and economically. When your base mode of living for generations is mere survival, how can you imagine building anything beyond that?

The combination of both land seizure and eradication efforts has resulted in significant economic disparities for Indigenous peoples in the United States. The 2008 Census estimated that 30 percent of all American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) peoples were in poverty. This reached 40 percent for those living on a reservation. Comparatively, the total U.S. population recorded a poverty rate of 16 percent. According to a 2017 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the AI/AN unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. Comparatively, the total U.S. rate hovered around 4.4 percent.

This is what makes the return of Duluwat Island to Wiyot peoples so important. It acknowledges past wrongs, understands how the original seizure of land harmed generations irreparably, and tries to rectify that in a culturally, spiritually, politically, and economically significant way. In giving back the land, instead of Wiyot Tribe buying the land back as has happened previously, Eureka took a step towards conciliation.

While the United States has often tried to find alternative methods of compensation for Indigenous land, the federal government would do well to follow the example of Eureka and the Wiyot Tribe. Just give the land back.

One year later, in 2017, de Blasio had a change of heart, and decided that he would propose a plan to close Rikers within 10 years and build four new jails across the city in its place. Members of the #CloseRikers campaign, many of whom are formerly incarcerated, have supported the building of four new jails to replace Rikers, too.

Close one jail to build four new ones was the limit of their imagination. But it should not be the limit of imagination for people of color and especially people who spent as much as one day in jail.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

The move towards opening more humane jails and state of the art “jail centers” is happening all around the country, from Sioux City, Iowa, to Spokane, Washington, to Oahu, Hawai’i. But that’s just the latest euphemism in the history of prison reform. From plantations to convict lease gangs to penitentiaries to correctional facilities, we have a collective conditioning to center confinement, even when the numbers provide a different narrative.

Reductions in the New York City jail population because of bail reform and other policy changes has made the once unrealistic idea of closing Rikers one of political pragmatism. According to statistics provided by the New York Police Department, New York City’s overall crime rate is continuing a downward trend. In fact, the homicide rate is at the lowest since the 1950s.

There is no Batman with a neverending utility-belt of crime-fighting tools intimidating the city’s underworld. Community-based programs aimed at prevention and intervention are the Caped Crusader. Crime in New York City declined at the same time that policy shifts forced the NYPD to stop using stop and frisk as its main policing tool.

The imaginations of activists, most of whom spent time on Rikers, is now being actualized.

This next step should not include the construction of another cage. If you build it, you will fill it, and according to scholar, Angela Davis, “jails and prisons always become overcrowded.” America’s prisons are already running at 103.9 percent capacity. The ACLU has been suing the state of Hawai’i since 1984 for its prison overcrowding; prisons there are now at an average of 167 percent capacity.

Prisons and jails, especially in America, are direct descendants of slave plantations. Laureates such as Ava DuVernay and Michelle Alexander have plainly made the case for this nexus.  Convict-leasing gangs were created after formerly enslaved Africans fought for their freedom in the Civil War, which were the precursors to the modern-day penitentiaries and jails.

Speaking at the Smart on Crime Conference at John Jay College earlier this month, Darren Mack, a formerly incarcerated leader and member of #CloseRikers, said that a part of the plan to close Rikers and open four new jails is to have social service providers run the new facilities instead of the Department of Corrections. But replacing correctional staff with any other kind of a professional is a jail with lipstick. Los Angeles residents fought against similar cosmetic changes by winning the battle to halt the construction of $2.2 billion jail-like mental facility.

If advocates, especially those who have lived in jails, don’t use this moment to close jails, 20 or 30 years from now prison reformers will be thinking of ways to improve these same jail centers.  In 1979, the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, wrote on the subject of prison reform: “One should recall that the movement for reforming the prisons, for controlling their functioning is not a recent phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated in a recognition of failure. Prison ‘reform’ is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its program.”

Now, I appreciate that the voices of formerly incarcerated are loud and numerous on both sides of this debate. Homogeneity in any movement is a myth at worse and unrealistic at best.

So here we are. We are at a moment when we can push, prod, and perform the dreams of the abolitionists of old: freedom. The upcoming biopic of Harriet Tubman, already getting Oscar buzz, will hopefully remind us that her first goal and hurdle was to convince caged human-beings that they were not free; that a plantation with better amenities was still a plantation committed to the peculiar institution of trampling Black souls to build a greater America. Dr. Tubman, as I like to call her, left us a vital lesson to remember.

Better conditions of confinement, though a necessary touchpoint of our humanity, is not freedom. Building new jails in a moment when it is becoming vogue to reduce the prison population is a cognitive dissonance that will likely result in creative ways to suggest Black and Brown people belong in them. America always finds a way to imagine confinement for people of color. Look at how kids are caged at the Mexican-American border.

We, especially those of us committed to implementing solutions that eradicate the need for jails and prisons, should not limit our expertise and our imaginations to soluble solutions that create more cages to be filled.

We can Harriet this moment.

Despite hazardous conditions in the days before the Camp Fire became a conflagration, Pacific Gas and Electric company elected not to take advantage of one of the most aggressive and effective tools in its wildfire prevention arsenal: De-energization, also known as a public safety power shutoff (PSPS).

According to California’s Public Utilities Commission, in 2015, the last year for which data are available, utility lines accounted for just 8 percent of fires, but they burned 150,000 acres, more than all other causes combined. Many of the state’s lethal fires have been attributed to power equipment. Utilities may opt to de-energize their lines when a lethal combination of weather factors converge: It’s hot, dry, and extremely windy.

While utilities determine when to make the call in different ways, the National Weather Service red flag warning of increased fire risk is often a factor. More than 50 percent of Northern California alone is at “elevated” or “extreme” fire risk, putting hundreds of thousands of residents in the danger zone. California’s Public Utilities Commission is deep in the heart of rulemaking around the relatively new approach to wildfire prevention as the state also explores options like burying utility lines and more aggressive vegetation management for preventing utility-associated wildfires.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

But de-energization comes at a cost. When it occurs, customers can be without power for hours or days. Utilities are supposed to provide advance notice, but some customers say that’s not happening. Instead, they complain recent Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison shutoffs have occurred with insufficient notice and been accompanied with outdated, confusing information on estimated time of power restoration, including lags in translating outage information.

This is a particular concern for customers who are electricity-dependent. In any given outage block, there may be hundreds or thousands of customers who registered with the utility to indicate they rely on medical equipment to stay healthy, and, in some cases, to stay alive.

Known as “medical baseline customers,” they may require ventilators and similar life support equipment, while others have conditions that can become uncomfortable or dangerous without medical equipment and cooling systems, or have medications that must be refrigerated. In recognition of their increased energy needs, utilities provide them with an extra allotment of energy at the base pricing tier. Other customers may have similar electricity needs despite not being enrolled in the medical baseline program, for a variety of reasons.

Utilities are supposed to be proactive about providing early and frequent notice to medical baseline customers to ensure they’re aware of the possibility of an outage. Kari Gardner, Southern California Edison’s Senior Manager of Consumer Affairs, explained that Edison, like PG&E and other utilities, has a multi-step warning process including a two-day warning that an area is being monitored, a one-day notice, and, ideally, one to four hours of notice before an area is de-energized, though rapidly-changing weather conditions can make this challenging. The utility, she said, is always working on better ways to reach customers, with a particular focus on medical baseline customers; the utility sends out door knockers for notification if they can’t get through on the phone, for example.

Jill Jones, who lives in Sonoma County near the site of 2017’s infamous Tubbs Fire, an area primarily served by Pacific Gas and Electric, is not a medical baseline customer but does have a condition called hereditary angioedema type III, which causes sudden intense swelling, including of her airways. She needs air conditioning and a low-stress life to reduce the risk of swelling episodes, and she also relies on a very expensive medication that must be refrigerated. “As soon as the air conditioner stops, the clock… when I will have an attack starts ticking fast,” she said.

Her condition was foremost on her mind when warnings of a possible shutdown started swirling in late September. Jones tried to track information about de-energization events through the PG&E website as well as social media. “They did not respond to my pleadings for them to consistently post updates. Their website and its map were either not updated and had info only from the day or two previous,” she said, noting the utility’s social media was slightly more current, but that not everyone could access it. She turned into an information conduit for those with limited computer literacy struggling for access to current information.

Lack of clarity led her to pack up and leave to stay with family outside the threatened zone, fearing that her power might be cut. “I have had to set up an emergency ‘go bag’ with a plan and network of family ready to house and come get me should we experience a Public Safety Power Shutoff. We have had to set up my parents’ RV to be ready to both run AC and safely house my medications should we lose power,” she said.

This issue isn’t just access to accurate and current information in multiple common languages about the possibility and status of a de-energization, though. The state’s information site, with language borrowed by the utilities, includes planning that is not necessarily practical or accessible for all medical baseline customers or others who rely on electricity for survival. Planning ahead for customers with medical needs is expensive, and disabled people are at a much higher risk of poverty — 26.8 percent compared to 10.3 percent for nondisabled people. In rural areas like those prone to shutoffs due to worries about vegetation on utility lines, that risk is even more extreme.

Recommendations include suggestions to buy generators or backup batteries, which are costly, and not always safe or practical in apartments and some rental single-family homes. Customers are also advised to “stay with a friend,” for those who can travel and have friends with accessible homes outside the range of the de-energization. The utilities operate respite centers with power and cooling, but they’re only open during the day.

This is something Gardner says utilities recognize when making the call for a PSPS and developing resources for medical baseline customers who may be caught up in fire prevention efforts. Utilities and the state are both working on programs to increase the affordability and practicality of emergency planning. One of the new bills Newsom signed encourages utilities to provide more support; tools such as microgrids and backup batteries can help electricity-dependent customers and their larger communities.

“What needs to happen is a genuine consideration of the risks of keeping the system on versus the risks of shutting it off,” said Melissa Kasnitz, a disability rights attorney with the Center for Accessible Technology. “Right now, utilities are only focused on one side of that equation.”

Kasnitz noted that while ventilator users and others with devices that require electricity may come to mind, there are other implications for medical baseline customers. For example, like Jones, diabetics need to keep medication in the fridge. In a country where one in four diabetics reports rationing insulin due to cost, losing a supply could be devastating.

Similarly, people relying on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program could lose all their food in an outage, with no budget for buying more — and the utility isn’t liable for that loss. And, said Kasnitz, people who work low-wage jobs who miss work because their employers can’t open might have to reshuffle their finances, putting prescription medication behind food or other needs.

Those customers might not necessarily be registered as medical baseline customers, highlighting the ripple effect of these outages, though she is swift to note that wildfires are also tremendously disruptive and sometimes fatal.

The debate over de-energization pits competing public health interests against each other, and it also has stakes far beyond California’s borders. Utilities in other states may begin to consider de-energization as an option in dangerous wildfire conditions with climate change increasing hot, dry weather. Disability advocates hope that consideration includes better planning for electricity-dependent customers with limited means as California learns how to navigate its new landscape. That’s something Gardener says is on Edison’s mind: “I want our most vulnerable customers to know that we do recognize that there’s additional risks when outages occur.”

During the course of his career, Scalia has denied the science behind repetitive stress injuries, prevented UPS drivers injured on the job from having the ability to form a class to sue, and — most outrageously — insisted that an employee at Ford Motor Company should soil themselves at work rather than be allowed the privacy to work from home.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

In the Ford case, Scalia defended the company against a claim that it had failed to accommodate a person with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The plaintiff had requested telework as a reasonable accommodation, which the company refused and countered with an offer to move the employee’s cubicle closer to the restroom.

When the plaintiff explained that simply standing up could trigger a loss of bowel control, Scalia argued that they should have taken “self-help steps such as using Depends (a product specifically designed for incontinence) and bringing a change of clothes to the workplace.” In other words, when an employee asked for support, Scalia argued that she should wear a diaper and be ready to change her pants.

This is not just a case for me. It is personal. As a person who has lived with inflammatory bowel disease for 34 years, I have requested and received the accommodations cited in this case. It’s not unusual for me to need quick access to a bathroom four, six, or eight times during a workday. On the days when that number is higher, I take advantage of telework. On days when it’s lower, I come to the office confident that my disability will not keep me from the work I love. Not because I’m forced to wear Depends — which would put me at risk for complications from inflammation or infection — but because of laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act that protect my right to accommodations that work for me.

Scalia’s nomination has the potential to set back disability employment policy by decades. The Department of Labor has a critical role in driving policy on disability employment, helping make the workplace safer and more accessible, and helping move the needle away from subminimum wage employment.

It might be easy to dismiss this administration’s nomination of Scalia as just one more dangerous appointment competing for our attention. That’s not what I see here. What I see is a nominee who endangers every worker’s right to reasonable accommodations. Not just the 3 million Americans who live with bowel disease, but the more than 60 million Americans with disabilities who depend on the ADA to protect them from discrimination by employers.

However, President Trump is not alone in targeting people with mental illness in the aftermath of gun violence instead of focusing on access to guns. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, among others, have done the same. If they’re successful, it will be another hard hit against marginalized communities during an administration when they are already under attack.

The American legal landscape is a complex web of laws that subject mentally ill people and those experiencing acute crisis or suicidality to surveillance and restrictions of their rights, which most notably includes the right of states to involuntarily commit a person with mental illness or to mandate outpatient treatment. Undergirding this legal framework is the presumption that people with mental illness are prone to violence (whether against themselves or others).

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

This is sanism: The system of institutionalized oppression that systematically disadvantages people perceived or determined to be mentally ill, while granting privileges to those considered sane.

The legal link between violence and mental illness is so strong that the United States often uses institutionalization as part of the broader carceral system. Among the most glaring examples of this are the insanity defense, people who are deemed incompetent to stand trial, and sex offenders who are confined to mental institutions even after the completion of their criminal sentence.

Technically, people charged under these laws are not sent to prison. However, institutionalization functions as a form of medical incarceration; patients are not free to come and go, and are often confined in hospitals for a longer period than they would have been confined to jail or prison. In fact, the population of forensic patients in state psychiatric hospitals has grown so rapidly that many state institutions are at or beyond capacity, with some patients held for decades or even indefinitely.

The specific legal criteria for involuntary civil commitment vary across states, but most states rely on the dangerousness criterion. In theory, it assesses if a mentally ill person poses a threat of danger to themselves or others to determine whether to initiate civil commitment proceedings. However, states generally do not distinguish between the danger posed to oneself and the danger posed to others in determining the appropriate interventions. The law affirms that states, pursuant to their parens patriae power, or the authority to act as a guardian for those unable to act on their own behalf, have a substantial interest in subjecting people with mental illness to involuntary commitment to ensure their safety or their community’s safety.

So even when no crime has been committed, people can be medically incarcerated. In a country that guarantees a constitutional right to liberty and due process, that poses a serious problem.

Trump’s call for increased institutionalization, therefore, bears a striking similarity to the cruelty of his other policies: It capitalizes on widespread anxiety about community safety in order to justify expanding carceral control of “deviant” groups. People of color and other historically marginalized populations will bear the brunt of any such expansion. People of color are more likely to be found incompetent to stand trial, and Black people are three to four times more likely than white people to be diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Black and Native people are disproportionately impacted by institutionalization and are more likely to be mandated to receive involuntary outpatient treatment.

Much like the proposal the Trump administration is weighing today, previous policies meant to reduce gun violence ultimately increased surveillance and criminalization of people with psychiatric disabilities.  For example, 43 states currently require or authorize that people flagged by the state due to certain mental-health adjudications have their names reported to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Four more states require such collection in an in-state database, each of which place people who have been involuntarily committed on lists alongside those convicted of violent crimes to bar them from purchasing firearms. Following the shootings at Virginia Tech, mental health related reporting to NICS spiked by 700 percent in just under seven years.

This becomes increasingly important as a focus on suicide becomes a larger target in gun violence prevention. While politicians have previously been met with skepticism for pinning mass shootings on mental illness, they have found support when focusing on the danger that people with mental illness are presumed to pose to themselves. This allows politicians to dodge the issues underpinning mass gun violence, instead targeting a population of people with much less political capital (people with mental illness) rather than the main perpetrators of mass shootings (straight white men). In that sense, they are leveraging sanism to protect white supremacist patriarchy.

As a result, the focus on suicidality is likely to increase the number of people who are institutionalized, without decreasing the number of mass shootings.

The American mental health system is violent. People with mental illness, particularly people of color with mental illness, are increasingly subject to punitive coercive treatment instead of community-based models for healing and care. The national fixation on mental illness which inevitably follows mass shootings is harmful not only because it does nothing to curb gun violence, but because it is a pretext for entrenching and expanding oppression.

Each time gun violence and mental illness are discussed together, we ultimately reinforce the discriminatory assumptions which animate our laws and justify dehumanizing treatment and oppression of psychiatrically disabled people.

While searching us, one of the officers said, cynically, “It ain’t legal yet,” though the “it” was not found on us.

It was around 10 p.m. and I was too tired to assert my rights or to say that I was in a meeting with their commissioner earlier that week about NYPD’s plans to build community-police relations. We accepted the harassment, survived the interaction, and went to our respective homes to smoke our blunts in peace, like most white people who now claim Crown Heights as their home.

Police murders of unarmed people in America sprout from seemingly benign harassment like that which happened to me and my friend, a military veteran — like what happened to Eric Garner, who was strangled to death for bootlegging cigarettes.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

In August, California passed a law making it less legal for law enforcement to kill Black and Brown people such as Eric Garner. California’s recently passed Assembly Bill No. 392, described by some as one of the toughest standards in the nation for when law enforcement officers can kill, is progress. Known as the “Act to Save Lives,” the law removes barriers to prosecuting officers who unlawfully use lethal force. The new law also redefines when a peace officer’s use of deadly force is deemed justifiable, based on the totality of the circumstance.

The LAPD alone killed 172 people in 2017. This new law would presumably decrease that number because police will be able to use deadly force only when, based on the perspective of the officer, it is necessary in defense of human life.

Advocates such as Cat Brooks at the Anti Police-Terror Project are the architects of this new law, potentially setting a legal precedent to be replicated across the country.

Acknowledging the success of the efforts of these advocates can occur while we also question whether substantive progress has been made. Five years ago, more than 500 journalists, lawyers, medics, organizers, pastors, students, tech experts and videographers participated in what would be called the “freedom rides,” which were response to the murder of unarmed Mike Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

The group of freedom riders, along with the local residents of Ferguson, had a list of demands, including: “a decrease in law-enforcement spending at the local, state and federal levels and a reinvestment of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing, and schools. This money should be redirected to those … departments charged with providing employment, housing, and educational services.”

California’s new law doesn’t address that concern.

Rightfully, the Act to Save Lives regulates policing with impunity. Police will no longer easily get away with the “I feared for my life” script; they will have to prove after the murder or assault that a “reasonable officer in the same situation would believe that a person has the ability…and intent to immediately cause death or serious bodily injury to the peace officer or another person.” All of this substantiation would be done after the hashtag for this person is created and goes viral.

What is still to be tackled is the oversaturated deployment of police into communities of color.

Which brings me back to Brooklyn. This fall in the East New York section of Brooklyn, less than a mile from where I was harassed, the NYPD is opening its first stand-alone community center — a $10 million investment by the City of New York.

Now, positive police-community relations are a plus for any community, but it is not where we need to invest $10 million dollars in a community where in 2015, the rate of preterm births, a key driver of infant death, is the fourth highest in the city; the teen birth rate is higher than the city average; and the rate of elementary school absenteeism is eighth-highest in the city.

Social welfare is not a function of police training, nor is it a part of their corporate culture. More importantly, policing as a practice has a foundationally biased perspective of poor Black and Brown communities, and that is a truth we all should be honest enough to sit with.

The step after this acknowledgement is changed behavior. Listening followed by action.

Over the past year or so, I have been in roundtable conversations with a diverse array of actors in the criminal legal system. Organizers, directly impacted people, loved ones of the impacted, along with academics, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, elected officials, social workers, historians, cops, prison guards, and wardens — basically all the cogs in an irreformable and irreparable old steam engine.

The convenings are a part of a project that Bruce Western of the Columbia University Justice Lab called the “Square One Project.” The home page provokes the following scenarios:

Imagine neighborhoods soaring in education instead of arrests.

Imagine community groups leading the effort to end violence in our towns and cities.

Imagine a response to crime that brings communities together instead of breaking them apart.

The next Square One roundtable convening will take place in Detroit in October, and I also wonder, “can police imagine a community that does not rely on them as a dominant resource?”

In communities such as East New York and Ferguson, police-community relations are one problem of many: High unemployment, negative prenatal outcomes, bad water, dilapidated and unaffordable housing, and the list can go on. More of a police presence is not a solution to any of the above.

Emory University Sociologist Abigail Sewell asserts that “part of the solution may be to reduce police contact in the first place.” With that reduction can come abundant and sustainable investments in community-based organizations and individuals of expertise who reside in the projects and hang on the street corners — the community writ large.

Regulating the justifications for police use of deadly force is a commendable step in the right direction. The leap that communities like East New York need, however, is an investment in reducing the social determinants that give law enforcement the excuse to have a suffocating presence there.

Black and Brown neighborhoods do not need more overseers, or more state of the art smaller jails. We are capable of thriving without emphasis on our perceived criminality, and we are capable of taking care of ourselves, just like those in places like Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, or Carrol Gardens, once we are provided with the tools to deal with the tentacles of American racism, such as poverty, the distribution of money, and overpolicing. The “Seven Neighborhoods Study” produced by formerly incarcerated people in the 1990s found that there was a “direct connection between low income, racially isolated, underserved communities…and encounters with law enforcement that result in prison or death.”

Only time will tell whether the Act to Save Lives will have a measurable positive impact on police interactions with Black and Brown people. That new NYPD community center will come as a win for those focused on building a new paradigm for police-community relations.

But the academic and practitioner in me still thinks about Malcolm X, who famously said, “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They won’t even admit the knife is there.” I know that police harassment is an underlying and extralegal blade that can be wielded at any time in the name of progress.

Yes, it is less legal to be killed by police, but I still feel the knife.

Alex, a teacher in the Bay Area, says conditions in her school have been particularly bad this year; many buildings in the region are not designed for high heat, thanks to the historically temperate climate. Her classroom doesn’t have openable windows, so she uses a fan to try to suck air in from the cooler hallway, but it’s not enough.

“Students will ask to go to the bathroom more often just to get into the hallway where it’s cooler,” she told TalkPoverty. She said the heat makes students feel sluggish and unfocused, a problem particularly acute for young women in her class who struggle with body image, and stay tightly wrapped up even in high temperatures. “I also notice that I tend to run out of energy a lot faster on hot days.”

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Not ideal for a high school teacher trying to keep order in a classroom of 16-year-olds, even one who loves her job and is passionate about education.

This is a problem that’s only going to get worse due to the confluence of rising temperatures thanks to climate change — average temperatures in the U.S. could increase by as much as 12 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and have already risen several degrees since 1900 — and declining school funding. Schools that don’t overheat today are going to in the future.

Education budgets were cut deeply during the Great Recession and some states haven’t returned to their pre-Recession funding levels; capital spending across the country hasn’t recovered to pre-recession levels either. As a result, schools that urgently need temperature control updates along with other infrastructure improvements face an uphill struggle to increase their budgets.

Overheated classrooms aren’t just uncomfortable. They can actively inhibit health and learning. There’s a large body of evidence showing that air conditioning can improve student health and academic performance, and research as far back as 1984 on the effects of learning in a hot classroom.

A May 2018 paper found that a temperature increase of just one degree can reduce the amount learned over the course of the school year by 1 percent. The researchers estimate that around 30 percent of schools in the U.S. lack air conditioning, and that even within hot areas with widespread air conditioning penetration, kids in low-income schools are less likely to have access to have cooling at school.

They also argue systemic inequality can exacerbate this phenomenon among low-income students of color, who live in hotter regions and are more likely to attend schools without adequate temperature control.

Jisung Park, one of the researchers, said that, “What we’re finding is totally consistent with the last mile of the school desegregation movement not having been completed … the neighborhood-level disparities driven by residential wealth still very much hold true.”

Park, an environmental economist, is swift to note that simply installing air conditioning — itself a known contributor to climate change — is not the solution. Greening electric infrastructure, taxing carbon, and taking other measures to tackle climate change is key, he said.

So is investing in school infrastructure, including new buildings; maintenance to bring schools up to new standards; and retrofitting to help schools adapt, inside and out, to climate change. That must include rich and poor districts alike, or the inequalities they observe will perpetuate themselves.

An Oklahoma educator who works in a school with a high percentage of low-income black students sees the consequences of being housed in outdated school buildings without adequate resources firsthand. Her classroom can get up to 80 degrees, and it takes a noticeable toll on her students. “I’m trying,” overheated students will tell her. “I’m tired, it’s too hot in here.”

Her school actually has a climate control system, complete with thermostats in every classroom. But it is not well-maintained. It can take hours for the district to respond when teachers put in a request for help.

For one of her colleagues across the hall, that means suffocating in heat as high as 90 degrees until her class is relocated to a comparatively cooler spot. But, she says, in the state with some of the worst education funding in the country, there are so many things going wrong that overheated classrooms aren’t at the top of her list.

This isn’t just a problem indoors. It’s also an issue in the schoolyard. Schools serving low-income students tend to have less greenery, and that’s not just an aesthetic problem. Trees, shrubs, and other plants can help to control temperatures, including indoors, when they’re planted strategically to provide shade to a building’s hot spots.

The lack of shade also increases exposure to harmful UV radiation on the playground, setting kids up for future health inequalities. From the moment they walk into school for the first time, some students are set up for failure, with Park noting that access to greenery can improve temperature control, but also offer mental and physical health benefits.

Oklahoma is not the only state struggling with school infrastructure, from campus trees to sound roofs. Across the United States, kids are attending classes in outdated, poorly-maintained, inadequate, and sometimes unsafe buildings. Schools across the country are struggling with lead contamination. Environmental Protection Agency regulations govern schools that maintain their own water supplies, but not those using municipal water that may get contaminated on its way to the tap. Kids are overheating, and they can’t even drink the school’s water.

It will cost $200 billion nationwide to bring America’s schools into good condition.  But schools, especially low-income ones, face a funding crisis. They rely on property tax revenues alongside some state funding to fund capital improvements, pay teachers and staff, and cover the numerous other expenses associated with running a school. Wealthy districts have a larger tax base and more access to loans and bond issues, and consequently spend more; their students are more likely to attend class in appropriately-cooled classrooms, to drink from lead-free taps, and to have access to well-maintained amenities.

“Targeting school facility upgrades should be part of a long-overdue federal infrastructure bill,” said Park, “or an education reform package.” Modernizing, and installing, HVAC systems is not a trivial task. Failure to make these investments, however, will keep low-income children in the U.S. at a permanent, sweaty, disadvantage.

Editors’ note: By request, the teachers in this article have been anonymized.

But I’m not shocked. Luck has played more than a decade of high-level, year-round football both for the Colts and at Stanford University. He’s dealt with a litany of injuries more reminiscent of someone involved in a car crash than a professional athlete, including a concussion, a torn labrum, and a lacerated kidney. That’s likely why the players around him have, nearly unequivocally, understood his decision. At some point, career viability matters less than the freedom to live a normal life without pain. And so on a Saturday afternoon in the August preseason, at the snap of a finger, Luck short-circuited our fandom and was gone.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

What’s truly unusual about Luck isn’t the choice he made — it’s the fact that he had the freedom to make it. Luck is the son of former Houston Oilers quarterback and current XFL commissioner Oliver Luck, which at least theoretically means his extended family is not reliant on his NFL income. He’s a Stanford graduate, with a second career available to him if he chooses. Football might have needed Andrew Luck, but Andrew Luck doesn’t need football.

Most NFL players aren’t so — ahem — lucky. The majority have spent a good portion of their adolescent and adult lives perfecting physical skills to make a career out of football, sacrificing other opportunities to do so. In a 2011 survey, NCAA Division I football players reported an average of close to 40 hours a week of athletic activity in-season, double the NCAA’s own restriction on time spent in athletic activity. That means there was no time in college for labs, study sessions, or other enrichment that a normal student gets — all of which are important parts of determining a career path. As a result, the handful of players who manage to secure a career in professional football are left adrift once they are forced into retirement.

Even worse is the physical damage to players’ bodies. Luck’s injury list is the norm, not the exception. In the NFL, as long as you have four accredited seasons to your name, you’ll receive the same health care as current players for up to five years. That care comes with two issues. First, the average NFL career is about 3.3 years, meaning many players won’t qualify for that health care at all. Second, medical issues of former players can, and will, show up beyond that five year limit, leaving players on the hook for their own care. That’s particularly troubling given the new research around chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head injuries, which new studies estimate affects at least 10 percent of professional players. CTE is progressive and debilitating, but it often does not show symptoms until many years after the injuries that caused it.

The NFL may be great work if you can get it — the rookie minimum salary for the 53-man roster is $480,000 — but one has to reasonably ask: Is it worth it?

To answer that question, you also have to understand where the majority of NFL players come from, and what they look like. Today, more than half of all NFL players come from a county with a poverty rate higher than the national average. Nearly 70 percent of NFL players are African-American, and face a much higher likelihood of being in poverty than most demographic groups. The average household income for an African-American family hovers roughly around $40,000 a year, making NFL salaries particularly tempting. When a player is making the decision of whether an NFL career is worth the risk, it depends on who you ask and where they’re from.

In this context, it becomes pretty hard to fault Luck for stepping away from the game when he did. Hopefully, he will be able to heal his body and avoid the nagging injuries that plague many former players. Hopefully, he will find meaningful work that will allow him to take care of himself and his family. To step away from a career, a vocation, that you are passionate about is difficult no matter what it is, and for that Luck’s care and grace in the face of perplexity should be commended. But let’s not forget that Luck’s economic background and education allowed him to make a choice of passion, rather than a choice of need like so many others have to. And if we’re going to be shocked by anything in this whole saga, it should be that.

Turns out, the market for meatless options is well developed. Not only was I able to find Beyond Meat products such as sausages and hamburger patties at the local grocery store, but there are restaurants like Bareburger, which my son and I frequent, that have a vegan menu consisting solely of plant-based meals. Plus, Burger King now sells the Impossible Whopper, a plant-based version of its popular Whopper hamburger.

The Impossible Whopper doesn’t come as cheap as Burger King’s more traditional meat offerings: It’s $5.19, a dollar more than the regular Whopper’s $4.19.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

That dollar might not seem like a lot, but it is an important issue, since many choose a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle for health or moral reasons. (While the health benefits of a plant-based diet are unclear, it is true that it lowers your carbon footprint.) Making this choice shouldn’t be limited to those with higher levels of income and wealth, as pointed out by economist Dr. Rhonda Sharpe:

I had the @BurgerKing #ImpossibleWhopper for lunch. Yummy! Why are vegetarian meals so expensive.? I have coupons for 2 whopper combos for $8.99. I paid $9.58 for 1 #ImpossibleWhopper combo! When will we stop treating eating healthier as a luxury. pic.twitter.com/c7iJKhaUQb

— Rhonda V. Sharpe (@RhondaVSharpe) August 19, 2019

Economics tells us the prices of goods are determined by the supply and demand for that given product.  Demand for meat alternatives will not be decreasing anytime soon, so for costs to fall we need to see an increase in supply.

There’s reason to believe that will happen. While Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are the two pre-eminent firms in the industry, other well-established firms such as Nestle, Tyson, and Perdue are now looking to compete. Having large firms with extensive distribution networks should help lower the price as economies of scale already exist.

The higher prices of meatless options are due to the supply chains for the inputs, like proteins derived from peas, being less well established than the inputs for traditional meat options. Essentially, because the process of creating meat alternatives is so new, firms have not found efficient ways to produce it. As these manufacturers continue to expand and existing firms create more efficient supply chains, input prices should fall — leading to lower prices across the board.

However, we must be cautious about mergers and acquisitions in this industry. Established firms may acquire the new upstarts and not only keep prices high, but also chill research and development towards making improvements. There are tools in place to combat anti-competitive behavior, but they need strengthening.

And to be clear, meat alternatives aren’t only more expensive because they’re newer. Beef and other meats are cheaper because of government subsidies.

The other factor that may lower the costs of meatless options is the availability of the meals at restaurants, including fast food chains. Having several establishments compete should drive prices down. Several other fast food chains offer (in a limited capacity) meatless versions of their meals, such as White Castle’s Impossible Slider or Del Taco’s Beyond Taco.

Even with the expected decrease in the price of meatless options, though, there is the concerning problem on the availability of meatless options for communities that lack grocery store options. Meat alternatives are offered at traditional supermarkets, with Beyond Meat products such as burgers, sausages, and crumbles already available and Impossible Foods getting approval by the Food and Drug Administration to have its products in stores.

But this is not helpful for communities in food deserts, where there is limited access to supermarkets or grocery stores.

Food deserts are a problem in many communities, both urban and rural. For many low-income individuals, the only option for groceries are places like Dollar General or Dollar Tree.

Food deserts did not occur randomly, and in many cities are the outcome of systemic racism. The process of redlining, creating race-based maps to exclude African Americans from receiving federal housing loans, not only prevented African Americans from obtaining mortgages in certain neighborhoods, but redlining also diminished the incentive for firms like grocery stores to locate in predominantly African American neighborhoods.

The problem is not just availability but also accessibility, as many individuals in food deserts have transportation issues. There are programs to address these problems and meat alternatives should be a part of the solution. Whole Foods has started to locate their stores in neighborhoods like the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Further policies to combat the structural issues must address the underlying inequality that plagues low-income communities.

As I have discovered from a summer living as a (pseudo) vegetarian/vegan with my kid, there are so many flavorful and delicious options with a plant-based diet. This is available to me because I live in a neighborhood where I have many transit options to Bareburger and where my local grocery store carries Beyond Meat sausages. But the choice to eat a plant-based diet should not be determined by your location.

Unfortunately, it’s very real, and the root cause of many  of the problems in child welfare cases.

“Some people do phrase it as a conspiracy theory,” acknowledged Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. “When they say the government makes money on foster care, that’s not true … on foster care they still lose money, but they lose less money [than on reunification]. And private agencies do make money on foster care in many cases.”

In the United States, child welfare agencies are tasked with ensuring the health and safety of the nation’s children. Each agency receives a complex web of funding from federal, state, and local sources, leaving it accountable to a hodgepodge of authorities. Although these agencies are often referred to as “child protective services” and considered by many as a cohesive national program, state and local agencies are only linked by a loose set of federal guidelines that provide broad definitions for child maltreatment, along with the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA).

First enacted in 1997 under the Clinton administration, ASFA has undergone several rewrites, but its overarching purpose has remained steady: to ensure “timely permanency planning for children.” Part of the emphasis on “permanency” includes financial reimbursements for foster care programs, as well as adoption bounties, which are lump sums in the thousands paid to states for each child they successfully adopt out after a certain threshold.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

This starts with the Federal Foster Care Program (Title IV-E of the Social Security Act), which functions as an open-ended entitlement grant. There is no upper limit to the amount of funding that can be provided for eligible foster children each year. States receive reimbursements ranging from 50 cents to approximately 76 cents for each dollar spent on daily child care and supervision, administrative costs, training, recruitment, and data collection.

But when it comes to programs that support family reunification, the budget slims. Title IV-B of the Social Security Act, which governs federal reunification funding, includes a capped entitlement component and a discretionary component. So, unlike foster care funding, these dollars come with a set limit.

And that limited money isn’t all for reunification services. Title IV-B also includes provisions that allow for some of this funding to go toward foster care programs. A portion is also required to go toward adoption promotion.

The result of this imbalanced funding structure? The federal government spends almost 10 times more on foster care and adoption than on programs geared toward reunification.

One of the less-known sources of federal funding for child welfare programs is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF is supposed to be a cash-assistance program servicing low-income families with children, In reality, TANF funds can be used to support many services designed to help “needy” children, including child protection agencies. The result is that many states use TANF funds to finance foster care, child welfare investigations, and adoption or guardianship payments.

Because child welfare program data are self reported, it can be difficult to track exactly how each dollar is spent, but Wexler was able to identify eight states using TANF to pay for adoption subsidies, 23 states funding CPS investigations, 27 states funding foster care, and three states diverting TANF money to fund residential treatment facilities for child welfare involved children.

Considering that three-quarters of substantiated child maltreatment cases are related to neglect, which is often the result of poverty, it seems exceedingly unjust that funds supposedly intended to offset the worst effects of poverty are instead being used to finance the separation of mostly poor families.

Under ASFA, states are — with few exceptions — required to file for the termination of parental rights when a child has been in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months. In an attempt to curtail the infamous foster care hopscotch, which leaves children whose parents have lost their rights bouncing from foster home to foster home, the government created adoption payment incentives.

Adoption bounties range from $4,000 to $12,000 per child. As Wexler explained, “the harder the system deems the child to place, the higher the bounty.”

But in order to begin collecting that money, a state must exceed the last year’s number of adopted children, thus incentivizing states to permanently re-home an ever-increasing number of children each year. As can be expected, the number of adoptions increased in the five years after the implementation of ASFA, while reunifications declined. The Bush administration’s Adoption and Promotion Act of 2003 further codified this adoption bounty system by allocating $43 million yearly to states that succeed in increasing the number of adoptions from foster care.

Many states contract with private agencies that oversee out-of-home placements and service referrals for child welfare involved children. Said Wexler, “that agency will probably be paid for each day that child remains in foster care … So the private agency has an incentive to convince itself that the child really, really can’t go home and has to stay with them for a long, long time.”

What does this look like on the ground? Painfully delayed referrals to support services such as parenting classes and addiction treatment, judges hesitant to find fault with the way agencies and providers handle cases, and private agencies eager to deem parents unfit for reunification.

There have been some recent moves at the federal level aimed toward shifting some of these financial imbalances. The Family First Act, signed into law in 2018, now allows federal reimbursements for mental health services, evidence-based substance use treatment, and in-home parenting support. Its purpose is to create similar incentives for helping families stay together.

Unfortunately, the act does not support many of the common needs that lead to family separation, such as housing or child care support. And because the programs it does support must meet stringent requirements in order to be eligible for reimbursement, foster care and adoption subsidies continue to exceed reunification programs by the hundreds of millions.

Take the Great Recession, the economic plunge that followed the 2008 financial crisis. It cost those in the poorest 10 percent of Americans more than 20 percent of their incomes, which was more than twice the drop experienced by the richest 10 percent. It was black and Hispanic workers, as well as workers who didn’t have a college degree, who saw higher rates of unemployment and longer durations without a job than other workers.

Overall, the recession exacerbated already existing inequalities in wealth and income, with black and Hispanic families, as well as women, falling further behind their white, male counterparts in terms of asset building.

And the next recession could be even harder.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

It’s not because that next recession, whenever it arrives, will reach the depth and breadth of the Great Recession. Rather, it’s because federal and state governments have been undermining the programs that protect people when an economic downturn arrives, such as unemployment benefits or nutrition assistance, essentially since the Great Recession ended. This means those programs will be even less effective when they’re next called into action, making the next recession more painful than it would be otherwise.

These concerns are even more important now that there are some flashing red signs that a recession may come sooner than anyone would hope.

To start, nine states have cut the duration of their unemployment benefits systems to below the previously standard 26 weeks, with Florida cutting all the way down to 12. During the recession, when the average length of unemployment approached 40 weeks, more conscientious states extended benefits up to 99 weeks.

While five of the states that have cut unemployment benefits have rules in place to automatically expand benefits if the unemployment rate rises, the other four don’t. And since the conservatives who now control the Senate were against those Great Recession benefits expansions, there’s no guarantee of federal help if states do not act to fix their stingy systems.

Also, having a workable benefits system in place doesn’t necessarily ensure people get the help they need. In 2007, 35 percent of unemployed workers received benefits. Today, barely more than a quarter do due to the imposition of more stringent eligibility requirements. In some states it’s substantially worse: In 2017, for instance, just 10 percent of unemployed workers in North Carolina qualified.

So the main bulwark against poverty when mass unemployment occurs has been whittled down from a standard that even before the recent cuts left America among the least generous countries in the world.

Then there’s nutrition assistance. During the recession, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provided help to nearly 50 million people per month at its peak in December 2012. But the Trump administration — after trying and failing to convince Congress to cut the program — has unilaterally imposed new limits that are going to make it so the program reaches fewer people in the future.

One change, in particular, makes it harder for states to waive certain requirements during periods of high unemployment, which is exactly the time at which eligibility should be expanding.

The Trump administration is also providing waivers to states so that they can add work requirements to Medicaid – to date, six states have had their waivers approved. So when workers lose their jobs, and thus their employer-based health insurance, Medicaid will be that much harder to turn to.

Other steps state governments have taken will also make recession response harder. One of the fundamental problems during an economic downturn is that most states have balanced budget requirements, meaning they have to cut their budgets and suck money out of the economy at the precise moment households are doing the same thing, creating a vicious cycle of economic contraction. Education is a particular favorite for reductions; 12 states still aren’t spending as much on their education system today as they were before the Great Recession.

To deal with that reality, states have rainy day funds they are meant to deploy during rough times to counteract some of that budget slashing. However, about a third of states don’t have the money available in their funds to get through even a moderate downturn. Some of those states, such as Kentucky and Missouri, decided to lower tax rates for their wealthiest earners this year, which didn’t really help bolster those reserves.

Come an economic downturn, the federal government could step in to fill the void states create, just as it did during the Great Recession, providing aid so that states don’t have to, for instance, lay off as many teachers as they would otherwise. But there’s not much reason to believe conservatives in the U.S. Senate would be for that, either. So, an economic problem is going to collide with a political one, creating more pain for more people. (It doesn’t help that Republicans in Congress used $1.5 trillion on a tax cut for the rich and big corporations that had little economic effect, and will embolden those who think additional spending is impossible due to federal deficits and debt.)

Of course, there’s no divining whether a recession is imminent. It may be that the warning signs this time are just a false alarm. But another recession is going to come eventually. And when it does, it’s going to be more painful than necessary, not due to any innate economic condition, but because of choices policymakers made.

For low-income people, that experience isn’t just annoying. It can also be a real financial hardship. Mismatches between available funds and expenses can create a spiral of bank overdraft fees and denied transactions, and the deeper in someone gets, the more insurmountable it can feel.

“It’s very embarrassing,” a commenter told TalkPoverty, describing a day of being hit with three separate overdraft fees while waiting on  processing for a paycheck.

That’s something that could change as early as 2024 with a proposed real-time payments system recently announced by the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank. With FedNow, as it’s being called, funds could be moved any day, any time, nearly instantly.

The move is long overdue and has big implications for people who cannot afford to wait for a transaction to clear, such as the 1.8 million people earning minimum wage or less. A waiter making a tipped minimum wage, for example, can ill afford to deposit a paycheck and wait for it to clear with their rent deadline looming, and the technology already exists to fix the problem.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Real-time payments are used all over the world to move funds rapidly; they are a type of “faster payments,” which speed the payment process relative to the current standard, but they aren’t just faster. They are, as the name implies, virtually instant.

The United States, though, has remained stuck in the past with an outdated payments system created decades ago that doesn’t operate every day or at all times throughout the day.

In places such as Mexico, the U.K., Japan, Australia, and Turkey, both private firms and central banks own and operate faster payment systems — and in the U.S., a consortium of banks known as the Clearing House operates its own, called, creatively, RTP (for Real-Time Payments). RTP has been rolling out since 2017, and is open to all federally-insured financial institutions. The Clearing House claims RTP is active on 50 percent of direct deposit accounts in America, but the service’s initial customers were the same larger banks that make up the Clearing House.

These account for a large volume of American bank accounts, but a smaller segment of American banks; good for Chase, but perhaps not good for clients, especially since RTP controls pricing and access, potentially to the detriment of some users.

The Fed, building on the work of a task force formed to explore faster payments, wants to leverage its already extensive network of connections with banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions large and small. The goal is not to replace RTP, but to offer another option, and specifically a public one, which offers a net good and adheres to the government’s critical role in promoting fair access, pricing, and opportunity for all.

This is important because while the Clearing House has promised to hold rates steady, there’s no guarantee it will. Smaller banks are concerned about being cut out by what former Independent Community Bankers of America president and CEO Cam Fine described as a “monopoly.” Clearing House’s target date of 2020 for covering all direct deposit accounts in the U.S. is also likely unrealistic, while the Fed’s existing network and reach could make near-universal access much more logistically possible.

Fine notes that the Federal Reserve has been involved in payment processing for over 100 years; this is just another iteration of the central bank’s duties, a sentiment echoed by Chairman Jerome Powell.

Real-time settlement has big implications for businesses, especially small ones. But for low-income people, it could be transformative. Americans spend $24 billion in overdraft fees annually, some of which are driven by issues resolvable via faster payments; if there’s no lag between deposit and funds availability, there’s less likelihood of engaging in a transaction that will overdraw an account. If someone expects to get paid on Friday, the funds are instantly available, and they can pay their rent without worrying about a financial penalty.

People also spend about $7 billion on payday loans, which one in ten Americans have used. Real-time payments can’t wipe out the payday loan industry, but they can take a chunk out of it, since some of those loans are taken out in desperation by people who need money immediately, not after the time it takes for a bank to settle. Similarly, Americans spend approximately $2 billion cashing checks every year. That’s not just people who don’t have bank accounts; it includes people who can’t afford to wait for their accounts to clear.

That’s billions of dollars low-income people can ill-afford going into the pockets of companies with entire families of products built upon exploiting financial vulnerabilities.

Thomas Hoenig, former president of the Federal Reserve in Kansas City, former vice-Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and currently a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, notes that FedNow has another potential benefit as the system is built out: It could extend to other financial institutions such as remittance services. Immigrants sending money home through Western Union could therefore benefit from modernization to U.S. payments system, as a faster payments service in the United States can communicate with similar systems overseas, instantly transferring funds from senders to recipients.

Real-time payments will not fix issues like a federal minimum wage that hasn’t increased since 2009, repeated attacks on nutrition programs, and attempts at undermining unions. But they will help low-income people get, and move, their money faster, reducing the strain that comes from living paycheck to paycheck but not actually knowing when the funds in your paycheck will be accessible.

If passed, the new federal bill would also have far-reaching consequences that aren’t widely touted — including helping address America’s growing retirement crisis.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

As of 2013, nearly one in five Americans age 55 to 64 had zero retirement savings or pension. The crisis is much more acute for lower-income Americans: While nearly nine in 10 families in the top fifth of the income distribution have retirement account savings, fewer than one in 10 families in the bottom fifth do.

It’s not surprising, then, that seniors increasingly rely on Social Security’s very modest benefits, which make up 90 percent or more of the income of nearly one in four seniors — a share that rises to more than six in 10 for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale.

The yawning gap between the high pay of the rich and the stagnant or declining pay of the working and middle class is a key driver of the crisis: According to the Urban Institute, rising wage inequality means that today’s 45-year-olds in the bottom fifth of the lifetime earnings distribution will have 3 percent less retirement income than today’s seniors, 25-year-olds will have 6 percent less, and 5-year-olds will have 13 percent less. Meanwhile, for the richest fifth, annual retirement income will rise over time.

The amount a worker can afford to save for retirement is tied to her earnings, and the Urban Institute researchers find that raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to just $12 — below the $15 Congressional Democrats have proposed — would offset nearly 60 percent of the retirement income lost by the bottom fifth of today’s 25-year-olds, and nearly 40 percent lost by today’s 5-year-olds.

The minimum-wage bill’s impact would be especially profound on workers of color — particularly black workers, a full 40 percent of whom would get a raise. Black workers are paid much lower wages than their white counterparts, with the typical full-time, year-round black male worker earning just 70 percent of what a white male worker earns, while black women make just 61 percent. They also face a much more severe retirement crisis, exacerbated by systematic inequalities that hamper saving, prevent wealth-building, and inhibit upward mobility. Black Americans who are nearing retirement age have only about 10 percent as much wealth as whites in the same age group. Social Security benefits made up at least 90 percent of income for 46 percent of black seniors, compared to 35 percent of whites.

The low-wage, low-quality jobs disproportionately held by workers of color don’t pay enough to make ends meet — much less save — nor do many offer the tax-preferenced retirement accounts such as 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts (IRAs) that help build wealth. As a consequence of shorter life expectancy and lack of resources, many black men will die before they are able to retire.

This raise is a decade overdue: In 2019, a worker earning $7.25 per hour will lose nearly $2,600 compared to 2009 — when the federal minimum wage last went up — because inflation has eroded the wage’s purchasing power. A $15 minimum wage would also lift millions of Americans out of poverty, dramatically reduce spending on public assistance programs, and improve infant health. In just the last five years, 22 states and Washington, DC, have increased their minimum wages, at little or no cost to government and without the job losses conservative pundits claim will result.

Americans get it: In every single state, voters say want their state’s minimum wage to be higher than it currently is. By passing the Raise the Wage Act, Congress would rightly give voters what they’re demanding, and help address the retirement crisis at the same time.

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on Jan. 17, 2019. It has since been updated.

Thankfully, neither occurred, which is why I can write this column today as a free(ish) man. But those moments of having my name associated with the death penalty were surreal — like an out of body experience. My lawyer was speaking to me, but I couldn’t make sense of the fact that it was actually me that he was speaking to and about.

Even without the ultimate penalty, though, incarceration in America is still a civil death. It deprives individuals convicted of certain offenses of many of their legal rights. And one of its most pernicious effects is felony disenfranchisement.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

During my 10 years in the penitentiary and five years on post-release supervision (a.k.a. parole), I was disenfranchised by the state of New York. For 15 years, I was civically dead for a crime that I committed at 19 years old, as part of a penalty that dates back centuries.

Forty-eight of the 50 U.S. states prevent full voting rights to some segment of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations. Overall, more than 6 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, with Florida alone counting for more than one quarter of that total. One in 13 black adults is disenfranchised due to a criminal conviction.

Recently, Florida voters approved an initiative that would have enfranchised that state’s voters with felonies, who were previously permanently barred from voting. The legislature then partially overturned the initiative, requiring that those who had regained the right to vote first pay all of their back court fees — a barrier that will continue to deny the ballot to many.

But that’s not the story everywhere. Maine, Vermont, and Puerto Rico are the only places in the U.S. where there are no restrictions on voting for people with felonies, inside or out of prison. Massachusetts was a part of this exclusive club until 2000, as was Utah until 1998.

But, why? Quite simply, those states never implemented laws that would deny incarcerated people that right. (Though in Vermont at least, there have been challenges to the state’s stance on suffrage for incarcerated persons, which has been in place since the 1790s.)  Leaders from both states, regardless of their political ideology, offer similar reasoning. Mike Donohue, a spokesman for the Vermont Republican Party said, “The last thing we want to do is start putting up insurmountable barriers to participation in civic life because someone may have been convicted of a crime.”  In Maine, meanwhile, former state prison warden Randall A. Liberty believes that, “it’s a basic American right to be able to vote for your elected officials … regardless of their offense.” Liberty’s beliefs, in particular, are supported by former Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote in a 1958 majority opinion that “Citizenship is not a right that expires upon misbehavior.”

But citizenship is also racialized in America, making this simple-sounding tale about civic responsibility and citizenship more complicated. Vermont is 96 percent white and Maine is 95 percent white, ranking them first and second as the whitest states in the country.

According to Ashley Messier of ALCU Vermont’s Smart Justice, who served time in a Vermont prison, “it’s easy for a 96 percent white state to allow its residents to vote.”  Civil death is less acceptable when the subject of the penalty is white.

That assertion should not surprise us, because since the incorporation of this country, the United States government had explicitly denied suffrage to anyone not white and male, whether through explicit law or reigns of terror. Only since the passing of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920 and the civil rights movement that took place just 50 years ago has there been concerted action to reverse electoral oppression in America. That fight continues today, with the passing of Amendment 4 in Florida, and efforts such as the bill recently introduced in Washington, D.C., which would allow incarcerated people to vote.

In the case of Puerto Rico, the constitution there guarantees the right to vote for every person over 18 years of age (though, to be clear, they have no meaningful representation in the U.S. Congress). Interestingly, Puerto Rico is also significantly racially homogenous, with more than 80 percent of its population identifying as white, though mostly of Spanish origin.

Suffrage for incarcerated populations is a moral imperative. Many other countries allow for incarcerated people to vote, and the 48 states that currently deny that right should follow suit.

As a formerly incarcerated person, I can attest to caring deeply about education, safety, health care, and immigration while I was serving my time. A prison sentence does not disqualify you from caring about the community in which you once lived. Prison should not equate to a relinquishing of the civic right and duty to inform the policies that will impact your daughter, son, or elderly parents.

In an article I wrote for The Nation, I documented the concerns of incarcerated men during the 2008 presidential election. One of the men wanted then president-elect Barack Obama to pay attention to the “shrinking middle class and health care.” Another wanted him to pay attention to “the state of the economy and implement a sound economic plan that will take the country of its current recession.”

The inconvenient truth, though, is that it is easier for the American public to ignore policies that have disproportionately negative impacts on people of color.

The general public probably thinks it’s a no-brainer that people in prison cannot vote, if they’ve ever thought about the issue at all. In part, that’s due to the tough on crime rhetoric that has permeated American politics since the days of Richard Nixon. This conditioning is racist in conceptualization and practice.

But it is time to challenge that conditioning. Theoretically, people go to prison as punishment, not to be punished. Civil death is contrary to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.”

The 2.2 million people in America’s jails and prisons were not sentenced to civil death and should be allowed to inform the communities in which their loved ones still live. Neither race nor the narrative that people in prison do not deserve the right to exert their full humanity should be the factors that prevent their enfranchisement.

Numerous law enforcement officials, prosecutors, lawmakers and local media outlets have been strong opponents of the elimination of cash bail, which is the payment required from a defendant in return for being released from jail as they await trial. The fiercest resistance to change has come from the powerful for-profit bail bond industry.

This $2 billion industry, which makes most of its earnings by exploiting low-income defendants stuck in desperate situations by shaking them down for steep and sometimes illegal fees in return for a loan that can be used to pay bail, has been using misinformation and fear tactics to combat cash bail reforms. One industry group even posted on Facebook that reforming the cash bail system means “every night is purge night,” an allusion to the popular horror films in which crime is legalized.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

However, the results are in from the long-awaited criminal justice report by New Jersey’s Administrative Office of the Courts, and it’s clear that the Garden State did not devolve into lawless chaos because of bail reform. Instead, crime rates in New Jersey have been plummeting ever since the reforms were implemented in 2017, with violent offences such as homicide and robbery down by more than 30 percent.

The report proves that concerns about large numbers of defendants committing crimes while released and failing to show up for trial were unwarranted. State court officials say that the differences before and after the state’s bail reform are statistically insignificant — there was a 3.3 percentage point increase in the number of defendants who failed to appear in court, and a 1 percentage point increase in the number of defendants who were charged with a new crime while released and awaiting trial. The report states that that “because of certain challenges in compiling data from 2014, small changes in outcome measures should be interpreted with caution and likely do not represent meaningful differences.”

The positive impacts are much more noteworthy. According to a statement by Superior Court Judge Glenn A. Grant, acting administrative director of the New Jersey courts, “New Jersey’s jail population looks very different today than it did when the idea of reforming the state’s criminal justice system first took hold.” The state’s overall pretrial population, which consists of detainees who have not been charged with a crime, has declined by 44 percent. That amounts to 6,000 fewer people incarcerated in 2018 compared to 2012.

This means that thousands of defendants who have not been convicted of a crime and are presumed innocent under the law will be free to remain with their families and their community while they await their day in court. Under the previous system, low-income defendants would see their lives fall apart as they lost their job, housing, or even their children simply because they could not afford to pay bail.

On the other side of the spectrum, violent yet wealthy defendants will no longer be able to use their resources to walk free when facing serious charges such as sexual assault or armed robbery, while low-income defendants facing minor charges such as possession of marijuana remain locked up. According to a statement by the Drug Policy Alliance’s New Jersey State Director Roseanne Scotti, all this proves “that New Jersey’s historic bail reform law has been a resounding success.”

It is important to note that these reforms are not a panacea. The report reveals that although the state’s jail population is dropping, “the overrepresentation of black males in the pretrial jail populations remains an area in need of further examination.” In a press release, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey mostly praised the reforms but added that “a system that reduces the number of incarcerated people but does not improve racial disparities is simply not good enough. We intend to continue our advocacy efforts to reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system.”

Although more work needs to be done to address these racial disparities, New Jersey’s reforms have been successful enough to inspire other states, including California, New York, Texas, Illinois, and Alaska. The bail bond industry has also declared war on those efforts.

The report’s findings are “an absolute refutation of the bail industry’s scare tactics” said Alexander Shalom, senior supervising attorney at the New Jersey chapter of the ACLU, in an email. “They had warned that a virtual elimination of money bail would result in no one appearing in court and massive crime increases. That we’ve seen 6,000 fewer people jailed and virtually no increase in court nonappearance or re-arrest rates debunks that myth.”

In New Jersey, concerns about a crime explosion turned out to be nothing but fearmongering. It is now up to the rest of the nation to follow suit by looking at the facts, ignoring the bail industry’s scare tactics and taking steps to create a just, safe, and nondiscriminatory bail system.

But targeting walkers doesn’t do anything to address the actual problem: that roads and sidewalks aren’t safe and accessible for all users. Instead, what this enforcement does is punish vulnerable people, contribute to an already-existing social mentality that blames pedestrians for their own demises, and send a clear message that safe streets are only a priority for people who drive.

According to the Detroit Free Press, Kalamazoo, Detroit, and Warren, the Michigan cities that participated in the pedestrian enforcement campaign, targeted jaywalkers — in particular, those who failed to cross streets at an intersection, who failed to follow traffic signals, who didn’t walk on the sidewalk, who didn’t walk facing traffic when on a roadway, and who didn’t yield to vehicle traffic with the right of way.

In order for traffic to flow smoothly and for people to stay safe, it is reasonable to expect everyone to follow the rules of the road. But when the road isn’t made for you, those rules can be tricky to follow, and in fact, even when they are followed to a T, walkers and bikers are no match for a two-ton vehicle whose driver is unaware of how to share the road with pedestrians — or simply doesn’t care.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

From 2008-2017, according to a report from the Governor’s Highway Safety Association, pedestrian deaths increased by 35 percent. In 2018, the report estimated that there were 6,227 pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. —  the highest number since 1990.

When bicyclists are included, those figures are even higher. And unlike motor vehicle fatalities, which are declining, pedestrian and bicycle fatalities are increasing.

The report cites things such as population growth and the shift in vehicle-buying from passenger cars to SUV’s as major factors that contribute to pedestrian fatalities. As city populations grow and as pedestrian commuters increase, car-centric street designs are increasingly dangerous.

Enforcing fines on pedestrians doesn’t fix these issues, it just sends an overt message that streets aren’t for pedestrians; they’re solely for people who drive. Meanwhile, it’s low-income people who are least likely to own a car and to have to walk on unsafe roads.

In addition, in communities that have targeted pedestrians with citations, trends have shown that marginalized people are the most impacted. For instance, in December of 2017, ProPublica reported that in Jacksonville, Florida, black pedestrians were disproportionately targeted with pedestrian tickets. Not only did black pedestrians there receive more tickets (55 percent of tickets went to black people even though they make up only 29 percent of the city’s population), they also were most affected by driver’s license suspension for failure to pay those tickets. A similar trend was noted in Seattle.

But there are alternatives, such as developing Complete Streets policies, which are designed to make streets safe for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, car drivers, and transit riders of all abilities. The model focuses on reducing pedestrian risk by placing physical barriers between cars and pedestrians, redesigning intersections and sidewalks, and modifying traffic flow. More than 1,400 Complete Streets policies have been passed in the United States. That figure includes 33 states that have adopted some form of a statewide policy.

However, that doesn’t mean those communities and states have full and adequate protections for pedestrians and bicyclists. A Complete Streets Atlas shows large swaths of the U.S. without any Complete Streets model at all, and of those that have adopted some policies, most do not have full bike and walking path protections.

Redesigning streets to accommodate all users requires traffic studies, planning, and redesigning, all of which come at a cost. But when cities are grappling with high rates of pedestrian casualties, they should invest time and money in that crisis. The Michigan cities that participated in the week-long enforcement period targeting pedestrians were each awarded grants to cover overtime for their police officers. Instead of investing in addressing the structures that lead to pedestrian casualties, they took the short-term, punitive approach — an investment that could never produce the kinds of benefits that structural changes to road design could.

In the mid-1980s, Florida adopted a statute requiring that roadway design accommodate walkers and bicyclists from the beginning. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that in the three decades following, more than 3,500 lives were saved as a result, with pedestrian lives among the most likely to be saved.

Other cities have not only implemented ordinances that protect pedestrians; they center their enforcement of those ordinances on drivers. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, an ordinance requires drivers to stop for a pedestrian approaching a crosswalk. This is more stringent than the state requirement that a driver stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk. The city did targeted enforcement of the ordinance between 2017 and 2018, and during that time police issued more than 800 tickets to motorists who violated the city’s pedestrian law.

As much as our culture loves to blame the victims, pedestrians aren’t responsible for their own demise. Still, following each pedestrian accident, the comment stream centers blame on the victim. “Why were they crossing there?” “Were they wearing bright vests?” Instead of focusing on the structural problem of roads with increasingly heavy and fast-moving traffic or the lack of safe pedestrian paths, the culture at large points fingers at the road users who are most in danger. Ticketing pedestrians reinforces this norm.

But punishing pedestrians won’t change the stark reality that walkers, wheelchair users, and bikers must navigate spaces that weren’t designed for them to maneuver safely. Municipalities must grapple with this safety crisis and recognize that punishing those who are most in danger while using the road isn’t the answer; safer streets are.

Next week, the Pennsylvania state legislature is scheduled to vote on whether to continue funding a program that helps around 6,600 residents make ends meet. The program, called General Assistance, is being targeted by the majority-Republican legislature as part of its bigger plan to dismantle an array of programs that help struggling Pennsylvanians get by. If they succeed, General Assistance will be eliminated effective July 1 of this year.

While it serves a relatively small population, General Assistance is a meager but critical lifeline for its participants. The benefit amount — up to $205 per month for an individual — might not seem like much, but the majority of participants are single adults who cannot work or have no other income whatsoever. Around 90 percent have disabilities. Participants include individuals in substance use disorder treatment, survivors of domestic violence, and adults caring for nonrelative children. And, importantly, beneficiaries are often ineligible for other public benefit programs because they don’t have dependents.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Many rely on General Assistance to serve as their only income while they await determinations on applications for Social Security disability benefits, which can take months and even years to process. Recipients indicate that they use the funds for essentials including rent, transportation, toiletries, and medical co-pays.

Recognizing the unique importance of General Assistance, Gov. Tom Wolf (D-PA) wants the program to continue to be funded at its current level of about $50 million — less than 2 percent of the state’s budget — in the coming fiscal year. But, predicting that the legislature will kill the program, he is also proposing to reinvest the money into the Pennsylvania Housing Affordability and Rehabilitation Enhancement Fund, or PHARE.

PHARE provides funding to build, rehabilitate, and support affordable housing throughout the state, some of which is allocated for households earning below 50 percent of area median income. Increasing housing affordability for low-income Pennsylvanians is extremely important, but Wolf’s office acknowledges that the two programs simply do not serve the same populations or purposes.

Eliminating General Assistance and reallocating its funds to PHARE will not mean that every current General Assistance participant receives access to affordable housing. A percentage would, but it would likely be a small one, based on the allocation of just $50 million and the fact that not all PHARE housing is for the lowest-income renters. Meanwhile, many of the General Assistance participants who don’t get housing would be left with no income.

Pitting these two essential programs against each other presents a false choice between basic necessities and housing development and affordability. Instead of robbing Peter to pay Paul, both programs should be adequately funded to help people meet housing and other basic needs.

Alas, there is good reason to expect the legislature will get its way. Six years ago, the Republican-controlled state legislature acted to eliminate General Assistance, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reinstated the program on a technicality, after finding that the legislature hadn’t followed certain required procedures. This time around, the legislature has learned from its mistake and knows exactly how to legally eliminate the program.

The Wolf administration still has time to push back. And for the well-being of the lowest-income Pennsylvanians, it should take up the fight.

An Instagram story from a low-pain day or a Facebook post with an old photo might be used against an applicant for disability benefits, a change from the status quo where the agency only looks at social media in cases of suspected fraud. Thanks to a New York Times story suggesting a tiny line item in the agency’s 2019 fiscal year budget overview will turn into a real policy, the disability community is very worried.

All this for an agency with a “fraud incidence rate that is a fraction of one percent.”

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

The proposed expansion of social media monitoring for the nearly 20 million Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income recipients would have several negative effects, among them that disability activists who organize and build community online may be hesitant to do so. It will also feed directly into myths about Social Security fraud that have been wildly overstated in media coverage, such as a 2017 Washington Post series or a 2013 NPR feature package that made it seem as though “undeserving” people were lining up for disability benefits. (The average monthly benefits are under $1,300; being on disability is hardly a profitable endeavor.)

Proposals like this one underscore the common belief that everyone applying for disability is fake until proven otherwise. “I hate the assumption that everyone’s lying just because they need help,” said Rachel Graves, a member of the chronic illness community who receives disability and private insurance coverage, and who is already very cautious about her online presence. Graves is well aware that social media is used to police disabled people online by the government and insurance companies, as well as the general public, who are all seeking out disabled people who don’t “look sick.”

In response to the news, Mila Johns, who has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, deleted her Facebook account and plans to scale back on Twitter: “It seemed like too big of a risk to take by continuing to engage in social media. Because we don’t know how it’s going to be used.” Johns relies on communities found through sites like Facebook and Twitter to connect with people who share her diagnosis. “[Social media is] a lifeline for so many people,” she said, but she’s preparing an application for disability benefits, and she’s worried about what examiners might find, and judge.

The internet is valuable for outreach and advocacy, but also activism. Online organizers have used social media to fight attacks on the Affordable Care Act, organize in defense of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and engage in solidarity actions with other marginalized communities. Disabled advocates such as Imani Barbarin, creator of hashtags such as #AbledsAreWeird and #ThingsDisabledPeopleKnow, and Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project and one of the co-partners of #CripTheVote, rely on social media for their work.

Images of disabled protesters went viral in 2017 during the fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act. Those same protesters now get to worry about whether those pictures will be used against them to deny or revoke disability benefits; if you’re well enough to occupy the halls of Congress, surely you’re not “really disabled.”

The agency already has an entire trained investigative division that focuses on preventing fraud before it even happens, in addition to following up on complaints about current beneficiaries. It also uses predictive analytics software to flag suspicious activity among both applicants for and current recipients of disability benefits. (Like other uses of predictive algorithms, this has dangerous implications, requiring applicants and recipients to submit to the surveillance state’s collection and use of their data. Algorithmic bias is also a significant concern.)

Now, in addition, the new proposal would allow thousands of front-line “disability adjudicators” all across the country to conduct their own fraud investigations using social media data. These are the staff charged with determining whether a claimant meets the agency’s stringent criteria for disability benefits.

On average, they are not very accurate.

In 2016, disability adjudicators approved 33 percent of initial disability applications and denied the other 67 percent. Claimants whose applications are denied have the right to appeal and have their case heard by an administrative law judge. After waiting one to two years to have their appeals decided, 46 percent of claimants are ultimately found to be disabled by Social Security.

In other words, nearly half of the people whom disability adjudicators rule as not disabled are actually determined to be disabled when they have their day before a judge.

In this climate, it’s easy to understand why disabled people might be afraid, and the consequences of curtailing social media engagement can be immediate and painful. “It is so isolating being really sick, especially when you have something unusual enough that you don’t know anyone else who has it. To find someone like you can make you feel less lonely,” said Graves.

The proposal also aligns with a long history of claiming that programs like SSDI and SSI are rife with “fraud.” For those concerned about fraudulent applications, the Social Security Administration maintains a fraud hotline and encourages not only workers, but also law enforcement and members of the general public, to report suspected disability fraud, in a “see something, say something” approach that encourages people to inform on each other.

This is the dangerous crux of the proposal: It will have a silencing effect on disability advocates at a time when they have won several high-profile victories with the assistance of online organizing, such as helping to prevent the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Expanding the use of social media in disability determinations could become punitive in nature, with poorly-trained adjudicators dealing with large caseloads making snap judgments about applicants, particularly those with outspoken political leanings. Disability activists who don’t “look disabled” or have variable experiences of disability, such as part-time wheelchair users, could pay a high price for leading public lives.

The proposal can be operationalized administratively, without Congressional action, though Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have expressed concerns about it. But it will make the internet less safe — especially for people like Johns who are primarily or entirely homebound and use it as a vital tool for participating in society. And it will make organizing harder for a fractured community that’s currently relying on the internet to help with the fight against dangerous, disablist policy proposals on the state and federal level.

Sensing a Trump-selected Federal Communications Commission Chair would be more open to creating corporate behemoths, and with the threat of “falling behind” on 5G wireless technology in hand, the two firms are taking another crack at the deal. A decision from the FCC is expected sometime this year. (In an attempt to ensure a better result this time, T-Mobile has taken to spending a lot of money at the Trump hotel in D.C.)

The average American is at no less risk from the merger this time around, but if it’s approved the fallout will hit low-income Americans especially hard.

In the words of the economists hired by T-Mobile and Sprint to defend the merger, low-income individuals “more heavily rely on their smartphone for their communications and media consumption,” and therefore will have little choice but to swallow any price increases following the merger. Commenting on the potential impact on low-income individuals at a recent hearing, Phillip Berenbroick of Public Knowledge said the combined firm “will have the power and incentives to raise prices on consumers who are reliant on that connection and have nowhere else to go.”

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

This is especially concerning given T-Mobile and Sprint’s customers are more likely to be black, Hispanic, and low-income when compared to AT&T or Verizon. In a sense, T-Mobile’s economists were saying the quiet part loud: the “New T-Mobile” would have the ability to raise prices, and knows that they have a vulnerable group of consumers who would be forced to absorb those increases.

Almost all mergers come with worries about whether the merged corporation will increase prices — a concern that is increasingly supported by empirical analysis. Fewer competitors means consumers have fewer alternatives when their provider decides to throw an extra zero on the end of their bill. What’s more, competitors in concentrated markets tend to get cozier with each other, and thus less likely to compete on price in the first place.

Evidence from Austria, the Netherlands and Canada show that the move from four to three firms in the wireless space can lead to drastically higher prices. In Austria, smartphone consumers saw their phone bills rise 50 to 90 percent following the 2012 “four-to-three” merger of H3G Austria and Orange Austria.

The thrust of T-Mobile and Sprint’s argument for the merger is that less is more: They claim that the number of choices for a wireless provider isn’t going down from four to three, but actually going up from two to three. In their telling, T-Mobile and Sprint are the underdogs up against Verizon and AT&T, which hold a combined 70 percent of the wireless market.

But there is a real threat of reduced choice and increased prices that low-income Americans would disproportionately bear.

Although they are smaller players in the overall wireless market, T-Mobile and Sprint play an outsized role in the way many low-income Americans access telecommunications services. The combined firm would hold a 59 percent share of the prepaid wireless market, comprised mainly of low-income Americans unable to qualify for the credit checks required for postpaid plans. This kind of market share would reduce competitive options for the 97 million consumers who depend on prepaid plans and give the “New T-Mobile” immense power in setting prices across the market.

There is currently vigorous price competition for prepaid customers between T-Mobile and Sprint, which would evaporate as soon as the merger was approved. In evaluating the potential harms of the merger, economists submitting comments to the Federal Communications Commission estimated “New T-Mobile” could raise prepaid prices by as much as 15 percent.

Beyond their reliance on prepaid wireless plans, low-income individuals are also more likely to rely solely on wireless service for internet. T-Mobile’s hired economists noted that “consumers with higher incomes may be more likely to offload to wi-fi or to consume media … through a broadband connection,” but low-income consumers are more likely to be “cord-cutters,” who are unable to afford multiple modes of connectivity. In 2018, Pew research found that low-income Americans were three times as likely as high-income Americans to own a smartphone while having no home internet connection.

This suggests that while higher-income consumers would be able to shift the type of internet they are using if prices rise, low-income consumers will not have the same option.

The merger is also a threat to the Lifeline Program, which provides access to phone service for nearly 13-million low-income households. Originally introduced in 1985, Lifeline was dramatically expanded and updated during the Obama administration to reflect the importance of wireless connectivity for low-income households. Crucially, Lifeline depends on the willingness of participating carriers to offer the discounted service, which is subsidized by telecom user fees.

As it stands, Sprint is one of the only remaining widespread wireless providers for Lifeline; T-Mobile only offers the program in nine states and Puerto Rico. If the combined entity decides to follow T-Mobile’s lead in its approach to the program, its availability and relevance to low-income Americans could be seriously compromised.

Despite claims to the contrary, the proposed merger of T-Mobile and Sprint has no less potential to be damaging to American consumers than in 2014, when regulators made it clear that such a deal would not be allowed. Evidence suggests a wireless telecommunications market comprised of three giants would be disastrous for low-income consumers at a time when wireless connectivity is increasingly critical for everyday life. An increased phone bill is not simply an inconvenience, but a major barrier to their ability to connect with the world.

Here’s the tl;dr:

A first bill, introduced at the end of January by Sen. Bob Casey, and Reps. Bobby Scott and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, would phase out section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which has made it legal for employers to pay disabled workers as little as pennies per hour. It would also provide resources to help these workers transition into competitive, integrated employment in their communities.

Second, Congressional Democrats’ $15 federal minimum wage bill, the Raise the Wage Act — introduced in mid-January by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Bobby Scott with the backing of the full Democratic leadership — would also eliminate the subminimum wage for workers with disabilities and phase out the separate subminimum wage for tipped workers, which is currently $2.13 per hour.

In the first week of February, Sen. Kamala Harris and Rep. Raúl Grijalva introduced the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, which would extend time-and-a-half overtime pay to agricultural workers, as well as minimum-wage protections to most agricultural workers who still lack them.

Finally, Sen. Harris and Rep. Pramila Jayapal recently announced the first-ever federal domestic workers’ bill of rights, which would give the nation’s more than 2 million home care workers long-denied rights to overtime pay, safety and health protections, recourse against harassment and discrimination, collective bargaining, and more.

This legislation is designed to chip away at several pernicious “-isms” written into the United States’ labor law — racism, sexism, and ableism.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Many labor carve-outs are the direct legacy of slavery: At the urging of Southern lawmakers determined to maintain a white economic and social hierarchy, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) — which established some of our most basic worker protections like the rights to form a union, earn a minimum wage, and receive overtime pay — cut out domestic and agricultural workers, who were overwhelmingly black and brown. At the same time, the discriminatory practice of tipping — which had originally enabled American employers to avoid paying wages to newly-freed black workers — and treating disabled workers as inferior permanently codified some forms of labor as lower-than-minimum-wage work.

As a result, workers in these groups tend to have a lot less power than other workers. For starters, the pay isn’t enough to keep workers out of poverty even if they have a full time job: In recent years, the median annual wage has been roughly $23,000 for tipped workers*, home care workers, and agricultural workers, and an estimated 420,000 disabled workers employed in “sheltered workshops” created under 14(c) were paid an average of $2.15 per hour. These groups of workers are also disproportionately likely to endure physical and verbal abuse, sexual harassment, wage theft, discrimination, and dangerous working conditions.

Yet these unprotected jobs make up a large and growing swath of our economy: Caregiving is the fastest-growing major occupation in the United States, and is forecast to be one of the largest sectors by the end of the next decade, with more than 4.1 million workers employed as home health aides and personal care aides by 2026. The largest employer of tipped workers, the restaurant industry, accounts for 9.5 million workers, which is nearly seven percent of the U.S. workforce. Since these jobs are heavily dominated by women and workers of color, their devaluation perpetuates America’s already-deep inequalities on the basis of race, gender, and disability. The Trump administration has further endangered the many immigrant workers in these professions — who made up 24 percent of domestic workers and 76 percent of farm workers in recent years — by pushing anti-immigrant policies and using xenophobic language that make it even less likely that immigrant workers will seek recourse for illegal or inhumane treatment.

Opponents will likely break out the usual fearmongering that closing loopholes will harm rather than help workers by making it harder to find jobs, like we’ve recently seen in D.C., New Jersey, and Maine. The problem with their argument is simple: States have already enacted these policies and seen positive results. In the eight states where tipped workers are paid the full minimum wage, tipped workers earn more and restaurant growth has outpaced other states. States such as New Hampshire and Maryland are already phasing out the subminimum wage for disabled workers, while eight states and Seattle already have domestic workers’ bills of rights in place. And in several states, including agricultural powerhouses California and Minnesota, farm workers have won overtime protections.

Lawmakers’ proposed fixes are by no means perfect. Perhaps the most egregious untouched loophole affects America’s more than 800,000 incarcerated workers, who earn as little as a few cents per hour — or nothing at all — and for whom labor is compulsory in some states. Also excluded are the roughly 1 in 8 workers in so-called “alternative work arrangements,” including independent contractors (ICs) as well as workers whose employers misclassify them as ICs to avoid taxes and legal requirements, such as Uber and Lyft drivers. Still, even if they’re imperfect and eight decades overdue, the proposed fixes are an important steps forward.

It’s no accident that the champions of these efforts in Congress are largely women and people of color, who come from the communities that have borne the brunt of these exclusionary policies. And it’s encouraging that some lawmakers believe that in addition to big, bold ideas, being a true progressive leader involves unglamorous, piecemeal grunt work, such as plugging the longstanding leaks in the nation’s labor laws. As long as the loopholes continue to exist, the shameful “isms” that create our two-tiered society will continue to stare us down through the holes of our frayed worker protection system.

* The most recent analysis of tipped workers’ wages nationwide, by Sylvia Allegretto and David Cooper, uses 2011-2013 BLS data in 2013 dollars. We assume that median wages have grown at roughly the pace of inflation, adjusting to today’s dollars using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers.

Today, thanks to the efforts of local advocates led by the NJ Time to Care Coalition, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed into law dramatic improvements to New Jersey’s paid family leave law. The law doubles the length of paid family leave available to 12 weeks, increases the average weekly benefit to $859 from $632, improves supports for domestic violence survivors and their families, and more.

One of the most exciting policy advances is that the bill updates the definition of “family” to people who “have a close association with the employee which is the equivalent of a family relationship,” making New Jersey the first state in the nation to extend paid family leave benefits to chosen family. This new law will particularly improve the economic security of workers who are LGBTQ or who have a disability, as these workers are most likely to be forced to make the impossible choice between caring for a chosen family member and taking home a paycheck.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

New Jersey’s victory is standing on the shoulders of decades of legal precedent. The U.S. government first recognized chosen family during Vietnam, allowing federal workers to take leave for the funerals of loved ones killed in combat if those people had “a close association with the employee … equivalent to a family relationship.” More federal benefits incorporated this definition in the 1990s, and in the last few years a host of states and localities, such as Arizona, Chicago, and Austin, have passed paid sick time laws that are inclusive of chosen family.

What is chosen family anyway? Simply put, it’s those people in your life you would do anything for. For me, one of those people is my college roommate, Diana. When my mom had a potentially fatal cerebral hemorrhage the month before finals our senior year, Diana dropped everything and drove with me nine hours to the hospital. When Diana’s son was born prematurely at just 24 weeks, I took time off work to help support her and her family. Diana and I have been family for more than 20 years — longer than I’ve known my husband, my stepmother, or any of my nieces and nephews — but until now no state in the country would have let us take paid family leave to take care of each other.

And Diana and I aren’t alone — millions of people across the country have an elderly neighbor who is more like a grandmother or a battle buddy they served with in the military. In fact, research Laura Durso and I conducted shows nearly one in three Americans have taken time off work to care for chosen family. While caring for chosen family is a shared experience, it is especially common among LGBTQ workers and workers with disabilities, due in part to family rejection, making this advance particularly important for those communities.

While this bill makes New Jersey a trailblazer on paid family leave and chosen family, this is the latest step for the movement to increase recognition of the importance of supporting diverse family structures in legislation. Historically, of course, diverse families have always existed, but the law has at best ignored them and at worst actively harmed them, from denying cash benefits to unmarried mothers to defining marriage as a union limited to one man and one woman. While harmful family policies still exist, increasing legal recognition of chosen family is a bright light.

Of course, these legal changes were not happening in a vacuum. In the media, chosen family rose to the spotlight as the name of Noreen Stevens’ cartoon about Canadian lesbians and their loved ones, and is in evidence today on FX’s award-winning Pose, about New York City ball culture, as well as in media that isn’t queer-specific. (X-Men or Fast and the Furious, anyone?) And more to the point, it’s the reality of people’s lives, perhaps made most painfully, tragically clear during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when chosen family were denied visitation rights in hospitals despite their family-like relationships.

New Jersey has made a great start. Who’s next?

This is the third time the government has shut down in the last year and — unless President Donald Trump drops his demand for a border wall — everything from the national parks to the National Science Foundation could be closing up shop again on Feb. 16.

In the face of all that, America’s federal workers are thinking twice about their careers — and that’s bad for workers and the country.

Historically, the federal government (and public service writ large) has been a pretty good place to work. Not only does it allow people to serve their country (which many are keen on), it is the kind of quality job that all people should have. There is stability. There are retirement benefits. There is health care. There is paid leave. There is pay transparency. There is a union.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Due in large part to the fact that the federal government has offered stable opportunities for advancement and a secure job with a steady paycheck, the federal workforce has disproportionately attracted people of color and people with disabilities. The latest data show that people of color are overrepresented in the federal government: More than 18 percent of workers in the federal government are black (compared to about 11 percent of the overall labor force) and Native Americans are more than one-and-a-half times as likely to work for the federal government than be in the overall labor force. Fourteen percent of full-time federal workers are people with disabilities, compared to 3.8 percent in the overall labor force. Veterans, who comprise nearly a third of the federal government, are also disproportionately represented.

But while federal jobs tick many of the job-quality boxes, satisfaction has been declining. The latest data reveal that morale at the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services fell by more than 10 percentage points between 2017 and 2018, and morale at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dropped by an astounding 25 percentage points.

One can only imagine what basement these numbers would be in if the survey happened this week.

This decline is likely due in no small part to the fact that attacks on federal workers have been mounting in recent years. Their work has been condescendingly dismissed by Trump, and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow referred to their unpaid efforts during the shutdown as “volunteering.” They have been asked to work with fewer staff due to hiring freezes and for diminishing wages due to Republican-pushed pay freezes.

Public sector unions have come under attack, both by Trump and the Supreme Court. And now workers have literally been forced to make do without pay, while many have still been having to show up and clock in. More and more work is being shifted to contractors who have fewer protections and who will likely not even be paid for the time they could not work during the shutdown. (Contractor satisfaction, which is likely even lower, deserves a whole article unto itself.)

Is it any wonder there have been reports of federal workers departing government service?

This could spell trouble, not just for the workers themselves who deserve far more than to be pawns in Trump’s racist game of chicken with the economy, but for our country in general. Reduced employee morale can lead to lower productivity — not a good thing when you’re trying to run a business, much less a country. We’ve also seen what it looks like when we don’t sufficiently invest in public services: lines get longer, corporations get away with defrauding the American people, and people die waiting for the services and benefits they need.

And if Trump’s divisiveness leads to less diversity within the workforce, the evidence indicates that could be bad for the public, too, because it matters who our public servants are. Research finds that having a diverse public labor force is important for the consideration of the interests of people of color in a range of circumstances.  For example, having more black and Latino bureaucrats is related to having more Latinos and blacks judged eligible for rural housing loans. Having a larger share of black federal workers in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is positively related to the number of discrimination claims filed by black workers.

There are high costs to everyone when we treat federal workers like disposable widgets — and in the wake of the shutdown we may find out exactly how high they are.

As federal worker Sam Shirazi noted on Twitter, the shutdown has created a child care emergency for some families: “I’m a furloughed Federal employee, but the #GovernmentShutdown doesn’t just affect me. My daughter’s daycare is in the Commerce Dept and is closed during the shutdown, but we still have to pay our weekly invoice.”

Nearly 100 child care centers serving federal employees, along with some civilians, operate across the U.S. The spaces are leased by the General Services Administration, which pays $5.6 billion in rent every year. According to the GSA, nearly 7,500 children receive care each day at such facilities, approximately two thirds of whom are children of federal employees. The facilities run on parent fees; the service is not provided by the government.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Even more child care centers provide services directly through government agencies, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, which maintains on-site child care for staffers and a limited number of civilians at locations like its Maryland campus. NASA also provides on-site child care to employees.

Federal workers and the civilians who take advantage of these services have come to count on them, and the child care providers who staff them rely on their wages to support their own families. During the shutdown, parents and workers alike are struggling to make ends meet, whether they’re civilians suddenly without child care, federal employees who remain working but have nowhere for their children to go, or child care workers uncertain about their pay status.

In GSA spaces or federal agencies that remain open, child care centers are operating as usual, though some reported declines in attendance, with federal workers keeping their enrolled children home. Others, like Shirazi’s Commerce Kids, are closed, forcing parents to look elsewhere for child care. Some are operating in GSA buildings with skeleton crews, like the Growing Years Child Development Center in Washington, where the GSA personnel who assist with building maintenance and safety concerns have all been furloughed. The precise number of facilities closed is unclear; many weren’t answering phones or responding to messages.

Many administrators are making the decision to pay child care providers who have been affected by involuntary leave in order to retain them, whether they are employees of nonprofits operating with a memorandum of understanding in GSA spaces or staffers at contract companies. abby, a civilian parent in Colorado, says “the teachers are definitely more poor than the parents,” and can ill-afford unpaid leave. Despite their low pay, they are highly-skilled workers who “could all find new jobs” if they chose to start looking.

To keep paying staffers, centers are still collecting fees from parents, even those who are furloughed without pay, though some are offering discounts and tuition assistance. This means some parents are paying twice: Once to the facility their children normally go to, which is currently closed, and again to whoever is filling in the gap during the shutdown.

Cathy Bisaillon, president and CEO of Easterseals Washington, the program provider at Growing Years, comments that nonprofit child cares run on very slim margins, making it hard to waive or reduce tuition fees, even though their office is sympathetic to and concerned about families like those in the Coast Guard who are currently on furlough. Lack of communication from the government is also complicating matters; she expressed concerns about Head Start funding, even though the program is funded through the Department of Health and Human Services, which remains unaffected by the shutdown.

Whether furloughed or ordered to work without pay, federal employees have child care fees to add to long lists of expenses for households that live paycheck to paycheck. And in the case of those working without pay who have children in closed facilities, there’s a scramble to meet child care needs as they report for work. For civilians who have relied on federal child care for their young children, the shutdown is creating uncertainty and frustration as they game out child care arrangements, uncertain about when the shutdown will end.

Child care administrators are sending out bulletins suggesting parents find college students on break or consider paying center staff for in-home care. Parents are frantically seeking spots in other facilities, or working out care arrangements with friends and family on a day-by-day basis. Those with flex time or paid leave are using it, and some are simply taking their children to work with them, for lack of a better option.

NASA engineer Jessica M reported on Twitter that her child care is raising rates to offset the costs of the shutdown. Some parents have child care access but can’t afford it because of the furlough, so they’re pulling their kids out and hoping they don’t lose their spaces in facilities that often have lengthy waiting lists.

According to the Center for American Progress’ Early Childhood team — one of whom is among the DC-area parents struggling to meet child care needs due to a facility closure — “licensed infant and toddler child care is unaffordable for most families.” While child care subsidies are available, only 1 in 6 eligible families are currently receiving them. Washington, DC, which has been hit especially hard by the shutdown, has particularly high child care costs; parents need to spend 21 percent of the area’s median income on center-based care that meets licensing requirements. Maryland and Virginia both have high costs, and a high concentration of federal employees, as well.

The price tag for child care isn’t the only problem, as many parents affected by the shutdown are discovering. There’s also a significant shortage of available spots and providers; among parents who can afford to pay tuition at a shuttered center and pay for other arrangements, some, like abby, are learning that there are no other arrangements available.

In a painful juxtaposition, at the precise moment that parents affected by the shutdown are desperate for childcare, Congress has just opened a state-of-the-art care facility for the children of staffers. Limited child care options, you see, had been driving staffers away from Capitol Hill.

Superstore

The first season of Superstore is essentially The Office, set in a big box store where the workers are making minimum wage. There’s a will-they-won’t-they relationship between coworkers, a brutal assistant manager who would break Dwight Schrute’s spirit in under half an hour, and some classic slapstick to tie it all together.

But the longer the show is on, the better it gets. Beginning in season two, the show starts to tease out the substantive issues that define the characters’ lives and brings them to the forefront without ever getting heavy-handed. That’s not an easy feat: There are plot arcs that deal directly, and unflinchingly, with union busting, health care inequity, documentation status, and paid maternity leave.

The show isn’t perfect: We’d be remiss if we recommended it without noting that a disabled character is played by an actor who does not share his character’s disability. It’s a misstep that could have easily been avoided, and a blemish on a show that handles a number of complicated topics so deftly.

How to watch it: Superstore airs on NBC, and older episodes are available on Hulu. Start with episode two, season two, “Strike.”

Bob’s Burgers

Bob’s Burgers is one of the funniest, most consistent shows on TV. It’s heavy on jokes and wild premises, and its characters are a collection of beautifully unhinged, frantic, awkward humans who are inexplicably relatable. And, at its core, the show is about a working-class family that is barely scraping by. The titular restaurant is always in peril, wealthy business owners are an existential threat, and minor mishaps – like a broken minivan or a decrepit sofa – are big enough financial burdens that zany attempts to replace them often form the basis of an entire episode.

Most importantly, Bob’s Burgers is a joy to watch. It’s a rare depiction of a family that faces stress without becoming bitter, and that struggles without being victims.

How to watch it: New episodes are on FOX, and the entire series is on Hulu. If you’re going to binge it, start with season three – that’s when the show finds its footing.

The Fosters

The Fosters finished airing in June and it is genuinely heartwarming, for those looking for some basic queer joy. The Freeform family drama revolves around a lesbian couple raising five kids under one roof – four of whom are foster children. It delves into the working-class life of a police officer and vice principal navigating childrearing, living in a racially mixed family, and the challenges of the foster system. It’s rare to see queer families on television, especially lesbian families, even though nearly 16 percent of same-gender couples are raising children together. For those dismayed its run is over, a spinoff, Good Trouble, is coming to Freeform!

How to watch it: The whole show is on Netflix, and if you want to dip your toes in, try season one’s “I Do” (episode 10) for an extremely wholesome lesbian wedding, and “Quinceañera” (episode four) for some moving family drama.

On My Block

Four inner-city LA teens navigate their coming of age in On My Block, which is a frank look at a part of Los Angeles that’s usually glossed over or turned into a cautionary tale. Monse (Sierra Capri), Cesar (Diego Tinoco), Ruben (Jason Genao), and Jamal (Brett Gray) inhabit different aspects of the Latinx and Afro-Latinx experience in a vibrant narrative deeply rooted in lived experience.

It would be a mistake to focus on the exploration of gang violence here: On My Block also confronts deportations, teen sexuality, family, and more in a diverse reflection of contemporary teen life. Plus, you are going to love Ruben’s abuela.

How to watch it: It’s a Netflix Original, and with only one season available, you can start right at the beginning!

Speechless

Energetic mom Maya DiMeo (Minnie Driver) and her chaotic family enliven a drama that’s been widely praised by the disability community for its authentic handling of cerebral palsy from both the perspective of disabled youth growing into their autonomy and parents who advocate tirelessly for access and inclusion. Her son JJ is played by Micah Fowler, who actually has cerebral palsy and fills his role as the titular nonverbal character with gusto. Class comes in as the family struggles to find a good school for JJ, and ultimately finds itself living in the junkiest house in a fancy neighborhood and navigating all that comes with it.

How to watch it: Speechless airs on ABC and you can find the entire series on Hulu. You’ll want to start from the beginning to root yourself in the DiMeo family’s woes … and triumphs.

GLOW

Jenji Kohan’s newest show, based on the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling series that ran from 1986-1992, is a classic dramedy about a band of misfits that defies the odds. The ensemble cast, featuring Marc Maron, Alison Brie, and Betty Gilpin, is comprised of deeply broken human beings who are trying to relaunch their careers (and redeem themselves after some truly astounding personal mistakes) by filming a low-budget women’s wrestling series in a run-down gym.

The episodes are a little uneven in quality, but the series engages directly with class in a way that feels original: Through the characters and the wrestling personas they take on. It’s worth watching just for real-life WWE star Kia Stevens, who plays Tammé. Tammé’s struggle with the wrestling persona she’s been assigned – who is literally named “Welfare Queen” – is given the air time it deserves in the second season. Her attempt to navigate the space between social responsibility and her very real need to support herself is messy and compelling.

How to watch it: GLOW is a Netflix Original. Start from the beginning, or you’ll struggle to piece together the dynamics between the characters.

Despite public statements to the contrary, there is mounting evidence that the administration is continuing to separate asylum-seeking families like Brayan and Julio’s. President Donald Trump holds fast to the belief that family separation effectively deters families from Mexico and Central America from seeking refuge in the United States, despite evidence to the contrary, and immigration attorneys are reporting that the administration is taking advantage of a loophole in the federal court’s injunction against separations. According to Neha Desai at the National Center for Youth Law, border patrol officers are using the pretext that children’s safety is at risk to separate families: “If the authorities have even the most specious evidence that a parent was a gang member… anything they can come up with to say that the separation is for the health and welfare of the child, then they’ll separate them.”

The Trump administration’s decision to systematically separate children from their parents, is, in its specifics, unprecedented. But family separation was enabled in the first place, and it continues today, because our immigration system, like other public systems, has been built to separate families — particularly families of color.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The immigration system is one of three systems that routinely separate families in the United States. The criminal justice and child welfare systems are the other two. In the immigration and criminal justice systems, separation is most commonly an unconsidered, if not quite unintended, consequence of policy, as parents are incarcerated and sometimes deported without their children. In child welfare, separation is the deliberate result of policy, as children are removed from their parents’ custody over concerns for their immediate safety. In each system, however, children are harmed by family separation. And in each system, children of color are more likely to be separated from their parents.

The very first federal restriction on immigration resulted in family separations. In 1875, Congress barred Chinese involuntary laborers and suspected prostitutes from entering the United States. In practice, the law made it almost impossible for Chinese women to immigrate, including those who wished to join their husbands, as government officials “demonstrated a consistent unwillingness, or inability, to recognize women who were not prostitutes among all but the wealthy applicants for immigration.” In the years that followed, an increasing number of laws excluded more Asians from the United States. Separations continued as part of this: At Angel Island, the notorious immigration station in San Francisco Bay, many Asian-American families were separated for weeks at a time so that they could not coordinate their answers before they faced interrogation.

By the mid-20th century, Latinx immigrants had become the subject of nativist ire, and many Latinx families were separated as a result. During the Great Depression, local and state governments colluded with social welfare agencies to encourage and sometimes coerce Mexicans—and in many cases Mexican Americans — to “repatriate” to Mexico. Two decades later, concern about rising undocumented immigration in the Southwest led to “Operation Wetback,” a federal deportation drive that was once again focused almost exclusively on Mexicans. The legacy of this targeting of Latinx communities by immigration enforcement is visible today. Though immigrants from Latin America make up an estimated 77 percent of the unauthorized population in the United States, they have constituted well over 90 percent of immigrants removed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in recent years. 27,080 immigrants with U.S. born children were deported in 2017.

Like immigration enforcement, our system of mass incarceration mechanically separates families. Incarceration creates financial and emotional hardship for families by default, but there are additional ripple effects that can last long after release. According to an analysis of 3 million child welfare cases, parents who have a child placed in foster care because they are incarcerated are more likely to have their parental rights terminated than those who physically or sexually assaulted their kids. Again, this falls disproportionately on children of color: Approximately 11.4 percent of African-American children have a parent in prison, compared to 3.5 percent of Hispanic children and 1.8 percent of white children. This disparate impact has been true for the history of the criminal justice system in the United States, and it has grown with the rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s.

Families of color are also disproportionately separated by the child welfare system, which from the beginning saw its role as removing children from their families for their own protection. Originally, the child welfare system focused on removing poor children from their families, whether or not there were signs of abuse. As William Pryor Letchworth, a famous advocate of children’s causes, declared in 1874, “If you want to break up pauperism, you must transplant [the child].” Charities in New York, Boston, and other East Coast cities sent thousands of poor children on “orphan trains” to towns in the Midwest, where they were assigned foster families.

As the child welfare system developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, children of color were for the most part excluded from services, but other public institutions separated them from their families at high rates. A Children’s Bureau report observed that from 1750 to 1960, “the black child’s chance of ‘receiving care’ [a polite euphemism for being incarcerated] from a correctional facility was still much greater than that of receiving any other type of care.” Meanwhile, the United States undertook a concerted campaign to remove American-Indian children from their families in order to facilitate their “assimilation.” Starting in 1879 and continuing well through the 20th century, children as young as five years old were packed off to boarding schools, where they were prohibited from speaking their native languages and, often, from visiting home.

When the formal child welfare system began to integrate following World War II, it continued to identify symptoms of poverty as grounds for removing children, and separated American-Indian and African-American families at startlingly high rates. Starting in 1959, the Indian Adoption Project, part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) larger effort to undermine tribal sovereignty and erase American Indian cultures, purposefully placed American Indians in white homes. Surveys in 1969 and 1974 documented that between 25 and 35 percent of all American-Indian children were placed in foster or adoptive homes or institutions. During this period, child welfare scholars also began to document the high rates of removal of African-American children, a legacy that lives on despite attempts to address racial inequities. A 2014 study found that 4.9 percent of white children will experience foster care placement before their 18th birthday, compared to 15.4 percent of Native American children and 11 percent of black children.

This history reveals that Julio and Barayan are not alone, even under less openly racist administrations. Thousands of families are separated every year by public systems, and families of color are much more likely to suffer this fate. In order to ensure that families like Julio and Barayan can remain together, we need to transform these systems. In the criminal justice and immigration systems, this means severely limiting incarceration and deportation, particularly of parents. In the child welfare system, this means increasing the services and supports available to families so that they can thrive together, as well as significantly raising the threshold to remove children from their homes. Children need their families in order to develop and flourish. As a nation, we cannot continue to tear children from their parent’s arms.

The goal of boosting development in low-income areas is certainly laudable, but one major concern is that funds are going to be directed to places that are not really distressed: Take, for instance,  the area where Amazon’s HQ2 will land in Long Island City, the area around a Trump golf course, or the future home of the Las Vegas Raiders NFL franchise, all of which qualify for benefits. Ahead of a White House event on Wednesday about Opportunity Zones, reports emerged regarding how the Kushner family business stands to take advantage of the program, after Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump pushed for its creation.

But high-profile, flashy examples of obvious Opportunity Zone boondoggles don’t highlight the full extent of the problem. For example, look at Rockville, Maryland.

The Rockville census tract below, outlined in dark green, fits within the definition of economically distressed for the Opportunity Zone program. For a census tract to be eligible, it must either have a poverty rate above 20 percent or median family income below 80 percent of the area median income.

While the Rockville tract has a poverty rate of 13 percent, well below the threshold, it is at 71.58 percent of area median family income. However, that is a reflection of the fact that Rockville is a suburb of Washington, D.C. that is well-off, with an overall median income of $100,436 in 2017, and that the median income of the tract in question is relatively smaller than that in the overall Rockville area.

It’s not that this census tract is distressed; it’s that it is relatively less well-off in a sea of wealth.

This census tract lies along a major highway, the Rockville Pike, which runs between the dark green and light green sections on the map. It is home to many strip malls. It is bordered to the west by the Woodmont Country Club, where the initiation fee is $80,000, and is also the location of new construction, especially around the Twinbrook Metro station, part of the D.C. subway system.

That’s not exactly the picture of a place that is going to have trouble attracting investment on its own. The Washington, D.C. region has the highest median income of any metropolitan area in the country, and while it certainly has pockets of deep poverty, this isn’t one where investment incentives are desperately needed.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Due to the Opportunity Zone program, tracts like this that are already experiencing growth will get big benefits and investors will be able to accrue significant tax savings for plopping their money there, while not achieving the core aim of the program. Investors will reap benefits for investments they might have made anyway, when the program is meant to entice them into areas they wouldn’t otherwise be. And there’s an opportunity cost at work: Funding that will come to this tract could have gone to other Opportunity Zones in places that are actually in need of capital.

Just looking at how the program is being touted in the investment community shows how far away from the mission it is in practice. In outlining the top 10 Opportunity Zones, Fundrise — an online real estate investing service — uses home value increases as the metric for investment. It is therefore not surprising that the top four are all located in large urban metropolitan neighborhoods in California.

Other fund managers are looking for an internal rate of return of 12 percent, but do not have similar metrics pertaining to the individuals within those communities. To fit within the mission of the program, funds should be tracking metrics like the number of startups created by individuals in the community, number of living jobs created, or the number of affordable housing units created.

If the goal is to revitalize low-income communities, the best way is to develop the already existing resources, namely the people who live there. If policy drives investment in individuals in these communities through the development of small businesses, it can spur further investment and uplift distressed communities. Instead, we’re stuck with a program that creates mini tax havens for the wealthy, while leaving low-income communities behind.

Lawmakers initially passed the popular policies in September, after it became clear that ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2022, phase out the tipped minimum wage, and guarantee 72 hours of paid sick leave were likely to be approved if they were put to the state’s voters in November. Concerned that they’d be unable to overturn a ballot initiative, which would require a three-fourths supermajority, Republican legislators took the extraordinary step of passing the law themselves — so they could come back and dismantle it with a simple majority in the current lame duck session.

The new Republican bill delays the minimum wage increase by eight years, until the year 2030. Paid sick time is slashed in half, to just 36 hours per year. In addition, it maintains the tipped minimum wage, increasing it to just $4.58 by 2030, which earlier legislation would have phased out. The bill now heads to the desk of the outgoing Republican governor, Rick Snyder, who is expected to sign it into law.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Outright subversion of democracy to defeat minimum wage hikes isn’t new. A similar series of events played out in Washington, D.C., just this year, when the supposedly progressive D.C. council repealed a ballot initiative to eliminate the tipped minimum wage just four months after the voters passed it. In Maine, lawmakers reinstated the tipped minimum wage in 2017 after voters eliminated it the year before.

It seems that the same lobbying group may have been behind the repeal of all three bills.

The National Restaurant Association, or NRA, represents more than 500,000 restaurant businesses, making it the world’s largest food service trade association. Over the last 28 years, the NRA and its largest corporate members have spent more than $78 million on campaign contributions, spending $12 million just in the 2016 election cycle. And they have a powerful and dangerous playbook: prevent minimum wage increases at any cost.

All three of the most recent minimum wage hike reversals received significant backing from the National Restaurant Association. In Michigan, dozens of legislators received campaign contributions from the National Restaurant Association during this past election cycle, including the House majority leader.

The Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association, the state-level partner of the NRA, openly bragged about the amount of control that this bought it over the state’s minimum wage fight, saying that it “worked tirelessly with the Michigan Legislature to prevent this onerous proposal from going to the ballot.”

Similarly, in Washington, D.C., the NRA contributed more than $236,000 in campaign funds to 13 of the city council’s 14 members. It helped fund an astroturf campaign designed to appear as if it was led by restaurant workers, which flooded public hearings with testimonies. In Maine, the Maine Restaurant Association vehemently lobbied the state legislature until the tipped minimum wage increase was overturned.

In most of its campaigns, the National Restaurant Association claims that minimum wage increases will hurt businesses and eliminate tips that workers depend on. Even a cursory review of the research shows that neither claim is true. The growth of restaurants and restaurant employment is more robust in “equal treatment states,” where there is no tipped minimum wage, compared with states that use the federal minimum tipped wage of $2.13 per hour. And tipped workers in those states see 17 percent higher earnings on average, including tips.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, one in six restaurant workers, or 16.7 percent, live below the official poverty line — fully 10 percentage points higher than workers outside the restaurant industry. Abolishing the tipped minimum wage is particularly beneficial to women and people of color, both of whom receive significantly less in tips than their white, male counterparts.

Raising the minimum wage is among the most popular polices out there, across party lines. In fact, a study released earlier this week finds that in literally every single state in the U.S., the minimum wage is lower than residents want it to be. That’s why when minimum wage increases are on the ballot, they pass. So the National Restaurant Association is doing everything it can to keep voters from having a say, with dangerous consequences for low-wage workers — and for democracy writ large.

The rule proposed by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services would require most immigrants seeking green cards to show that they have a middle-class income: specifically, more than 250 percent of the federal poverty line (about $62,750 for a family of four). Immigrants could also fail the test if they have received government benefits, including Medicaid and Medicare Part D, in the past or if officials feel they are likely to receive them at any point in the future. The test would also penalize use of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) and housing assistance programs.

Researchers at the consulting firm Manatt found the proposed changes could drive disenrollment from Medicaid, even for people who are lawfully in the United States, eligible for coverage, and wouldn’t be subject to the public charge rule, because they fear running afoul of the new requirements. Similar fears are already pushing eligible immigrant families off SNAP, especially those in “mixed status” households that include lawful residents, citizens, and/or undocumented people.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Overall, the researchers estimate public charge could affect 13.2 million immigrants on Medicaid, including 7.6 million children, who consume nearly $70 billion in Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program services annually.

When people begin to unenroll from Medicaid, the rise in uninsured people who still need health care will lead to fewer Medicaid reimbursements and a corresponding increase in uncompensated care costs. That will be particularly hard on rural hospitals, in part because rural communities rely more heavily on Medicaid coverage than their urban counterparts due to the lower number of other insurance options and high poverty rates.

While the majority of immigrants in the United States live in urban areas, they are making up an increasing share of rural communities. When rural hospitals experience even a relatively small drop in income from losing these patients, Manatt researcher April Grady notes that it “can have an outsized impact.”

Texas, California, and Nevada could see particularly acute chilling effects for their immigrant residents in both urban and rural areas if the public charge rule is approved, thanks to their large immigrant communities. Texas is already struggling with hospital closures, where changes to Medicaid policy, along with the state’s refusal to expand the program, have hit rural facilities hard.

Sharita Thomas, a research associate with the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program (NCRHRP), observed that there have been 90 rural hospital closures since 2010, many in the South, with more on the horizon. 68 percent of rural hospitals vulnerable to full closure are Critical Access Hospitals, which are facilities that are at least 35 miles away from other hospitals, maintain 24/7 emergency care, and meet several other criteria to receive unique benefits designed to make them more financially stable, including cost-based Medicare and in some cases Medicaid reimbursement.

When the sole hospital in a rural community closes, it forces patients to search further afield for care, a particular concern with obstetrical and emergency treatment. It also has a wider negative economic impact. “In rural communities,” said George Pink, Deputy Director of the NCRHRP, “the hospital is the largest or second-largest employer in the region. When that source of employment goes away, there are often ripple effects.” This can extend to companies considering relocation but reluctant to do business in an area that lacks a hospital or doesn’t provide sufficient hospital services, depriving rural regions of economic opportunities.

Even if hospitals facing budget constraints don’t close, they could start cutting programs, with labor and delivery a frequent early target. When cuts fail to achieve the desired goal and get more drastic, a floundering hospital may ponder a merger with another health care entity. Hospital mergers in urban and rural areas alike are rapidly accelerating, with 102 in 2016 alone and a comparable number in 2017. Many of the hospital chains gobbling up smaller competitors are Christian, with the Catholic hospital system in particular expanding rapidly and cutting off access to reproductive health services in the process.

Public charge could have another unintended consequence on rural hospitals, where physicians from immigrant backgrounds make up an important component of health care access. Many rural communities are counting on immigrants to meet health care provider shortages, offering incentives to those willing to work in underserved communities. Physicians have already warned that the executive order restricting entry from majority-Muslim countries is detrimental to health care access in the U.S. and this rule could be another deterrent.

Determining the impact of public charge on rural hospitals “really is a bit of a numbers game,” said Grady, but it’s a game that the federal government has been unwilling to play. She added that while the proposed rule hints at issues like people being afraid to seek emergency care and mixed-status households withdrawing from benefits, it declined to provide estimated fiscal and social impacts.

“There’s administration hurdles that are not fully explored in the proposed rule,” she said.

Throughout the thread, Jeffery expressed frustration that teachers’ needs were so dire. “She [is] asking for pencils and gluesticks ffs,” Jeffery commented on a fundraiser for a low-income San Francisco school. On a request for help buying laundry equipment, she said: “These asks for ways to help kids and their families get and clean clothes are so sad. We need to serious[ly] overhaul our society.”

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

No teacher should have to beg for help with buying pencils, but here we are. As Jeffery notes, “so many more teachers are paying for essentials out of their own, far-too-small, paychecks.”

While she was quick to put her fundraising in context, her efforts could have easily fallen prey to a media trend of stories that follow a familiar formula: A person sees an individual injustice and takes a step to remedy it, everyone gets inspired, the end.

The boss buys a car for an employee struggling with transportation issues. Coworkers donate sick days to a teacher undergoing cancer treatment so they don’t lose employment benefits. A garbage truck driver helps an elderly customer evacuate a wildfire. A LASIK surgeon donates procedures to veterans. Well-paid celebrities offer generous tips to wait staff having hard days. News station buys up, and forgives, medical debt.

Websites specializing in “good” and “uplifting” news love circulating this kind of content, but they aren’t alone, especially at this time of year, when readers and viewers are hungry for a feel-good story. But these stories should not make anyone feel good. They are stark illustrations of inequality in the United States and the reasons why it’s so pernicious. Circulating narratives like these reinforces the attitude that they are personal problems that can be solved by an act of charity, instead of institutional injustices that must be remedied through legislation.

That employee who got a car from their boss doesn’t need a one-time gift from a generous CEO: They need reliable transit and a fair wage so they can be empowered to make their own decisions about how they get to work. Meanwhile, the oil industry continues to fight transit improvements while transit systems across the country are plagued by deferred maintenance, insufficient capacity, and accessibility issues. The federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 hourly for almost a decade, with states slowly working on increases.

An employee with cancer doesn’t need donated sick pay — a growing trend, along with donating paid time off to new parents so they can take leave with their newborns or recently-adopted family members. They need adequate sick leave to meet their needs, along with paid family leave to help them care for their relatives and chosen family when necessary. The United States is the only industrialized nation that lacks national paid leave requirements: Just 13 percent of private sector workers have access to paid family leave, the majority do not have paid medical leave, and 29 percent have no paid sick leave.

A garbage truck driver shouldn’t have to lift a 93-year-old woman into the cab of a sanitation truck and help arrange shelter at the other end of the journey. Local authorities should proactively identify residents in need of evacuation assistance and dispatch trained personnel to assist. The costs of failing to do so are high: During 2017’s Hurricane Irma, 12 Florida nursing home residents died due to inadequate disaster preparation. That same year, residents of eldercare facilities in Santa Rosa, CA were abandoned in advance of a wildfire – fortunately, the community was able to rescue them.

LASIK surgeons shouldn’t be donating procedures to veterans. The Veterans Administration should be addressing long wait times for benefits and gaps in coverage.

Waitstaff shouldn’t have to rely on random $500 tips from strangers who feel guilty about their wealth. They should be making a living wage and receiving employment benefits that allow them to access health care, paid leave, educational opportunities, and other supports. The federal tipped minimum wage has been flat since 1991 and service workers are subject to wage theft, racial inequalities, high poverty rates, and city councils and legislatures that overturn the wage increases voters asked for.

A news station shouldn’t have to buy up debt for pennies on the dollar and forgive it, passing along potentially serious tax implications. People should have access to health coverage and living wages that keep them out of debt in the first place. Medical debt is the leading cause for debt collection calls. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Nothing has to be this way.

These are systemic problems, not personal ones, and they could be better addressed through policy interventions than on a case-by-case basis. Access to things like paid leave, safe housing, transit, and health care shouldn’t be dependent on whether someone can make their story trend on Twitter or package it for a local news entity. Every time these stories are shared and re-shared, it pulls attention away from the institutional issue in favor of a highly-personal quick fix.

Individual acts of generosity like these can feel rewarding: People see a fellow human in distress and they help alleviate it, for an immediate hit of gratification (and guilt reduction, when these gifts come from people who may have contributed to the underlying problem). But they do not necessarily make a long-term meaningful difference in the recipient’s life, and they do nothing to resolve the inequities that created the situation in the first place. For every one of these happy endings, there are millions of others facing the same precarious situations with no helping hand in sight.

What happens when that employee faces car insurance and registration fees she can’t afford for the car she didn’t ask for? When that waitress receives a tax bill for her $500 tip? When that elder’s home burns, hospitality runs out, and her insurance refuses to pay out, leaving her homeless and adrift? When a teacher’s fundraising efforts for classroom cleaning supplies fail and students work in increasingly dirty conditions for the rest of the school year?

We create problems like these by putting the feelings of people who want to perform charity before the actual needs of low-income people. The consequences are the parts of the story we never see, and the illustration that far from making us feel good, these stories should make us feel very, very bad.

The problem was that Novo Dia held the only keys to a USDA program dedicated to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program processing software and equipment for 1,700 farmers’ markets nationwide. Without Novo Dia providing this service, markets would have no way to accept SNAP — a disruption that would cost farmers income and SNAP recipients food.

If you’ve ever attempted to switch your cell phone provider but keep your actual device, you might be able to relate: Farmers’ markets had perfectly functional and expensive equipment that simply would not work with any other SNAP processing software. It’s the government equivalent of trying to keep your iPhone when you move from Verizon to AT&T.

This episode raised a lot of questions about the government’s relationship with tech companies tasked with administering public programs: How does it choose who to hire? How does it hold those companies accountable? And how do those decisions affect the daily lives of low-income Americans who rely on being able to access their benefits?

The answers are vitally important: Governments are increasingly relying on new technologies to sort applications, manage caseloads, and distribute benefits. How such technology is contracted, developed, and deployed will have real impacts on millions of low-income Americans.

Take, for instance, what happened in Washington, D.C. In the fall of 2016, the city’s Department of Human Services, along with the contractor Infosys Public Services Inc., replaced a computer system the District had been using since the early 1990s to enroll low-income residents in SNAP and cash assistance programs. The Food and Nutrition Service, the USDA agency responsible for administering the country’s nutrition assistance programs, issued a letter to the D.C. Department of Human Services, warning against launching the new system without having done adequate testing.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

But two months later, D.C. rolled out the system anyway — to repeated outages and glitches, including benefits not being loaded onto Electronic Benefit Transfer cards.

Frustrations between agency employees and customers ran so high that there were physical altercations in some enrollment offices, causing the union representing the workers to issue a formal grievance. The union asked that the agency return to using the previous technology or distribute hazard pay to employees.

Rhode Island, meanwhile, has been struggling to serve its SNAP recipients since it rolled out a new $364 million computer system in 2016 — known as the Unified Health Infrastructure Project — causing delays in distribution by the thousands. Recently, the Food and Nutrition Service threatened to withhold more than $900,000 in federal reimbursements due to Rhode Island’s continued failure to address a list of nearly 30 items related to system functionality, issuance of benefits, backlogs, certification, and more.

In turn, state Department of Nutrition Services Director Courtney Hawkins blamed Deloitte Consulting, the company contracted to build the computer system saying, “This formal warning underscores the fact that Deloitte has not yet delivered a fully functioning system that works on behalf of Rhode Islanders.” In April, the company apologized for its disastrous roll-out.

To date, two federal class action lawsuits have been filed against Rhode Island over its SNAP program. Recently, it was reported that the total cost of its new computer system had reached “$647.7 million through the 2019-20 federal fiscal year, with $138 million of that amount to be covered by state taxpayers and the rest by the federal government.”

Part of the problem in developing these systems is how the government chooses which companies to hire, said Dave Guarino, director of GetCalFresh, a project of Code for America. He notes that there are only “a small number of vendors who know how to navigate the procurement process, and they’re the ones who get the contracts.”

Thus, the proposal and bidding process limits the amount of competition and creates stagnancy in the technology developed for government programs. It also leaves out newer, smaller, and more innovative companies.

In theory, this is because the government process is designed to decrease risk, given the high amount of sensitive and confidential information managed by these systems, so it’s the well-known contractors with a track record of managing large projects who ultimately get the gig.

But Guarino says that government technology crises, such as IT disasters for SNAP recipients, highlight the need for a true shift in thinking about risk and agility. “We should be demanding better software and better experiences,” said Guarino. “But if we want government to be able to act more nimbly and quickly, we also need to be able to say that government can take more risks.”

While risk-taking can have downsides, Guarino said the best practice is to test new ideas “on a really small scale in a way that minimizes risk, but maximizes learning” — a concept that could have helped to prevent harm caused by the failure of the D.C. system roll-out, as problems could have been spotted and fixed with a relatively small control group.

Guarino also noted the importance of working with a broad range of partners to develop and administer technology, as well as dividing up tasks to “the best firm for each job.”

His own project, GetCalFresh, is one such successful model. GetCalFresh offers online SNAP applications for 36 counties in California, and its technology was developed to measure and remove barriers that often prevent low-income people from accessing their benefits. Users can easily submit SNAP applications by mobile phone or computer, often in fewer than 10 minutes, and can also send verification documents securely via their phones. And by working with a wide range of partners, including Code For America, state and county agencies, and organizations, Guarino said the project is more successful than it would be with a single entity at the helm.

“These things often aren’t talked about as dimensions of why poverty persists and why some poverty solutions don’t reach everybody they could,” said Guarino, “But they’re a really huge deal.”

The thousands of farmers and customers affected by the Novo Dia debacle would likely agree. And as D.C., Rhode Island and surely other places have proven, short-sighted decisions and worse implementation of new government tech can adversely impact scores of people. Indeed, if we want innovative, effective poverty solutions in today’s digital landscape, we need to think hard about tech.

In a 2016 survey, nearly half of retail workers reported having to work on Thanksgiving, and big employers are far more likely to have their workers on duty than are smaller ones. Those who refuse or complain can face retaliation, leaving many to decide that putting up a fight isn’t worth seeing their hours cut or losing their jobs entirely.

Every year there are a flurry of stories that question whether that practice is worth denying workers a holiday at home. However, long holiday hours are just one of the myriad abuses employees face when it comes to their work schedules.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Take, for instance, Aliyyah Miller, a housekeeping supervisor at a hotel in Philadelphia. She only receives her work schedule one day in advance, on Saturday for a workweek that begins on Sunday. “Literally, you know the day before which days you’re working,” she said. “You can’t make a doctor’s appointment because you don’t know if you’ll have the day off.”

The turnover at Miller’s hotel is high, and the housekeepers lose hours and income when they have to call out of shifts that conflict with their other responsibilities, thanks at least in part to the unpredictable nature of their schedules.

Nearly one in five workers experiences similarly unstable work hours, and those who are subjected to the worst abuses are disproportionately women and people of color, because they are more likely to work in the low-wage, part-time jobs that include the most haphazard scheduling.

Younger workers, too, are more likely to face abuses: According to research from the University of Chicago, nearly 40 percent of early-career workers receive one week or less of notice regarding their work schedules, with young part-time workers and workers of color experiencing rates even higher.

Other scheduling problems include the inability to ask for time off when it’s needed; split shifts, wherein workers have unpaid hours in the middle of their shifts; and being dismissed early when businesses isn’t high enough, meaning they aren’t paid for hours they were banking on. On-call work, when workers are put on notice that their services may be needed between particular hours, requires them to reserve time for which they may not be compensated.

The income volatility that comes with an unpredictable work schedule can lead to all sorts of adverse outcomes. After all, monthly bills stay the same no matter your hours, whereas service workers report weekly earnings fluctuating by 34 percent or more. Erratic schedules also make it difficult to commit to other paying work in order to make those ends meet.

Unpredictable scheduling also makes securing child care difficult, as it has to be done on short notice. It makes it harder for workers to access the health care system, as Miller noted, or to invest in themselves via more education, which requires predictability in order to choose and attend classes.

Unsurprisingly, then, workers who face schedule volatility are more stressed and experience more health problems, as do their children.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. When Miller previously worked as a kitchen manager, she knew that her staff members had lives outside of work. So she ensured they had regular schedules that were planned out ahead of time.

“We would rotate weekends and everyone had one day off during the week to take care of things,” she said. “I had zero turnover. Everyone was happy because they could attend to their children, they could have a life.”

Some national chains, such as Walmart and Starbucks,  have taken steps toward improving scheduling practices, even if they fall short of what workers and activists have demanded. According to a study done in 2015-2016 at Gap stores, more regular schedules result in more productivity and higher sales. That finding jives with other data showing pro-worker policies improve the performance of the businesses at which they work.

Still, fair scheduling isn’t common practice. So cities and states have stepped in.

San Francisco was the first locale to pass a fair work schedule law, followed by New York City, Seattle, Emeryville, California, and others. Oregon has a statewide fair scheduling law. Though they differ in the details, the general thrust of all of them is to provide workers with some level of predictability, including knowing their schedules more than a week in advance, and providing compensation for erratic or unfair scheduling, such as paying workers for some portion of their time if a shift gets canceled.  (There was also a federal bill introduced in 2017 by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that never received a vote in the Republican-controlled Congress.)

Miller’s home of Philadelphia could be next. At the end of the month, the city council is expected to vote on a measure that would require employers at large firms to give their workers 10-days notice of their schedules (increasing to 14 days in 2021) and for those firms to compensate workers for last-minute schedule changes. If it becomes law, the legislation is expected to affect about 130,000 workers. According to a 2018 survey by the Shift Project, a joint effort between the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco, two-thirds of Philadelphia service sector workers report having unpredictable work schedules. More than a third say they receive less than one week’s notice regarding when they’re going to be on duty. Miller and her housekeeping staff, then, have a lot of company.

Philadelphia City Councilmember Helen Gym, who introduced the bill, described one Philadelphia worker she met who quit school because his ever-shifting schedule didn’t allow him to attend classes, and another who sat around all-day, paying for child care, while waiting for on-call hours that never materialized.

“I am trying to do more than pass a bill. I’m trying to change people’s understanding of a problem we’ve got and why this matters, and why this shouldn’t be left to the purview of the market,” Gym said.

No new law is going to help those employees who are stuck working on Thanksgiving this year, but far scheduling efforts like the one in Philadelphia can, hopefully, ensure that next year turns out better.

On Tuesday, the internet retailer announced that its search for a second headquarters has ended, with Long Island City in Queens and “National Landing,” Virginia, a conglomeration of Washington, D.C. suburbs, selected as sites for its big expansion. The company is promising to bring tens of thousands of jobs to the two areas, along with billions of dollars from direct investments and a broadened tax base from its new, highly-paid workforce. The company also announced a smaller expansion in Nashville, Tennessee.

However, there’s a catch: Both Virginia and New York offered Amazon monetary incentives in an attempt to win HQ2, as it’s known. Until now, the public — and even some lawmakers in those states— had no idea what those incentives were. And it’s ultimately low-income residents in both places who will pay the biggest price.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Amazon’s announcement included the news that it will receive $1.5 billion in tax breaks from New York, and another half a billion from Virginia, along with promises from both states to make significant infrastructure improvements. As a result, each new job that Amazon brings will cost these cities tens of thousands of dollars.

Depending on which analysis you look at, cities and states in America spend up $90 billion annually on corporate tax incentives. That category of spending has more than tripled since 1990. The theory at work is that incentives are an investment in corporations creating jobs and boosting local economies.

The evidence backing up that theory, though, is thin. In fact, most studies have found that corporate tax breaks have little to no effect on job creation or economic growth, because they mostly encourage shifting jobs from one locale to another without creating any new economic activity. (Think, for instance, of a worker who leaves her current job to take one at Amazon, or moves from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters to Long Island.) What these tax breaks really stimulate is politicians’ efforts to get re-elected, as doling them out is correlated with rising vote shares.

The secrecy surrounding the effort to woo Amazon adds insult to that injury. 238 cities responded to the corporation’s initial request for proposals. Only a few of them made what they offered Amazon public. Reporters and activists in several cities took their local governments to court in an effort to ascertain what they promised Amazon.

The secrecy even extended to local elected officials.“My understanding is the public subsidies that are being discussed are massive in scale,” a New York state senator who represents Long Island City said to CNN before Amazon’s announcement.

New York’s incentive package was overseen by the state’s development office, with Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo promising to go to great lengths, including naming both a polluted creek and himself after Amazon, in order to secure HQ2. Already, New York spends more on corporate tax breaks than any other state, including $8.25 billion in 2015.

That officials promised a private corporation unknown amounts of taxpayer money is troubling on its face, and prevented activists and elected officials from organizing against specific proposals. But it’s also problematic because every dollar that winds up going to Amazon is taken from programs that are designed to help the area’s residents more directly.

Since most states have balanced budget requirements, the money spent on Amazon can’t be spent on education, health care, infrastructure, affordable housing, or the host of other responsibilities of local governments. (For instance, the entire annual budget of the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development is about $150 million — less than one-third of what the state offered to Amazon.) And other corporations have said they want the same deal Amazon received, which would strain budgets even more as states promise ever-bigger sums to major corporations.

Plus, the influx of money and people that Amazon brings will exacerbate inequality in the New York and D.C. areas, which are already some of the most economically unequal in the country. According to the Urban Institute, D.C.-area rents have risen by about 10 percent since 2011, and the median house price is now north of half a million dollars. Per that analysis, “the challenges of rising affordability pressures and lengthening commutes will intensify, and more households will experience hardship” with the influx of Amazon money and workers.

Even before Amazon made its announcement, D.C. was facing a housing deficit of tens of thousands of units, while Arlington County, Virginia, has seen its affordable housing stock plummet by 90 percent over the last two decades. New York is facing similar concerns. Though the effect will be more muted than it would have been in some smaller cities, it will still be significant.

Already, other cities have experienced the downside of being home to big tech corporations that stress local housing markets, including Seattle, Amazon’s main home. An effort to tax big corporations there in order to raise funds to address the lack of affordable housing was defeated thanks to opposition from Amazon.

In many ways, the Amazon HQ2 process has been a charade. After gathering data on hundreds of cities, Amazon wound up going with the home of Wall Street and the home of America’s government, two advantages no amount of money could buy.

Meanwhile, struggling cities across the country were led to believe that an economic renaissance could be headed their way, and spent time and money trying to win something they possibly never had a chance at to begin with, instead of expending those resources on the people they are supposed to serve. The whole thing should be a national embarrassment.

The undisputed good news is that Americans chipped away at the old guard last night. After two years of constant stress about losing our health care, massive tax handouts to the wealthy, and open animosity towards anyone perceived as different, we finally gained some ground.

To celebrate, we’re taking a break from our usual doom and gloom and rounding up the results that we were excited to wake up to this morning.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

We finally have some good news about health care.

Congressional Democrats are in a better position to defend the Affordable Care Act, and are likely to work on stabilizing the ACA and addressing high drug prices in the new congress.

On a state level, voters were clearly motivated by concerns about health care. They also approved Medicaid expansion in three states: Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah. This extends Medicaid coverage to 340,000 low-income people.

The victories for Medicaid don’t stop there. In Maine, where the governor and voters have been engaged in a protracted battle over Medicaid expansion, Governor-elect Janet Mills says she’ll implement Medicaid expansion “immediately” upon taking office. Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Laura Kelly in Kansas could also drive expansion in their states, where leadership has historically resisted it. Sadly, all isn’t rosy: Montana voters rejected a ballot measure that would have extended Medicaid funding via a tobacco tax, ending coverage for nearly 100,000 residents.

A number of pro-choice candidates performed well last night. But two states, West Virginia and Alabama, amended their constitutions to specifically rule out the right to abortion. It’s a symbolic amendment for as long as Roe v. Wade stands, but the new balance on the Supreme Court could place it in jeopardy.

Florida is giving the vote to 1.4 million residents.

Florida’s Amendment 4 restored voting rights to people with felony records. Until last night, it had been one of only three states (now two) that denied people convicted of felonies the right to vote after they served their sentences. That disenfranchised more than 9 percent of the state’s population overall, and 21 percent of African Americans.

It’s difficult to estimate how big of an impact this could have moving forward, but it’s certainly possible that this influx of new voters will sway future elections. And, most importantly, it will allow more than a million people to vote on the policies that affect their lives.

One other bright spot last night was in Colorado: The state passed an amendment barring the use of slavery as punishment for a crime. Other ballot measures were, to put it nicely, kind of a bummer. Six states passed a version of Marsy’s law, which establishes a victims’ bill of rights that has the potential to violate the rights of people accused of crimes and makes it harder for people who are incarcerated to access parole boards and early release. In addition, North Dakota and Ohio both rejected measures that would lessen sentences for drug crimes.

Conservative states are raising their minimum wage.

Voters in Missouri and Arkansas approved increases in the minimum wage, which will together provide a raise to nearly 1 million workers. Missouri’s ballot initiative, which won with more than 62 percent of the vote, will hike its wage to $12 per hour by 2023. Arkansas’, approved by nearly 70 percent of voters, will increase the minimum wage to $11 per hour by 2021. Missouri’s initiative also reverses a minimum wage decrease that the state legislature imposed on St. Louis, which had raised its own minimum wage to $10 in 2017.

This continues a trend of minimum wage action on the state and local level. Though the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not been increased since 2007, four states approved wage hikes in 2014, and four more did the same in 2016, while cities including Baltimore, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. have increased their own minimums.

Still, 21 states adhere to the federal minimum wage, the purchasing power of which peaked in the 1960s. We would certainly like to see more movement here, since wages have been stagnant across the country for the last several decades – particularly for low-income workers and black and Hispanic families.

Massachusetts will uphold rights for transgender Americans.

In 2016, Massachusetts passed a bill to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity in public places, but the law’s opponents managed to get it placed on the ballot this year. Voters upheld the law, which provides protections that don’t exist on a national level, by nearly 70 percent. In most states, it is still legal to discriminate against someone in housing, business, employment, and public accommodations because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Because we’re celebrating, we’ll gloss over how irritated the entire TalkPoverty staff is that it’s possible to put these rights on the ballot. Instead, we’ll look at this as a blow to the specious arguments that opponents to trans rights have been making against trans Americans.

San Francisco is taxing corporations to help people experiencing homelessness.

It was generally a bad night for tax policy on the state and local level, due to several states, including North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, approving anti-tax ballot measures, and the defeat of an effort to raise corporate taxes and implement a progressive income tax in Colorado in order to spend more money on public schools.

However, San Francisco approved an increase in its corporate tax — which will be levied on about 300 of its biggest businesses — in order to raise money to combat the city’s homelessness epidemic. At least 50 percent of the funding will be dedicated to direct housing in a city where some 7,500 people are experiencing homelessness.

The successful campaign in San Francisco was mirrored in two other Bay Area cities and counters a similar effort in Seattle, where the city council passed and then repealed a “head tax” due to opposition from Amazon and other big corporations.

The HHS proposal would reinterpret Title IX, which bars “sex”-based discrimination in federally-funded education and is applied to a wide range of civil rights issues from campus sexual assault to affirming the rights of trans students. HHS intends to push other government agencies to adopt the same narrow and biologically inaccurate view of gender, according to the Times. The agency’s view is also not shared by the courts, which have ruled repeatedly that “sex” includes gender identity under Title IX and Title VII.

The news about HHS came just days before a report that the Department of Justice believes employers can discriminate against employees on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. Meanwhile, agencies such as the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have chosen to withdraw anti-discrimination guidance that protected transg people, while HHS quietly removed trans discrimination guidance from its website about health care discrimination. Massachusetts voters will decide on Election Day whether they wish to uphold a law banning gender discrimination in public accommodations.

This is an all-out assault on the transgender community in the United States, and it has sinister implications for other vulnerable groups as well. It will hit low-income trans people especially hard, amplifying already existing economic inequalities.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

“People with low or no income already struggle to acquire adequate representation to challenge their rights in court,” Harper Jean Tobin, director of policy at the National Center for Transgender Equality, said via email. “They could potentially be impacted by just the misinformation spread by this proposal. The proposal doesn’t actually rewrite laws, but it could embolden many employers or doctors or schools to disregard the rights of trans people. Those with resources enough to speak to a lawyer are more likely to know when their rights are being violated, while those who cannot might find themselves without much recourse.”

According to a 2015 report from the Movement Advancement Project and the Center for American Progress, trans people face a “financial penalty,” paying more to access health care and other services, from credit to fair housing, than their cis counterparts. They are more likely to live in poverty, with 15 percent of trans people making less than $10,000 annually in contrast with 4 percent of cis people. These numbers are even more stark for black (34 percent versus 9 percent) and Latinx (28 percent versus 5 percent) trans people.

The community overall experiences an unemployment rate double that of cis people. LGBQT people also rely more on threatened benefits programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

This state of economic precarity has a concrete impact on trans lives. For instance, the National Center for Transgender Equality has found that just 21 percent of trans people have changed over all their identification documents, due to high costs and regressive policies such as refusals to allow trans people to update identification or birth certificates without proof of surgery in some states. The lack of consistent and accurate identification can fuel discrimination, such as refusals to hire people when their identification outs them as transgender, or denial of benefits, with 16 percent of U.S. Transgender Survey respondents reporting benefits issues related to mismatching identification.

Financial instability also amplifies widespread housing, employment, education, and health care discrimination against trans people. 23 percent of trans people faced “some form of housing discrimination” in the previous year, according to the U.S. Trans Survey, while 67 percent reported being passed over for hiring, fired, or denied promotions because of their gender identity. One in four experienced problems with their health insurance. Low-income people may not be able to “go somewhere else” to access services, cannot afford alternative housing, and cannot fund litigation in cases of discrimination.

In a landscape without comprehensive and explicit civil rights protections, and with federal agencies not only refusing to enforce existing protections but actively promoting discrimination against the trans community, low-income trans people’s financial disadvantage will become much more glaring. The administration is already not enforcing Affordable Care Act protections barring discrimination on the basis of gender identity, making it challenging to access not only transition services but permitting other forms of health care discrimination; this kind of policy could make this problem even worse. Similarly, barriers to accessing identification could leave more trans people struggling to access benefits they need to thrive, such as subsidized housing, SNAP, and Medicaid.

Just as a flood of bathroom bills in 2015 and 2016 emboldened transphobic people and policymakers, moves like this fuel hatred and contribute to the distribution of misinformation about what it means to be transgender and how trans people interact with society. Legitimizing transphobia on the institutional level encourages harassment and abuse of trans people, which harms vulnerable trans populations such as sex workers, women of color, immigrants, disabled people, youth, and low-income people.

Targeting the trans community could also lay the groundwork for disrupting other civil rights, with the federal government’s pursuit of a “right to discriminate” becoming a blueprint for attacking groups such as those who are homeless on the streets of San Francisco, Native American and fighting for the right to vote in Utah, or lesbians who want to adopt a child.

The highest-profile spat has been between Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, the former of whom gave millions of dollars to the campaign to pass Proposition C, while the latter has derided the initiative as “quick acts to make us feel good for one moment in time.”

But this debate isn’t really about tech companies and the political preferences of their wealthy CEOs. Proposition C is about our priorities at a time when wealth and power are more concentrated in America than they have been in decades.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Were Proposition C to pass, taxes would increase for 300 or so of the city’s biggest businesses, raising $250-$300 million  for homelessness supports. (Last year, the city spent $380 million on homelessness programs, so this proposal would increase that funding by at least 65 percent.) At least half of the new funds must be dedicated to permanent housing, which research shows is the most effective way to combat homelessness, with the remainder split between mental health care, shelters, and prevention efforts.

“The idea is simple. It’s about taxing our largest and wealthiest corporations and redistributing that to our most vulnerable communities,” said Sam Lew, policy director at the Coalition on Homelessness. “The everyday San Franciscan won’t be impacted by this tax. It’s really those who are making the most profit and asking them to pay their fair share and give back to the community.”

If this sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because it is. Seattle’s city council passed and then rescinded a corporate tax to bolster funding for homelessness prevention in April, backtracking after the city’s biggest companies — and most prominently Amazon — objected and threatened to put a direct vote over the issue onto the ballot in November. Amazon also halted a construction project in the city during the dispute, threatening to blunt its economic activity if the tax remained in place.

“I and other people out on the streets have reached the conclusion that this is not a winnable battle at this time. The opposition has unlimited resources,” said one city council member who voted first for the tax and then for its repeal.

A similar dynamic is at play in San Francisco ahead of November’s vote. The threat from big businesses, such as Square, Lyft, Stripe and the others who have donated to a “No on C” campaign,  is that Proposition C would kill jobs or deter companies from coming to the Bay Area without solving the homelessness problem. However, a report from the city controller found that were the tax enacted, there would only be 725-875 fewer jobs in the city over the next 20 years, amounting to just 0.1 percent of total employment, while the measure would provide housing for thousands of people.

One of the selling points for Proposition C campaigners is that the measure would simply offset some of the tax benefits that corporations received in 2017 courtesy of the Trump administration and conservatives in Congress. It would also begin to counteract some of the vast under-investments that the federal government has made in affordable housing funding since the Reagan administration, says Lew.

“Because of that huge divestment in public housing, there’s been an increase in homelessness across the United States and there hasn’t been a reinvestment in that in the last 30-35 years,” she said. “What we’re saying in San Francisco is that we’re going to be leaders in providing housing for people who need it. We’re actually going to spend the money that we need to spend to house people.”

San Francisco has about 7,500 people who are homeless, according to the latest data, which is almost certainly an undercount due to the inherent difficulties in accessing the homeless population. People experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are also disproportionately people of color or members of the LGBTQ community, per the city’s most recent survey.

Homelessness in both San Francisco and the U.S. has risen in recent years for many reasons, but one of them is growing economic inequality. In California and San Francisco in particular, that inequality is boosted in no small part by the presence of America’s tech titans. Plenty of research has shown that tech clustering is responsible for the growing wage gap in big cities, and for the divergence between wages in those cities and elsewhere. And that clustering didn’t happen completely organically: San Francisco provided tax breaks to tech companies that settled in the city, with one known as the “Twitter tax break” saving companies $34 million in 2014 alone.

Tech workers, especially at the richer end of the income scale, have seen their incomes rise in California. However, everyone else hasn’t been so fortunate:  According to a recent report, wages for 90 percent of California workers are lower than they were 20 years ago.  There’s also no shortage of stories about other inequalities in the Bay Area, on everything from food to transportation to education.

Even a decent paying job is no guarantee of affordable housing, thanks in part to the tech-industry driving gentrification and increased housing prices in California’s major cities. Average rent in San Francisco varies depending on how it is calculated, but many analyses place it above $3,000 per month. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, renting a modest two-bedroom home in the city requires a wage of more than $60 per hour.

These figures, not which tech CEO said what on Twitter, get at the essence of Proposition C. The only question that really matters is: Will San Francisco will ask its wealthiest corporations to pay slightly more so that thousands of currently homeless people can have a roof over their heads?

“We’re on this national platform now because two CEOs of tech companies are fighting about whether it should be passed,” said Lew. “But at the end of the day we’re fighting for a measure that’s going to save lives regardless of what billionaires are thinking.”

Under the Obama administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau attempted to rein in abusive payday lending, by, among other measures, forcing lenders to ensure borrowers had the means to pay back their loans. The Trump administration, under interim CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney, is looking to roll back those rules and give payday lenders, who as an industry donated significant amounts of money to Mulvaney when he was a congressman, more room to operate. A high-profile rule proffered by the CFPB to govern payday loans is under review, and Mulvaney’s CFPB has also dropped cases the bureau had previously pursued against payday lenders.

Payday lenders have taken notice, and are already adapting their business to evade regulation. Meanwhile, small-dollar, high-interest lending has migrated to other parts of the financial industry, including traditional banks. Banks aren’t actually calling their loans “payday loans” — preferring names like “Simple Loan” — but the problems, including high costs and the potential for creating a debilitating cycle of debt, are largely the same.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Payday loans are short-term loans, so named because they are meant to be paid back when the borrower earns her next paycheck. The interest rates on these loans are high, running up to 400 percent or more. (For comparison’s sake, a borrower will pay about 5 percent interest on a prime mortgage today, and between 15 and 20 percent on a credit card.) Payday lenders tend to cluster in areas where residents are disproportionately low-income or people of color, preying on economic insecurity and those for whom traditional lending and banking services are unavailable or insufficient.

It’s not only those high interest rates that make the loans lucrative for lenders and damaging for borrowers. Much of the income payday lenders derive comes from repeat business from a small population of borrowers who take out loan after loan after loan, engaging in so-called “churn.” According to the CFPB, more than 75 percent of loan fees come from borrowers who use 10 or more loans per year. These borrowers wrack up big fees that outweigh the economic benefit provided by the loans and become stuck in a cycle of debt.

This is serious money we’re talking about: Prior to the Obama administration’s attempt to more strongly regulate the industry, payday lenders  made some $9.2 billion annually. That total is down to about $5 billion today, even before the Obama team’s rules have fully gone into effect. Meanwhile, many states have also taken positive steps in recent years to regulate payday lending. (The loans are also outright banned in some states.)

However, that doesn’t mean payday lending is going out of style.

For starters, old payday lenders have revamped their products, offering loans that are paid in installments — unlike old payday loans that are paid back all at once — but that still carry high interest rates. Revenue from that sort of lending increased by more than $2 billion between 2012 and 2016. The CFPB’s rules don’t cover installment-based loans.

“They claim that these loans are different, are safer, are more affordable, but the reality is they carry all the same markers of predatory loans,” said Diane Standaert, director of state policy at the Center for Responsible Lending. These markers include their high cost, the ability of lenders to access borrowers’ bank accounts, and that they are structured to keep borrowers in a cycle of debt. “We see all of those similar characteristics that have plagued payday loans,” Standaert said.

Meanwhile, big banks are beginning to experiment with small-dollar, short-term loans. U.S. Bank is the first to roll out a payday loan-like product for its customers, lending them up to $1,000 short-term, with interest rates that climb to 70 percent and higher. (Think $12 to $15 in charges per $100 borrowed.)

Previously, American’s big financial institutions were very much discouraged from getting into small-dollar, high-interest lending. When several major American banks, including Wells Fargo and Fifth Third, rolled out short-term lending products prior to 2013, they were stopped by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks. “[These] products share a number of characteristics with traditional payday loans, including high fees, short repayment periods, and inadequate attention to the ability to repay.  As such, these products can trap customers in a cycle of high-cost debt that they are unable to repay,” said the OCC at the time.

In October 2017, however, the OCC — now under the auspices of the Trump administration — reversed that ruling. In May 2018, it then actively encouraged national banks to get into the short-term lending business, arguing that it made more sense for banks to compete with other small-dollar lenders.  “I personally believe that banks can provide that in a safer, sound, more economically efficient manner,” said the head of the OCC.

However, in a letter to many of Washington’s financial regulators, a coalition of consumer and civil rights groups warned against this change, arguing that “Bank payday loans are high-cost debt traps, just like payday loans from non-banks.” Though the terms of these loans are certainly better than those at a traditional payday lender, that doesn’t make them safe and fair alternatives.

Per a recent poll, more than half of millennials have considered using a payday loan, while 13 percent have actually used one. That number makes sense in a world in which fees at traditional banks are rising and more and more workers are being pushed into the so-called “gig economy” or other alternative labor arrangements that don’t pay on a bi-weekly schedule. A quick infusion of cash to pay a bill or deal with an unexpected expense can be appealing, even with all the downsides payday loans bring.

Payday lenders seem well aware of the state of regulatory flux in which they find themselves; they have made more than $2 million in political donations ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, the most they’ve made in a non-presidential year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

That’s real money, but it’s nowhere near as much as borrowers stand to lose if payday lending continues to occur in the same old way. In fact, a 2016 study found that consumers in states without payday lending save $2.2 billion in fees annually. That’s 2.2 billion reasons to ensure that small-dollar lenders, big and small, aren’t able to go back to business as usual.

So now it’s time for the coup de grace: An amendment enshrining those tax breaks for the state’s wealthiest residents into the state constitution.

In November, North Carolina residents will be voting on a ballot initiative that would amend the state’s constitution to cap its income tax at 7 percent, down from a current cap of 10 percent. Considering that North Carolina’s income tax currently tops out at 5.499 percent, and is scheduled to fall further to 5.25 percent next year, that may not seem like a big deal. But it is.

First, the background. The change to a flat tax helped those at the top of the income scale, who saw their rates drop the most. Along with a host of other tax cutting measures, including a corporate income tax reduction, it cost the state a big chunk of money.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

“Since 2012, when Republicans took full control of the legislature and governorship for the first time in modern history, they’ve been on a tax cutting rampage,” said Meg Wiehe, a North Carolina native and deputy director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “The state will be about $3.6 billion shorter in revenue than it would have been otherwise, which is a pretty significant difference in a state with a general fund of just around $21 billion.”

By pushing a cap on the income tax into the Constitution, lawmakers hope to lock those reductions in, making future legislators go through the same long amendment process in order to raise taxes or add progressivity back into the code. (Amendments to the North Carolina constitution are placed on the ballot via a three-fifths vote of both houses in the state legislature and require approval by voters, whereas legislation can be passed by a simple majority of lawmakers.)

As recently as 2013, the top income tax rate in North Carolina was 7.75 percent, so it’s not out of the question that lawmakers would want to implement an increase from today’s levels. Even setting the cap at 7 percent was a compromise of sorts among the Tar Heel State’s Republicans: Many wanted to cap the income tax at its current level, or even below that, forcing a constitutionally-mandated tax reduction.

A cap poses several problems, in addition to the simple unfairness of leaving such a low tax rate on the wealthy in a state where more than 100 percent of the income gains since 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent of the population (meaning those at the other end of the income spectrum actually lost ground). For starters, it could undermine important state investments, as Alexandra Forter Sirota, director at the North Carolina Justice Center’s Budget and Tax Center, explained.

“To maintain current service levels for our population, we won’t have enough revenue under our tax code in 2019,” she said. “So they’ll have to either cut services or raise revenue or some combination of both.” And those cuts tend to fall disproportionately on low-income communities and people of color, she said, as will potential revenue raisers if the state has to resort to fees or sales taxes in lieu of being able to raise income taxes.

Already, that dynamic has been evident in the state. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted recently, spending on public colleges in North Carolina is still nearly 20 percent below where it was before the 2008 recession. Previous rounds of tax cutting have made it so that North Carolina can’t raise K-12 education funding, which is already among the lowest in the nation.

This problem will be magnified when another economic downturn inevitably comes. “There have been key times even in recent history when the state, in an emergency situation, has relied on the wealthiest taxpayers to pay more to help ensure that critical services don’t have to be deeply cut,” explained Wiehe. “Future lawmakers who maybe would prefer to use the income tax as their tool wouldn’t have that available to them.”

Case in point, the state enacted a temporary top tax rate of 8.25 percent on the state’s richest residents in response to the Great Recession – helping to preserve funding for public schools and public health programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program – a  move which would be rendered much more difficult if lawmakers needed to spend time getting voters to approve a new amendment.

North Carolina has been a political battleground in recent years, the quintessential “purple” state that is home to the weekly Moral Mondays march, but with a state legislature controlled by conservatives. In addition to the tax cap, voters there will be assessing amendments that would restrict voting rights and remove some of the (currently Democratic) governor’s powers. Locking in tax cuts for the wealthy fits right in.

According to a recent Elon University poll, 56 percent of North Carolinians support the tax cap amendment as written, with 15 percent opposing it. However, after being provided an explanation that includes the amendment’s possible adverse effects, the gap falls to 45-27. That has Sirota optimistic that voters grasp what’s at stake.

“I think that North Carolinians are incredibly smart about this issue right now,” said Sirota. “They understand that since 2013 the vast majority have not seen a big difference in their taxes, but they have seen their communities struggle with having to figure out how to meet needs.”

Just a 20-minute drive away, in the Uptown/Carrollton neighborhoods near Tulane and Loyola Universities, that same child could expect to live 20 years longer and take home roughly $53,000 more in annual salary.

These communities are just six miles apart, yet designed and resourced in such a way that there’s a world of difference between the lives their residents can hope to have. Being raised in different neighborhoods can determine everything from the jobs you have access to, the schools your kids attend, and the groceries you can buy.

In 2015, the Obama administration created the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule to fix this disparity. But Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has moved to indefinitely delay implementation and is proposing drastic changes that analysts predict will all but gut its efficacy.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Why this matters.

While the idea of furthering fair housing appears in the 1968 Fair Housing Act, it wasn’t meaningfully enforced over the last half century. So under the 2015 rule, communities that receive funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development are required to develop action plans to not only remedy their existing racial and ethnic segregation and neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, but to also ensure that every U.S. community is equipped with the resources and opportunities to meet their residents’ housing needs.

As nationwide data released this month grimly reinforced, the neighborhood or ZIP code you grow up in, more than ever, has a dramatic impact on whether you earn more or less than your parents did. Researchers found this impact is particularly acute for black boys who, regardless of their families’ income, face the worst outlook for escaping poverty, building wealth, and doing better than their parents.

This is merely one aspect of a racial wealth gap that has persisted since the formal founding of this nation. Today, a typical black family with an income of $50,000 lives in a poorer neighborhood than a white family earning $20,000. Government-sponsored public policies intentionally crafted to hold back people of color and cut off their communities from wealth-building opportunities, through practices like segregation and redlining, continue to drive these disparities.

What the rule was starting to do, before HUD attacked it.

The 2015 rule was meant to begin addressing this man-made problem. And early results were promising. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor of Law and Urban Planning, Justin Steil, pointed out, several municipalities were beginning to create meaningful, measurable goals as part of the new rule.

For example, New Orleans committed to developing 400 units of affordable housing in Tremé, a neighborhood near the French Quarter that is quickly gentrifying, and Seattle proposed expanding its housing affordability requirements into new areas of the city.

Other regions’ goals included increasing access to existing opportunities, such as Chester County, Pennsylvania, which committed to building 200 affordable housing units in neighborhoods already well-resourced with good jobs, quality education programs and health care services, as well as access to other essential amenities such as grocery stores, parks, and community centers. Paramount, California proposed changing its zoning codes to increase housing accessibility for people with disabilities. Wilmington, North Carolina’s goals prioritized workforce development via job training and placement programs tailored to its local economy.

Dozens of communities had submitted plans under the rule. And yet HUD suddenly and without warning removed a key assessment tool from its website in May that communities were using to shape their goals.

Carson cites a “high failure rate” of analyses submitted by communities among his reasons for delaying the rule, but that justification isn’t valid. Of the 49 analyses that communities submitted to HUD between 2015 and 2018, 65 percent were accepted immediately. The remaining 35 percent were returned to communities with detailed guidance about how to fix the problems; almost all have since been corrected, re-submitted, and accepted by HUD.

This degree of success is remarkable considering the rule was being newly implemented. And, contrary to Carson’s reasoning, the fact that a few of the initial submissions were sent back to communities for corrections signals that the new rule’s standards are exacting and meaningful, and should not be interpreted as evidence of failure.

Indefinitely suspending the rule and eliminating the federal assessment tools that have been helping local communities fight segregation as well as identify, increase and ensure fair housing opportunities for all means HUD has brought this long-overdue and much-needed progress to a halt.

What now?

America continues to grapple with the ongoing byproducts of state-sanctioned separate and unequal neighborhoods that set their residents on very disparate and divergent achievement paths. The rule that the Trump and Carson HUD aim to derail and ultimately demolish is designed to tear down those longstanding structural barriers and shrink the ever-widening gap between the haves and have nots.

It is important to keep in mind that the rule is not only focused on stopping segregation and discrimination but also on actively investing in neighborhoods where people currently live so that those communities are well resourced. The bottom line is that people should not be forced to move away from their community and existing social networks in order to access the basic supports necessary to have a good life.

The department is required to accept public comments until Oct. 15 about these proposed changes. Any member of the public — individuals, organizations, or community groups — can submit comments and let their voices be heard on the importance and fate of this equity tool.

Editor’s note: The public can submit comments on the proposed rule in the Federal Register. For additional instructions, see the guide produced by the Center for Effective Government.

Overturning Initiative 77, which would gradually raise the tipped minimum wage from $3.89 per hour to the full minimum wage by 2026, would be a tough blow for tipped workers. They’re already three times more likely to live in poverty than other workers—and those odds get worse for people of color.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

New analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that in D.C., people of color make up 70 percent of the tipped workforce. This alone ensures that communities of color are most affected by Initiative 77.  Moreover, when we analyzed wage gaps for full-time, year-round workers in tipped occupations (referred to here as “tipped workers”), we found that tipped workers of color also earn significantly less than white tipped workers in D.C.

Among full-time, year-round tipped workers in the District, the median annual wages of Hispanic tipped workers were $25,760—$10,737 less than the wages of non-Hispanic white tipped workers. Non-Hispanic black tipped workers made even less at $25,345, a gap of $11,152. This discrepancy is due in part to the nature of tipping itself, which creates a power structure that permits discrimination to blossom: Academic researchers found that black servers receive tips that average 15 percent to 25 percent less than white servers. The result is a wage gap so big that it could cover nearly 6 months of child care, or more than 8 months of rent, in one of the most expensive cities in the country.

This sizable gaps in tipped workers’ wages mirrors broader economic inequalities in the District, which has one of the nation’s largest racial income gaps. New data out this week from the Census Bureau show that while median household income for white families was more than $134,000, the median black household income was just over $42,000—less than one-third as much. And although at nearly $85,000 per year, D.C.’s Hispanic families have the highest household income of Hispanics across the nation’s 50 biggest cities, it still leaves them nearly $50,000 below white families.

Given the disparities they face, it’s not surprising that communities of color came out strongly in favor of giving tipped workers a raise. Across D.C.’s eight wards, support for Initiative 77 was highly correlated with the share of residents of color. In Wards 7 and 8, where more than 90 percent of residents are black, Initiative 77 passed with more than 60 percent of the vote. The only ward where initiative 77 did not win the majority of the vote was Ward 3—the whitest, and wealthiest, ward in the district.

In other words, if D.C. Council members reverse Initiative 77, they’ll not only be disproportionately hurting D.C.’s communities of color—they’ll also be directly silencing these communities’ voices by disregarding their votes.

Methods: In our analysis, which employs the 2012-2016 American Community Survey,  we used the same “customarily tipped occupations” that the D.C. government used it its minimum wage impact study. This definition is very similar but not identical to the occupations used by the Economic Policy Institute in their analysis. Notes: In this analysis, “workforce” includes all those who are employed.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Roughly half of the difference is because the Trump administration is measuring poverty with a federal survey that tracks household reports of spending, including spending financed by credit cards and other debt, rather than income. Luke Shaefer and Joshua Rivera at the University of Michigan have already detailed some of the problems with this approach, but in short, the measurement just doesn’t line up with any of the struggles we associate with poverty. In years when we know that more families had trouble paying for basic necessities (for example, during the Great Recession), the measurement the Trump administration used (labeled “consumption” in the chart below) shows a decline in the poverty rate. Every other measurement shows an increase.

The other half of the difference is because the administration is using a poverty line that will strike most Americans as far too low to be plausible: a mere $18,000 for a family of four in 2018. That’s $7,000 lower than the estimate used by other government entities, and about $15,000 less than the income that most Americans think a family would need to not be considered poor, according to public opinion research conducted by the conservative think tank AEI.

The public’s opinion is backed up by market data on the cost of housing and other necessities. A couple with two children will need to spend about $800 a month—$9,000 a year—to purchase the food necessary for a nutritious diet according to USDA’s “low-cost” food plan. The Trump poverty line would leave that family with $750 a month to cover the rest of their bills. If they live in Ohio, where living costs are below average compared to other states, that won’t even cover rent. Fair market rent for a three-bedroom apartment costs more than $750 a month in every Ohio county. That means this family, who the administration is arguing is barely poor, cannot afford housing, transportation, child care, utilities, student loans, clothing, or any other bills, if they also want to be able to eat.

The closest the administration comes to acknowledging the public implausibility of its poverty line is when it notes that “poverty thresholds are arbitrary.” It’s not exactly a reassuring defense. Moreover, it boggles the mind to hear the administration claim that the Trump poverty line is both “properly measured” and “arbitrary.”

To be sure, it’s impossible to pinpoint the precise amount of income needed to not live in poverty in 2018 terms. Establishing a standardized poverty line, even if we all agree on what poverty means, is always going to involve some subjectivity and discretion. But that is not the same as drawing an “arbitrary” line.

At the very minimum, to properly measure what it takes to live at a dignified and minimally decent level in 2018 requires a poverty line that can be defended in terms of what it reasonably means to be poor today. Despite impressive technological advancements, a family of four still can’t take their $18,000 and travel back in time to live in 1960s.

Policy makers have long recognized this and adjusted eligibility thresholds for a number of income-tested services and benefits to keep pace with common sense. For example, a married couple with two children is eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) until their income is over $50,000. In most states, the upper income eligibility limit for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) reaches a similar level.

More likely than not, the Trump poverty line isn’t arbitrary at all. The administration and their right-wing allies are very determined to cut and impose punitive restrictions on pretty much every public service and benefit that goes to working-class and middle-class people based on their incomes. Artificially lowering the poverty line would help them do that—in effect, it’s an attempt to change the conversation. Instead of a continued focus on material hardship and the economy, the administration wants us to think that bad people on “welfare” are the real problem. Trump has explicitly said as much in discussions around benefits, describing people who receive them as lazy and having ”no intention of working at all,” yet “making more money and doing better than the person that’s working his and her ass off.”

And so, Trump’s argument goes, the issue isn’t poverty—that doesn’t exist. The issue is fictional freeloaders, and cuts to Medicaid and SNAP are the punishment they deserve.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

In 2001, three intellectually disabled D.C. residents brought suit against the city in Doe ex rel. Tarlow v. D.C, after they were subjected to at least three involuntary procedures: two abortions and one elective eye surgery. Ultimately, the district court agreed that these women’s due process rights had been violated and that “constitutionally adequate procedures” had not been followed. The District Court ruled for the plaintiffs and held that D.C.  must make “documented reasonable efforts to communicate” with patients and if unsuccessful, the government had to take into account the “totality of circumstances” before proceeding to ensure any decision is in the best interest of the patient. This decision codified patients’ right to self-determination, and struck down the practice of elective surgeries without consent from the patients at stake.

On appeal, Judge Kavanaugh vacated the District Court’s injunction, arguing that “accepting the wishes of patients who lack, and have always lacked the mental capacity to make medical decisions does not make logical sense.” That stands in contrast to even the most conservative interpretations of the laws that existed at the time, which required two separate health professionals to determine whether a patient had the capacity to make medical decisions before every procedure. The lifetime pass Kavanaugh seems to be arguing for, which would allow doctors to perform any procedures they wanted on a person who was once ruled unfit, does not exist.

One hundred years ago, Kavanaugh’s ruling would have been at home on the Supreme Court. In the 1920’s, in the famous 8-1 ruling of Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court found a Virginia statute that allowed for the sexual sterilization of a third generation, “feebleminded” women was constitutional because “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

For context, when the Supreme Court made that ruling, John Scopes had recently been put on trial for teaching evolution in public schools. Penicillin hadn’t been invented. It was still illegal in most states to marry someone of a different race. There was no such thing as a chocolate chip cookie, Scotch tape, or the Golden Gate Bridge. We didn’t know Pluto existed.

We’ve made progress since then. Twenty-eight years ago, the Americans with Disabilities Act granted people with disabilities access to society. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act expanded the right to an education 43 years ago, and the Olmstead v. L.C. decision gave disabled people the right to live in their communities 19 years ago. All that will be meaningless the moment Kavanaugh is given a seat on the Supreme Court that allows him to rule that disabled Americans are not capable of deciding what’s best for them. It’s not hard to imagine that happening. He could rule that it’s okay for teachers to use seclusion and restraint because they know what’s best for the treatment of disabled children in school. He could say that community living isn’t the best option for someone successfully living in a home of their own because that’s what the nursing home lobby says.

As both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate gear up for what is likely to be a long hearing process, the 57 million Americans with disabilities are bracing themselves for the negative consequences of Judge Kavanaugh’s appointment. If that happens, the disability community’s history of activism in all forms—from their work to preserve the ACA, to fighting to end the use of electric shock therapy on children, to pushing for a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work—shows that when it’s most needed, the moral arc of the universe can be bent into a ramp to achieve justice.

Today’s announcement, published in the Wall Street Journal by Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Acting Administrator of the E.P.A. Andrew Wheeler, is part of a plan that was set in motion by Wheeler’s predecessor, Scott Pruitt. In just over a year as head of the E.P.A., Pruitt managed to roll back, reconsider, delay, or otherwise tinker with more than 14 safeguards that protect everything from the air we breathe to the water we drink. In total, taking away all of these protections will cost Americans  upwards of $260 billion annually in climate, health, and fuel impacts—that’s $2,000 in costs annually for every American household.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Here’s how the cost breaks down specifically for today’s clean cars rollback announcement:

The average American family will pay an additional $500 per year in fuel costs.

The current rules require automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles by 2025. But with today’s announcement, the standards will be frozen at 2020 levels—meaning that fuel economy for new cars will stay lower, and Americans will be stuck with cars that consume more gasoline.

That increased cost to individuals will in turn cost the U.S. economy more than $450 billion over the next thirty years. Each family’s increased fuel expenses are ultimately withheld from the economy, and will grow with each year the standards are not in place and fuel savings are relinquished.

If the existing standards were left in place, Americans would have saved $1.7 trillion on fuel. Owners of model year 2025 cars were likely to see a personal savings of $2,800 over the lifetime of their vehicles compared to 2020 vehicles. For light trucks, owners would save $4,500.

The country will take on another $5.5-$7.9 billion in additional costs from worsening air pollution.

Already, 25 million Americans, including 6 million children, suffer from asthma; that’s around $81 billion annually in medical costs and lost work and school days nationwide. With a rollback of these standards, Americans would be stuck with the bill for an additional $5.5-7.9 billion each year in health and climate impacts. Those impacts can be anything from additional medical costs associated with bad air quality (treating asthma and purchasing inhalers), to costs associated with climate change (such as damage from extreme weather).

The country will also lose about 60,000 jobs.

According to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the United States could lose 60,000 jobs in 2025 as we turn over leadership on efficiency technology to other countries like China. With the clean car standards in place, the economy was projected to add nearly 100,000 jobs by 2025.

The great irony here is that the administration claims that the regulation would “impose significant costs on American consumers and eliminate jobs.” But basic math says the plan to roll it back will hurt a whole lot more.

While retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy generally has a pro-business voting record, he has often broken with the conservative wing of the court on civil rights cases and issues of environmental law. At times, this led Kennedy to rule in favor of civil rights and against powerful interests.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

With Kavanaugh, there are few exceptions to a reliably anti-worker and anti-consumer record. In an analysis of 286 opinions authored by Kavanaugh as a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge, Adam Feldman of Empirical SCOTUS found that Kavanaugh has “written almost entirely in favor of big businesses, employers in employment disputes, and against defendants in criminal cases.” In fact, according to a leaked document obtained by POLITICO, the Trump administration recently asked corporate interest groups for help with Kavanaugh’s confirmation, circulating a document touting that, “Kavanaugh helped kill President Obama’s most destructive new environmental rules” and that he “has overruled federal regulators 75 times on cases involving clean air, consumer protections, net neutrality and other issues.”

One of Kavanaugh’s recent decisions, for example, concerned the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that has resulted in nearly $12 billion in relief for consumers who were duped by banks or credit card companies. Kavanaugh found that the entire CFPB was unconstitutional, and even questioned a Supreme Court ruling from 1935 that upheld the constitutionality of independent agencies. His decision was overturned two years later by the full court, who called Kavanaugh’s ruling “a wholesale attack on independent agencies…that, if accepted, would broadly transform modern government.”

And in 2012, Kavanaugh dissented from a D.C. Circuit decision finding that the State Department had inappropriately fired an employee based solely on her age. Kavanaugh argued that the State Department’s decision did not constitute age discrimination. Even though the agency itself did not dispute the reason for the employee’s termination, Kavanaugh said it was “not a close call.” As the majority wrote, “the necessary consequence of the Department’s position is that it is also free from any statutory bar against terminating an employee…solely on account of his disability or race or religion or sex.” In other words, Kavanaugh’s ruling would have also allowed the agency to discriminate against people with disabilities, racial and religious minorities, and women.

And Kavanaugh’s most prominent positions—his decision to block an unaccompanied young immigrant woman from having an abortion immediately or his criticism of John Roberts’ decision upholding the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—would disproportionately harm low-income people. The most frequently cited reason among women getting an abortion is that having a child “would interfere with school, work or other responsibilities, and that they could not afford a child.” Indeed, when women are denied abortions, they are more than three times more likely to experience poverty two years later. And the antipoverty effects of the ACA are undeniable. Medicaid—which the law expanded—is one of the most effective antipoverty programs in the country, reducing child poverty by 5.3 percentage points. And although the uninsured rate has increased slightly since Trump took office, it is still significantly lower than before the bill was passed.

But perhaps no decision better illustrates Kavanaugh’s ideology than this: in an incident made famous by the documentary “Blackfish,” Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau died after being attacked by a killer whale—making her the third Sea World worker killed by the same whale. When the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Sea World $75,000 for safety violations, the company appealed to the D.C. Court of Appeals, where Kavanaugh served. The panel upheld OSHA’s fine, but Kavanaugh dissented. In his view, “Many sports events and entertainment shows can be extremely dangerous for the participants.” But, he reasoned, society should not “paternalistically decide that the participants in these…activities must be protected from themselves.” Kavanaugh’s position would undermine the entire foundation of workplace safety regulations.

As Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress notes, Trump delegated the task of identifying Supreme Court nominees to the rightwing Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, organizations that have made it their missions to dismantle federal regulations—everything from labor law to consumer protections to environmental rules. Kavanaugh’s record suggests he would do just that.

In case after case, Kavanaugh exhibits a preference for the more powerful party—whether corporations, agencies, or the criminal justice system—over the less powerful—whether consumers, workers, or victims of pollution.

That alone should give every Senator pause before they vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination.

This article was originally published on Spotlight on Poverty.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is battling his Democratic colleagues in the state legislature over this very premise. The legislature is hesitating on Murphy’s proposal for a millionaire tax hike, restoring the sales tax to a pre-Gov. Chris Christie rate of 7 percent, and an end to budget gimmicks that made his predecessor’s fiscal plans seem more responsible than they were. At stake are investments in public education, transit, affordable child care, and other pillars of economic security. The showdown couldn’t be more relevant for antipoverty advocates or anyone interested in a more equitable economy.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The governor’s argument is simple: Lawmakers are constitutionally obligated to balance the state budget. If New Jersey residents want to make these fundamental investments—and they do—there must be adequate and sustainable revenues.

So straightforward, and yet …

Many lawmakers still don’t want to raise taxes on the wealthy, in part because they fear it will cause those residents to relocate. However, research shows that millionaires are less likely to leave a state than middle- and working-class families, and tax hikes on wealthy residents have a negligible impact on their moves out of state. Additionally, despite overwhelming popular support for asking the wealthy to pay their fair share, too many Democratic elected officials still worry that they will pay a political price for raising taxes.

But if you don’t raise taxes on the wealthy, you’re left with … budget gimmicks. You end up using one-time revenue sources such as draining funds that were earmarked for the Clean Energy Fund, or fuzzy math instead of transparent accounting. People deserve a government that plans for the long-term funding of its core functions and obligations, instead of one that reels from budget crisis to budget crisis, leaving constituents uncertain at best or pessimistic. People also respect a politician who is honest about the trade-offs and implications of budget decisions.

In the case of this budget fight, the stakes couldn’t be more clear: New Jersey’s millionaires just got an average federal tax cut of $21,700 courtesy of the Trump Tax Scam. In contrast, in the 8 years leading up to Murphy’s election, his predecessor cut $9 billion from public schools, which resulted in axing academic and extracurricular programs, teacher layoffs, and increased property taxes for working-class and middle-class families. If the choice is between protecting New Jersey millionaires from a negligible tax increase or restoring funds for public education, health care, transit, and other basic needs, there is a clear answer that is good politics and smart policy.

Despite low national unemployment, people are still rightfully worried about their own family’s ability to afford necessities like health care or save for a future home or college education. And while there is positive GDP growth, people know that the rich are getting richer while the rest of us aren’t—nearly half of Americans can’t afford an unexpected $400 expense. If advocates, policymakers, elected officials, and others want to connect with the American people and address their economic struggles, they need to be straightforward in their message and forward-looking in their policies. Rather than protecting millionaires due to unwarranted fears about a political price, let’s be clear about what it will take to fund the government that the people want and deserve.

The trouble is, there isn’t much actual information beyond the signage—and the information being shared isn’t backed by research.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

D.C.’s overall minimum wage is $12.50 per hour, and will increase to $15 by 2020. By law, employers have to ensure that tipped workers make that amount as well—by combining the base wage of $3.33 with their tips—and if workers’ wages are too low, employers are required to supplement them. In practice, employers often fail to do this. Research by the Economic Policy Institute found that recent Department of Labor investigations of close to 9,000 restaurants resulted in workers receiving nearly $5.5 million in back pay because of tipped wage violations.

Low wages have left many tipped workers struggling to make ends meet. Roughly 1 in 4 D.C. bartenders, servers, manicurists and pedicurists, and shampooers made $11.71 per hour or less in 2017*—well below a living wage in the district. D.C.’s tipped workers are also nearly twice as likely to live in poverty compared to the city’s overall workforce.

The concerns with the tipped wage go beyond just money—the power dynamics of the tipping system allow discrimination and inequality to flourish. One study showed that black servers receive tips that average 15 percent to 25 percent less than white servers, and in D.C., tipped female workers are twice as likely as tipped male workers to live in poverty. It also paves the way for sexual harassment: 1 in 7 sexual harassment charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are in the accommodation and food service industry.

In contrast, research shows that the eight states without a tipped minimum wage have higher average earnings and lower poverty rates among tipped workers, without hurting their employment rates. Specifically, in equal treatment states, tipped workers’ median earnings are 14 percent higher and the growth of restaurants and restaurant employment is more robust compared with states that use the federal minimum tipped wage of $2.13 per hour. Research also suggests that abolishing the tipped minimum wage may be particularly advantageous for women, as the average wage gap for women tipped workers in equal treatment states is one-third smaller than the wage gap for women tipped workers in states that maintain the federal tipped minimum wage.

While the evidence is clear on the positive impacts for D.C.’s lower-wage tipped workers, the District’s high-end restaurant and bar scene, with its higher-paid workforce, has been the center of attention during much of the debate, with figures ranging from Mayor Muriel Bowser to Chef José Andrés voicing concerns that the unified minimum wage will lead to higher prices and lower pay.

It’s tough to envision that high-end establishments’ well-off clientele, wine-and-dine lobbyists, and company-credit-card-wielding business travelers will suddenly become highly price-sensitive if the cost of a meal rises slightly. And any increase would likely be relatively small: Labor costs only account for an average of 30 percent of restaurant operating costs, and businesses absorb higher minimum wages through reductions in costly turnover and increases in productivity. It’s also unlikely diners would compensate for higher prices by offering a smaller gratuity: data on tipping show that tipping behavior in equal treatment states is virtually indistinguishable from tipping behavior in states that have different minimum wages for tipped workers.

What’s more, this focus on D.C.’s high-end establishments misses the bigger picture. Not only is the district home to many restaurant workers who struggle to make ends meet—even after tips—but one-fifth of D.C.’s tipped workers aren’t in the restaurant industry at all. Many valets and manicurists, for example, don’t earn 20 percent on top of an expensive meal, but the Department of Labor allows their employers to pay them D.C.’s $3.33 per hour base wage as long as they “customarily and regularly” receive $30 or more per month in tips.

Initiative 77—which 70 percent of voters support—would reduce poverty and increase economic security among tipped workers in the district, as well as better protect them against discrimination, wage theft, and sexual harassment. The effects would be particularly powerful for women and people of color. Chipping in a little more for craft cocktails and small plates at happy hour seems like a small price to pay.

* Note: At the time these data were collected, the minimum wage in Washington, D.C. was $11.50 per hour.

The conclusions are damning. “The United States already leads the developed world in income and wealth inequality, and it is now moving full steam ahead to make itself even more unequal,” the report concludes. “High child and youth poverty rates perpetuate the intergenerational transmission of poverty very effectively, and ensure that the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.”

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The U.N. explicitly lays blame with the Trump administration for policies that actively increase poverty and inequality in the country. “The $1.5 trillion in tax cuts in December 2017 overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality. The consequences of neglecting poverty and promoting inequality are clear,” it concludes. “The policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship.”

In December, Alston visited seven locations throughout the country—ranging from Los Angeles’s Skid Row neighborhood to rural Alabama, West Virginia, and Puerto Rico—to meet with people experiencing deep poverty, along with experts and civil society groups.

In an interview with TalkPoverty ahead of the release, Alston characterized the United States as an outlier among the developed world.

“If you said to most Americans, ‘Look at what country X does to its ethnic minority or to a particular religious minority’ … your average American with any knowledge of that situation is going to shake her head and say, ‘This is a disgrace,’” Alston said. “But of course there’s a direct parallel in the United States and it affects not just a small ethnic minority but a very large racial group of African Americans in particular, where they just come out worse on every possible indicator and policies are clearly designed to hit them harder.”

Alston described meeting “people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor,” and people in Puerto Rico “living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash, which rains down upon them bringing illness, disability, and death.” In Lowndes County, Alabama, the U.N. found cesspools of sewage that flowed out of dysfunctional (or nonexistent) septic systems, which has led to a resurgence in diseases that officials believed were eradicated. A recent study found that more than one-third of people surveyed in Alabama tested positive for hookworm—a parasite that thrives in areas of poor sanitation, which has not been well-documented in the United States since the 1950s.

The reactions to the visit from the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress ahead of the report have ranged from indifference to hostility. Alston requested meetings with House Speaker Paul Ryan and a range of Republican committee chairs—all of whom declined the request. Senators Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Rep. Terri Sewell, and Elizabeth Warren’s staff, on the other hand, all met with Alston. Alston also got a mixed result from the Trump administration. While some agencies were cooperative, “the Justice Department … basically refused all requests to meet and that was pretty striking. It’s not the sort of thing that normally happens on a mission like this,” Alston says.

The Human Rights Council oversees human rights protection around the world. Though the United States is an elected member of the council, it doesn’t have the friendliest relationship with the body. President George W. Bush boycotted the council at its founding in 2006 (a decision the Obama administration later reversed), and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley has been a relentless critic of the council under Trump. Notably, the United States and Cuba are the only countries in North America not to offer standing invitations from the Human Rights Council.

As for the odds that the report will force the administration to change course, Alston was not hopeful. During the visit, “The U.S. was visibly debating what to do with $1.5 trillion [in tax cuts]. And its proposals in relation to those living in poverty was essentially to cut back on existing benefits in order to help fund the tax reforms. That made for a pretty dramatic contrast for the approach that I have found elsewhere.”

No, this isn’t the recent West Virginia teachers strike — it’s a 1921 coal miners strike, which escalated into what would come to be known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. The two sides battled for five days, until more than 2,000 additional U.S. Army troops entered the fray to crush the workers rebellion. Up to 100 laborers were killed, hundreds more were injured, and more than 1,000 were arrested. While the uprising seems like an episode relegated to the largely forgotten labor wars of past, the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) may make such conflicts part of the future for unions once again.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The plaintiffs in Janus—backed by right-wing foundations and corporate lobbying groups—seek to deprive AFSCME of its ability to collect agency fees, which are essentially reduced union dues from non-union members. By setting a federal precedent, the case could cleave the public sector workforce across the country into two groups: those paying for collective bargaining and those not paying for it but still receiving benefits such as higher wages—often referred to as “free riders.” The fear is that, without a way to prevent free riding, collective bargaining will be overburdened and underfunded, and already embattled unions—which have fallen from representing 33 percent of workers in 1954 to just 11 percent today—will be finished. Or, as Charles Wowkanech, president of the New Jersey State AFL-CIO, put it, “[S]uch a broad-based attack on workers would leave no group unscathed.”

But this prognosis ignores that unions both existed and made great strides before they were officially recognized or even legal organizations. And it ignores what organized labor has accomplished in the roughly half of U.S. states that already prohibit mandatory agency fees—including West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky, where massive teacher demonstrations have led to statewide victories.

*           *           *

Prior to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), employers had no obligation to recognize unions, and they even included anti-union clauses in employment contracts. This prevented millions of workers from joining unions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Yet it was during this time that unions were their most militant. Without legal recourse, workers relied on direct action—such as boycotts, pickets, and strikes—to win their demands. These tactics put workers face to face with their opposition: the bosses and their lackeys; mercenaries; local law enforcement; and, as in the 1921 West Virginia coal miners’ strike, even the U.S. military. And with so many union sympathizers barred from official memberships, labor actions often included both unionized and non-unionized workers, if not their entire communities.

The results could be explosive. Besides the Battle of Blair Mountain, which remains the largest labor rebellion in U.S. history, the Haymarket affair of 1886 involved a bombing and Chicago police opening fire on a rally in support of striking workers; the so-called “Colorado Labor Wars” led to the deaths of both strikers and strikebreakers from 1903 to 1904; and two people were killed by the police and militia during the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Despite the overwhelming violence used against them in this period, unions were still able to win significant victories, such as the eight-hour workday (albeit only in particular locations and industries). By 1934—the year before the National Labor Relations Act granted unions state recognition—the tide seemed to be turning in favor of workers: Sailors and longshoremen unionized all West Coast ports in the United States, and 400,000 textile workers from New England to the South launched what was then the largest strike in U.S. history.

According to Peter Cole, professor of history at Western Illinois University, these strikes—and the “working class radicalism” they represented—were curtailed by the NLRA. Cole says the Act was designed to contain “radical left-wing forces by forcing employers to accept modest, if still quite beneficial, reforms,” like giving workers the right to unionize and strike.

In other words, the federal government used the NLRA to enforce a peaceful compromise between labor and business, rather than risk the escalation of all-out class war. In exchange for the right to unionize, strike, and collectively bargain, workers agreed to union elections and arbitration of unfair labor practice charges through the newly created National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). That is, rather than rank-and-file union members fighting for their demands through direct action, labor struggles were decided by lawyers and bureaucrats behind the closed doors of NLRB regional offices. (Although the NLRA does not cover public sector employees, many of these same rights were later extended to them through various state and federal measures, such as President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988, with the substitution of federal and state boards for the NLRB.)

Janus threatens to dismantle this regime of compromise and deliver unions into the pre-NLRA era, shifting labor struggles from the courts back onto the streets. And we don’t have to look as far back as the 1920s for examples of how this could play out. Unions in West Virginia lost the ability to collect agency fees in 2017, yet rather than collapsing, labor’s struggle in the state has hit a new zenith. Without the backing of their union or much faith in their elected representatives, 20,000 rank-and-file West Virginia teachers organized and led their recent nine-day strike, winning raises for public sector workers statewide and inspiring successful teachers strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky—all states where unions are barred from collecting agency fees. In an homage to the past—and perhaps a harbinger of the future—some of the teachers in West Virginia chose to wear red bandanas, just like the striking coal miners of 1921.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and are not representative of the Center for American Progress’ policy positions on any issue. 

Apply Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words to Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson’s latest plan and you’ll see just how brainless public housing policy could become.

Last week, Carson unveiled a plan that would, among other things, triple the minimum rent for the poorest public housing residents—from $50 to $150. The change would affect an estimated 1.7 million people, 1 million of whom are children.

His prediction is that higher rents will encourage tenants to earn more money.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

“Instead of [public housing] being a stepladder it’s become a mode of life and, in many cases, for generation after generation of individuals and I don’t think it’s their fault,” Carson told the conservative online news outlet Townhall. “I think it’s the fault of the system that has basically sapped the incentive for people to work.”

There’s no doubt that HUD needs fixing. Less than a quarter of families who qualify for housing assistance actually get it.

But Carson misdiagnoses the problem when he pretends that public housing residents don’t work. Many do, just at jobs that pay too little to make ends meet.

The system that truly needs an overhaul is the American economy, which operates on the labor of millions of low-wage workers who earn too little to keep a roof over their heads without help.

“Rent Is Affordable to Low-Wage Workers in Exactly 12 U.S. Counties,” blared the headline on a 2017 CityLab story that detailed the glum findings of a National Low Income Housing Coalition study. To afford the average one-bedroom rental home, a minimum-wage worker would need to put in 94.5 hours a week, every week. Imagine working from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. seven days a week, 52 weeks a year to afford your one-bedroom—and you’ll understand just how cruel and clueless the former brain surgeon’s plan to make housing even less affordable for struggling families is. Carson proposes that public housing residents pay either 35 percent of their gross income, or 35 percent of their income from working 15 hours per week at minimum wage—whichever is the higher amount.

“This is a particularly good time because the economy’s improved quite a bit, there are a lot of jobs now,” Carson has said—as though the line between a job and economic independence was straight and true.

It is not, as anyone who’s dealt with low-wage work—not to mention unpredictable scheduling, irregular hours, or wage theft—can attest.

Carson seems to have confused the quantity of jobs with the quality of jobs. In fact, 6 of the 10 occupations that will add the most jobs between 2016 and 2026 pay less than $30,000 per year. Number one on that list—personal care aides—accounts for more than 777,000 new jobs, but at a median pay of just $23,100 a year.

But back to the impracticality of Carson’s plan. Earning that additional $100 in monthly rent will take about 14 hours of minimum wage labor. (Of course, if the federal minimum wage were $15 an hour, as advocated by the Fight for $15 movement and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival, that drops to less than seven additional hours of work per month.)

And that assumes the public housing resident can get more hours at her current job. Or that she can find another job—and has transportation to get there. In cities like Memphis, where I live, the public transportation system is pitifully inefficient. It’s a two-hour bus ride from my neighborhood to the retailer IKEA, which pays a living wage.

Then, assume that the worker can find child care for these additional hours she’s working—and that she can afford to pay for it and the rent increase.

In an April 10 USA Today op-ed, Carson conceded that the housing discrimination Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fought—and that the 1968 Fair Housing Act was designed to correct—persists. But while he lauds King, he ignores what King said.

“We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished,” King told the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967.

The solution to poverty?

Money. If you have more money, you’re not poor. (It really is that simple.)

Since most people make money through their jobs, the cure to the sickness of poverty isn’t higher rents for the families struggling hardest to make ends meet.

The cure is a sizable increase in the federal minimum wage, which remains at $7.25 an hour.

Again, King’s words are instructive: “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

The order, titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility,” carries little weight by itself. It directs a broad range of federal agencies to review programs serving low-income people and make recommendations on how they can make the programs harder to access, all under the guise of “welfare reform.”

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The order’s main purpose appears to be smearing popular programs in an effort to make them easier to slash—in part by redefining “welfare” to encompass nearly every program that helps families get by. To that end, the order reads as follows:

The terms “welfare” and “public assistance” include any program that provides means-tested assistance, or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households, or families that have low incomes (i.e., those making less than twice the Federal poverty level), the unemployed, or those out of the labor force.

Redefining everything from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) to Medicaid to Unemployment Insurance to child care assistance as “welfare” has long been part of conservatives’ playbook, as my colleague Shawn Fremstad has pointed out. The term has a deeply racially charged history in the United States, evoking decades of racial stereotypes about poverty and the people who experience it. By using dog-whistle terms like welfare, Trump is erecting a smokescreen in the shape of President Reagan’s myth of the “welfare queen”—so we don’t notice that he’s coming after the entire working and middle class.

The fact is, we don’t have welfare in America anymore. What’s left of America’s tattered safety net is meager at best, and—contrary to the claim in Trump’s executive order that it leads to “government dependence”—it’s light-years away from enough to live on.

Take the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP provides an average of just $1.40 per person per meal. Most families run out of SNAP by the third week of the month because it’s so far from enough to feed a family on.

Then there’s housing assistance, which reaches just 1 in 5 eligible low-income families. Those left without help can spend up to 80 percent of their income on rent and utilities each month, while they remain on decades-long waitlists for assistance.

And then there’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996 when Congress famously “[ended] welfare as we know it.” Fewer than 1 in 4 poor families with kids get help from TANF today—down from 80 percent in 1996. In fact, in several states, kids are more likely to be placed in foster care than receive help from TANF.

Families who do receive TANF are lucky if the benefits even bring them halfway to the austere federal poverty line. For example, a Tennessee family of 3 can only receive a maximum of $185 per month, or a little over $6 a day.

Yet TANF is the program Trump is holding up as a model—hailing 1996 “welfare reform” as a wild success—despite the fact that TANF has proven an abject failure both in terms of protecting struggling families from hardship and in helping them get ahead.

In particular, this executive order directs agencies to ramp up so-called “work requirements”—harsh time limits on assistance for certain unemployed and underemployed workers—which were at the heart of the law that created TANF. But decades of research since TANF was enacted show that work requirements do not help anyone work.

Make no mistake: Pushing for “work requirements” is at the core of the conservative strategy to reinforce myths about poverty in America. That “the poor” are some stagnant group of people who “just don’t want to work.” That anyone who wants a well-paying job can snap her fingers to make one appear. And that having a job is all it takes to not be poor.

But in reality, millions of Americans are working two, even three jobs to make ends meet and provide for their families. Half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have even $400 in the bank. And nearly all of us—70 percent—will turn to some form of means-tested assistance, like Medicaid or SNAP, at some point in our lives.

Trump claims his executive order is intended to eliminate “poverty traps.” But if he knew anything about poverty—aside from what he’s learned on Fox News—he’d know the real poverty trap is the minimum wage, which has stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour for nearly a decade. That’s well below the poverty line for a family of two—and not nearly enough to live on. There isn’t a single state in the country in which a minimum-wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at market rate. Many low-wage workers are forced to turn to programs like Medicaid and SNAP to make ends meet, because wages aren’t enough.

If Trump were really trying to promote “self-sufficiency”—a concept he clearly doesn’t think applies to the millionaires and billionaires to whom he just gave massive tax cuts—he’d be all over raising the minimum wage. In fact, raising the minimum wage just to $12 would save $53 billion in SNAP alone over a decade, as more low-wage workers would suddenly earn enough to feed their families without nutrition assistance.

Yet there’s no mention of the minimum wage anywhere in Trump’s order to “promote opportunity and economic mobility.”

Which brings us back to the real purpose of this executive order: divide and conquer.

Trump and his colleagues in Congress learned the hard way last year how popular Medicaid is when they tried to cut it as part of their quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And it’s not just Medicaid that Americans don’t want to see cut. Americans overwhelmingly oppose cuts to SNAP, housing assistance, Social Security disability benefits, home heating assistance, and a whole slew of programs that help families get by—particularly if these cuts are to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. What’s more, as polling by the Center for American Progress shows, Americans are less likely to vote for a candidate who backs cuts.

By contrast, vast majorities of Americans across party lines want to see their policymakers raise the minimum wage; ensure affordable, high-quality child care; and even enact a job guarantee to ensure everyone who is able and wants to work can find a job with decent wages. These sentiments extend far beyond the Democratic base to include majorities of Independents, Republicans, and even Trump’s own voters.

That’s why rebranding these programs as welfare is so important to Trump’s agenda. Rather than heed the wishes of the American people, Trump’s plan is—yet again—to tap into racial animus and ugly myths about aid programs in order to pit struggling workers against one other. That way, he can hide his continued betrayal of the “forgotten men and women” for whom he famously pledged to fight.

The state’s Republican leaders appear to have no qualms about taking health insurance away from Tennesseans who can’t find work or get enough hours at their job—even though taking away someone’s health insurance isn’t going to help them find work any faster, and can actually make it harder to find and keep a job. Instead, debate around the legislation has reportedly centered on how to pay for the new policy. Lawmakers’ own estimates put the price tag for enforcing the new work rules at $10,000 per person disenrolled from Medicaid—which advocates note could be more than the new policy saves.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

This is where Tennessee’s proposal gets really evil. Unwilling to foot the bill for their new policy out of the state’s general budget, Republican lawmakers have decided to pay for it with funds from the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program—which provides meager cash assistance to very poor families with children.

While news reports, such as the Nashville Public Radio story noted above, make it sound as though Tennessee’s TANF program is flush with unused cash due to a “booming economy and historically low unemployment,” the real story is much more dire.

Nearly one-quarter of Tennessee children live below the federal poverty line, making it one of the worst states in the nation when it comes to child poverty. But fewer than 1 in 4 poor Tennessee families with children get help from the state’s TANF program, which is one of the stingiest in the country. A Tennessee family of three lucky enough to get temporary assistance can expect to receive a maximum of $185 per month—or a little over $6 a day.

Why is Tennessee failing so horrifically to help so many of its poorest children? In part, this failure is the legacy of 1996 “welfare reform,” which converted the nation’s main source of assistance for poor families—then called Aid to Families with Dependent Children—into TANF, a flat-funded block grant with very little accountability for how the money is spent.

Many states use TANF as a slush fund to close budget gaps, with just 1 in every 4 TANF dollars going to cash assistance for struggling families with kids. But Tennessee has made an Olympic sport out of diverting TANF funds away from poor families in need of help, squirreling away more than $400 million in unspent funds in recent years rather than using the money to help struggling families with kids avoid hunger and homelessness.

Now the state’s lawmakers want to use those unspent funds to bankroll the disenrollment of thousands of struggling Tennesseans from Medicaid.

The bill is expected to clear Tennessee’s conservative Senate in the coming days and has the support of Gov. Bill Haslam (R), who is expected to sign it into law. If passed, both the state’s proposed work rules and their proposed pay-for will require the approval of federal health officials. If the state’s scheme gets a thumbs up from the Trump administration, other states will likely follow suit. Kentucky, Indiana, and Arkansas have all received permission from the Trump administration to enact work requirements for Medicaid, following Trump’s widely criticized invitation to states earlier this year, and more than a dozen states are actively seeking similar approval. Many—if not all—of these states are looking for ways to pay for the costly bureaucracy required to implement this type of policy.

One would be hard-pressed to cook up a more twisted irony than taking money intended to help poor families with children avoid hunger and hardship and using it instead to take health insurance away from, in some cases, the very same struggling workers and families. But there’s a deeper rot at the core of Tennessee’s plan that cuts across conservative proposals to slash not just health care but food assistance, housing, and more—both in Congress and in the states. And that’s an ideology-fueled willingness to spend whatever it takes to take aid away from struggling workers and families—even when bureaucratic disentitlement costs more than it saves.

In many ways Shkreli is a master of American capitalism, but he forgot its cardinal rule: Hurting people with less money than you is part of doing business, but ripping off other rich people is a line you do not cross.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Like most people, I first heard the name Martin Shkreli when he made news for hiking up the price of a drug called Daraprim. The medication is used to treat life-threatening infections that can strike people with compromised immune systems, particularly people with AIDS. After Daraprim was acquired by Shkreli’s company in 2015, the price of a single tablet skyrocketed by 5,000% overnight from $13.50 to $750. It was at least the second time he had used the tactic: A year earlier he encouraged a different company to inflate the price of a kidney stone medicine called Thiola, increasing the daily cost from $30 to $450.

To be fair, he isn’t the only one guilty of this offense. Hundreds of other drug company executives have committed similar deeds to rake in as much profit as possible. But few others have been so blatant about it, reveling with such glee in both the frustration of patients and the rewards of his gluttony. Shkreli seemed to delight in flaunting his wealth. He loved showing off all the pricey toys and trinkets he bought with his drug company profits, including an infamous (and now subject to forfeiture) one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album. It was the kind of entitled, spoiled-rich-kid behavior that earned him the nickname, “Pharma Bro.”

From all appearances, life was good for Pharma Bro in those glory days of making a lifesaving drug unaffordable to those who desperately needed it. He was universally loathed, but nothing he did was actually illegal.

I don’t currently have any family members who take Daraprim, as far as I know. However, my family and I rely on other expensive drugs to stay alive or maintain even just the bare minimum quality of life. My sister is on a host of drugs to treat advanced multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and severe asthma. Or should I say, she is supposed to be on these drugs. She doesn’t have insurance, so she hasn’t taken any of them in more than a year. Just one of her MS drugs, Rebif, costs more than $5,000 a month. That’s $60,000 per year.

I would go to fill my child’s prescriptions, and then see the staggering price lists on the computer screen.  The clerk or pharmacist would call me over to the side for a private consult. Their expression was always one of either shock or pity, or a combination of both. In whispered tones, they would say something like, “Um, this is pretty expensive, so I just wanted to make sure you were aware of that.” If you were lucky enough to have insurance that would cover any portion of this—usually a relatively small amount—the insurance company would also often get involved at this point. Then you would face the additional experience of insurance companies playing doctor, attempting to make critical decisions about your lifesaving treatments.

Sometimes I’d try to bargain with the pharmacist by asking if they could dole out a one-week supply at a time, so I could pay in smaller increments. There were times when I had little or no money at all, and would break down in tears at the pharmacy counter. In the end, though, you usually would be left to face the inevitable: Come up with the money, or go without it.

Sometimes the prices are justified—the rarer the drug, the more costly the treatment—but a lot of the time it’s not. I had always assumed that somewhere behind the scenes, someone was getting rich off the proceeds of these meds, whose sky-high prices often sent me into an emotional panic. But I never realized how arbitrary it could be until I read the coverage of Shkreli and his Daraprim price hike a few years ago.

Shkreli was famous for his cocky smirk and glib attitude towards anyone who questions his methods, but he reportedly cried when his sentence was announced. He presumably never shed tears for the people who needed his companies’ medications so they wouldn’t die, or the many people like me who have sobbed at a pharmacy counter.

We are left to wonder why justice only appeared when the victims were rich.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, children of color are significantly more likely to be referred to special education than white children. They are also more likely to be educated in segregated settings—away from nondisabled peers—and to be suspended from school. For example, in the 2013-14 school year, 6 percent of all public school children received at least one out-of-school suspension. This figure doubles to 12 percent for children with disabilities, and doubles again to approximately one quarter of black, Hispanic, multi-racial, and American Indian/Alaska Native boys with disabilities.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

That much time in segregated classrooms—or being out of class entirely—drags down students’ academic performance. Only 3 percent of black 4th graders in special education were proficient in reading; Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native students are 5 and 6 percent proficient, respectively. Since the overwhelming majority of children in special education can complete grade-level work with appropriate interventions and supports, these numbers point to something beyond student ability: an unequal education. Students in segregated classrooms are less likely to engage with effective educators and less likely to participate in enrichment activities. Decades of research clearly show that children with disabilities perform better academically when they are held to high expectations and have access to the general curriculum.

That’s all in addition to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 60 years ago that “separate but equal” is inherently unequal.

When Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 2004 to revamp special education, it tried to address this inequality through specific provisions about significant disproportionality. But more than a decade later, black students are still 40 percent more likely to be identified as needing special education and are twice as likely to be labeled as having an intellectual disability or emotional disturbance. Hispanic students are 40 percent more likely to be labeled as having a learning disability, and American Indian/Alaska Native students are 60 percent more likely to labeled as having an intellectual disability. At the school district level, the data can be even worse: Almost 800 school districts identified black students with emotional disturbance 300 percent more often than white students.

That’s in part because the IDEA doesn’t define “significant disproportionality.” The Department of Education originally gave states full discretion on how to identify school districts, so states created definitions that were almost impossible to meet—and let themselves off the hook when it came to addressing any problems. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), out of a total of more 15,000 school districts in the United States, only 356 school districts (approximately 2 percent) were flagged as having overrepresented students of color in special education.

In 2016, the Department of Education issued regulations requiring states to use a standard approach to identify significant disproportionality. It also established more effective ways to address the issue. This is the specific part of the law that the Trump administration wants to delay: the one with the potential to make it effective. More than one hundred civil rights and disability organizations have already expressed opposition to this roll-back.

According to the Trump administration, the rule might not address the problem. But since states are just beginning the appropriate analyses and are not required to comply with the rule until July 2018, they simply don’t have enough data to say that the rule doesn’t work. The administration also argues that states are in the best position to evaluate the problem, despite the decade of evidence proving otherwise.

Unfortunately, this appears to be part of a pattern of rolling back hard-won protections for children and adults with disabilities from the current administration. We know that Secretary Betsy DeVos is considering rescinding critical guidance protecting children of color and children with disabilities from unfair and illegal discipline practices. The Department of Justice recently rescinded a number of pieces of significant guidance regarding the civil rights of individuals with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, during her confirmation hearing and subsequently, Secretary DeVos has displayed a lack of clarity and purpose regarding enforcing the rights of children with disabilities and recently rescinded 72 pieces of guidance related to special education without sufficient explanation.

Under federal law, the public has 75 days to provide comment on this proposed rule. Children of color have already waited through Jim Crow and segregation, Supreme Court cases and legislation, for an equal public education. How much longer must they wait?

For more about this, listen to Michael Yudin on the February 2 episode of Off-Kilter. 

Ryan’s 2016 agenda—which he says is still his template for benefit cuts—uses Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF or “temporary assistance,” which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996) as a success story and model for future cuts. But evidence is mounting that a growing number of states are outright failures when it comes to meeting the first purpose of temporary assistance: providing assistance to families so that children “can be cared for in their own homes” instead of in foster care or institutions.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The number of children in foster care now exceeds the number of children being cared for at home with the support of temporary assistance in at least seven states: Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota, and Wyoming.

As the map below shows, in 2016, the ratio of children in foster care to children receiving temporary assistance varied from .07 in California to 2.77 in Wyoming.* In 21 states, this ratio is greater than .5, meaning that for every two children receiving TANF while living at home, there is one or more children living in foster care. In seven states, the ratio is 1:1 or more, and in two states (Wyoming and Indiana) there are roughly two or more children in foster care for every one receiving TANF while living at home.

The ratio of children in foster care to parents and other relative caregivers receiving TANF varies even more: from .11 in Maine to 41.56 in Idaho. The ratio is greater than 1 in 34 states, meaning that for every one parent receiving temporary assistance while caring for children in these states, there is one or more children living in foster care.

Let’s take a closer look at one of these failed TANF states: Kansas. Starting in 2011 under Gov. Sam Brownback, Kansas began implementing a series of cuts that have made it much harder for working-class parents and children to receive temporary assistance, regardless of their financial situation.

As the cuts were imposed, the number of Kansas children and parents receiving temporary  assistance plummeted. At the same time, the number of children in the child welfare system, including the number being cared for in foster homes, increased. By 2016, nearly 11,000 Kansas children were spending time in foster care. That same year, only about 9,200 Kansas children were receiving temporary assistance while being cared for in their own homes. Moreover, a significant number of these children were being cared for in the homes of grandparents or other relatives rather than parents. Less than 3,000 actual parents were receiving temporary assistance themselves in 2016.

To put these numbers in context, nearly 3 million people live in Kansas. Nearly 1 in 3 Kansas workers are paid under $12 an hour, and 1 in 7 Kansans are food insecure. Some 100,000 Kansas children live in families with incomes below the poverty line, and roughly 20,000 Kansas children live apart from both their parents.

Kansas officials claim the rise in children living in foster care is not due to the temporary assistance cuts. Research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly suggests otherwise. In their preliminary research, economist Donna Ginther and social work professor Michelle Johnson-Motoyama, both at Kansas University, have found that the number of children in the child welfare system, including foster care, increased in Kansas and other states that implemented more restrictive TANF policies. In recent testimony before the Children and Seniors Committee of the Kansas House of Representatives, Johnson-Motoyama said that “restrictions on access to [temporary assistance] appear to have unintended consequences with regard to human costs and costs to Kansas taxpayers.”

Most children end up in the child welfare system not because of abuse, but because officials decide parents aren’t adequately meeting their children’s basic needs. Recent research suggests that when low-income parents receive even modest amounts of additional income each month, their children’s risk of involvement in the child welfare system goes down.

As a practical matter, it will be difficult to definitively prove that cuts in temporary assistance are pushing more children into the child welfare system. But debates about causality shouldn’t distract from the fundamental problem. If a state has more children in foster care than children receiving temporary assistance in their own homes, this should raise searching questions about whether the state is meeting the first purpose of temporary assistance.

Beyond this, temporary assistance in the vast majority of states needs to do more to support parents’ role as caregivers and homemakers. There are no provisions built into the program to make sure it is doing enough to meet families’ needs. The only real accountability provisions for states in TANF direct them to not provide assistance to families, typically because parents aren’t working enough each week. States and the federal government have paid little heed to parents’ more fundamental role—for their children—as caregivers and homemakers.

* The most recent state-level foster care data available from the Department of Health and Human Services are for 2016. Even fewer children are receiving TANF today, so this ratio will have grown in most states.

Under the proposal, households receiving $90 or more per month in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—which accounts for the vast majority of all of the households who currently participate in SNAP—will receive a portion of their assistance in the form of a box of pre-selected food. According to the USDA, which would be responsible for administering the program, the box would be filled with items like pastas, peanut butter, beans, and canned fruit, intended to “improve the nutritional value of the benefit provided and reduce the potential for EBT fraud.”

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

In effect, the proposal is a paternalistic spin on Blue Apron: Instead of being able to choose food based on their nutritional and family needs, SNAP households may get standardized boxes of food that the government chooses on their behalf. Hunger and nutrition experts have panned this as “costly, inefficient, stigmatizing, and prone to failure.” A 2016 USDA study found no evidence to suggest that households who receive food stamps need the government to select their food for them—their spending habits are almost identical to other households. (The only exception is baby food—SNAP households buy a lot more of it, because they’re twice as likely to have a child under age 3.) Replacing the food that people are buying for themselves with pastas and canned fruit is likely a nutritional downgrade. And, since the food is being delivered directly to families, it’s unclear whether families will get the opportunity to provide input based on allergies or specific nutritional needs—say, to account for a peanut allergy, or for all that baby food.

As for reducing EBT fraud, the Trump Administration is offering a complicated solution for a nonexistent problem: SNAP fraud is extremely rare, and the government spends about as much money looking for SNAP fraud as it actually finds in misused funds. (As a point of comparison, the Pentagon misplaces enough money every year to fund the entire SNAP program twice.)

What’s more likely is that the proposal will become a giveaway to major agriculture companies. Creating this type of program will require a massive number of new government contracts for food, shipping, storage, and delivery. These contracts will have volume requirements that smaller farms will not be able to meet, but they’ll open the door wide to America’s “Big Ag” lobbyists—including those with close ties to Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue.

And given that this proposal is paired with a $214 billion cut over the coming decade—nearly one-third of total SNAP spending—as well as punishing time limits for workers who cannot find a job or get enough hours at work, it’s hard to believe this proposal is anything but malicious.

Considering Trump’s past statements on food stamps—and on poverty in general—it’s likely that malice actually is at the core of this. Remember the time that he said the only reason a protestor could be angry that he was talking about food stamps was because the protestor was fat? Or the time he said he “just doesn’t want a poor person” involved in decisions about the economy? The president sees his own wealth as the chief validator of his societal worth, and believes it makes him perfectly qualified to make choices about how low-income people live their lives. This SNAP proposal is the result of that line of thinking. It strips people of control over one of their most basic decisions—what they’re going to eat—and hands it over to a government agency. It flattens out the shades of humanity that go into our food—the garlic or chilis or cumin or fish sauce we use when we need to make dinner feel more like home, or the choice to splurge on a steak for your wife’s birthday dinner even if it means you’ll be scraping by for the rest of the month—and it replaces them with cans of fruit in a cardboard box.

Last month, the administration began testing these policies at the state level. On January 11th, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) announced that states can now compel low-income people who rely on Medicaid to meet “work and community engagement requirements” in order to keep their health insurance. Within a day of making this announcement, CMS approved Kentucky’s plan to implement such requirements. The plan strips Medicaid coverage from most adults who fail to comply, including those who do not complete paperwork on time or report “changes in circumstances” quickly enough.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

All told, Gov. Matt Bevin’s office estimates that around 350,000 Kentucky residents will be subject to the new requirements and 95,000 will likely lose their Medicaid benefits. But once those people are booted from the program, Kentucky is giving them a chance to get it back: through “a financial or health literacy course.”

Of course, this is not the first time that Americans have been required to meet economic standards or pass a literacy test to exercise their rights. Discriminatorily applied literacy tests, known for their impossible difficulty, were administered by election officials who were given immense discretion over who to test, what to ask, and how to assess the answers when (mostly black) citizens attempted to vote. Similarly, extractive poll taxes disenfranchised poor black populations (and sometimes poor whites) from the end of the 19th century until the advent of the 24th Amendment (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

These methods were incredibly effective at preventing black people from voting. They led to dramatic drops in black voter registration in the South, and in the states that were the most egregious offenders—like Louisiana—black voter registration decreased by as much as 96 percent over an eight-year span.

Of course, the electoral arm of white supremacy in the postbellum era stretched well beyond such tools (and all the way to violent repression). Nevertheless, taxes and tests stand out as especially contemptible because they officially codified a logic of exclusion aimed at those presumed unworthy of American citizenship.

On the surface, Kentucky’s new Medicaid rules don’t look exactly like poll taxes or literacy tests. But there’s an equivalent logic of exclusion that holds across both domains: Those who are unworthy—either because of their race or due to their inability to access decent jobs—are ousted. Their political and social rights (like the right to vote and the right to be healthy) are sacrificed on an altar built by those with power.

Since social rights like health care are connected to political rights like voting, undermining one deteriorates the other. When Medicaid recipients are made to jump through hoops to prove that they are worthy of health care, they quickly figure out where they stand in the American social hierarchy. And once that’s clear, they have a diminished desire to participate in politics.

I know this because I spent years studying Medicaid and wrote a book about the politics surrounding it. I had in-depth conversations with people who use Medicaid; I observed  Facebook groups filled with Medicaid beneficiaries who readily recounted their experiences; I examined thousands of responses to large national surveys; and I scoured administrative records that detailed the actions that people with Medicaid took when they had scuffles with the government. I got to know some of the people who will find themselves at the losing end of the new Medicaid regulations, and I discovered how Medicaid shapes their political choices.

Take Angie, for example. Michigan’s Medicaid program stripped her coverage for not completing paperwork that she never even received. After battling for several months with local bureaucrats, she finally got her benefits restored. But by then she knew who she was in the eyes of the government:

“It’s like you are uneducated and you just want to get these free services and somehow you are inferior to other people if you receive those benefits … Once they hear Medicaid its ‘oh, one of those people.’”

Alienated from the government, Angie stopped voting and trying to advocate for herself. “I don’t do politics,” she said. When we talked about why she wouldn’t appeal devastating benefit cuts, she explained that she was a “nobody” and that the “powers that be” would not bend very far for her.

Angie was hardly alone. Ahmad fought back tears when he told me about the bureaucratic hurdles he faced after losing a limb in Iraq. Again and again he had to re-certify his enrollment, refile paperwork and find new medication when the old ones were no longer covered by Medicaid. He was clear on what this implied about his social status. “They treat us like we are stupid animals; like we don’t know anything,” he says. “I feel like I’m nothing, because when you are in Medicaid, they do whatever. You have to be on their rules.”

Just as literacy tests were applied unfairly by the election officials who administered them, adding stipulations to Medicaid will create opportunities for racial inequity. Blacks and Latinos face more labor market discrimination, have a harder time finding quality child care, and—because of biases in the justice system— are more likely to have a criminal record. In the face of such barriers, work and health literacy requirements pose burdens that will fall disproportionately on people of color.

That brings us back to where we started. Both types of literacy testing are predicated on assumptions about who deserves access to fundamental social and political rights, like health care and voting. Both also reinforce racial and economic inequality, whether purposely or inadvertently. Most crucially, both lead to the erosion of democratic citizenship among Americans whose political power has long been systematically suppressed.

The study starts in the 1950s and 60s, when Sweden gradually rolled out high-quality, nutritious, free lunches to every child in its school system. Thanks to Sweden’s meticulous data collection, the authors were able to link detailed information about individual schoolchildren—including how many years they had access to free lunches—with decades of subsequent earnings, employment, and even medical data.

The economists discover that the school lunch program had tremendous positive effects, increasing adult earnings by about 0.35 percent for every year a student had access to the program, for a total of 3 percent—or $11,700 over the working years—for the average kid who was exposed throughout nine years of primary school.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The program’s positive effects were nearly universal, with large gains for the students with family incomes in the bottom 75 percent. Even the richest students derived some benefit, though it was statistically insignificant. For the lowest-income children, the gains were particularly substantial: Kids in the bottom 25th percentile of family income increased their adult earnings by nearly 5.5 percent, for an average of $21,560 more in lifetime earnings.* That means the program’s benefits were seven times larger than the cost of the meals. And, since low-income students benefitted more than students in higher income groups, the program can actually be credited with decreasing inequality.

The study adds to abundant evidence that getting enough food helps kids succeed in school—and in life—with improved school performance, greater economic self-sufficiency, and better health.

Implementing a similar program in the United States would likely have an even larger effect than the one researchers observed in Sweden. In part, that’s because more students stand to gain. School lunches in the United States are typically free only to the lowest-income students—about 20 million kids last year—and experts say they have historically been underfunded and inadequately nutritious.

There’s also a dramatic difference in inequality between the two countries: Swedes have a much smaller income gap between the rich and the poor, and Swedish kids are only half as likely to grow up in poverty as American kids. As the authors note, “Food shortage and hunger was uncommon in Sweden during the 1950s and 1960s.” The program’s primary goal was to improve nutrition—similar to more recent U.S. changes like the School Meals Initiative for Healthy Children in 1994—rather than addressing a nationwide problem with childhood hunger.

By contrast, in the United States about 1 in 12 families with children experienced food insecurity in 2016, and our nutrition assistance benefits for families (like SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) are so modest that they can’t address the issue. That means school meals are all the more important for low-income American kids; it’s where they get as many as half of their calories. As a result, we’d likely have an even more significant proportion of students making the types of large income gains that Sweden observed with its poorest students.

The argument against such a program, of course, would be its cost. At $3.23 per meal, extending free school lunch to every American schoolchild would cost roughly $19.6 billion per year. ** That’s about 13 percent of what Trump and Republican lawmakers just spent on their monumentally unpopular tax bill. But unlike the tax plan, research shows that this would significantly boost an average worker’s earnings—and it’d be a lot more than the temporary bump of $1.50 per paycheck Paul Ryan boasted his tax law is bringing to workers.

Next week, the stakes are about to get much higher for kids when the Trump administration releases its fiscal year 2019 budget. Trump will likely propose deep cuts to nutrition assistance; last year’s budget cut SNAP benefits by nearly 30 percent. And despite opposition from two-thirds of Americans, congressional Republican lawmakers are already chomping at the bit to help. For kids whose families struggle to put food on the dinner table, that means the cafeteria lunch line may become a lifeline.

* Calculation is based on study’s report of a total real program cost per student of $3,080 over nine years, and an estimated benefit-cost ratio of seven compared to lifetime earnings (that is, earnings between ages 21 and 65) for students in the bottom quartile of household income. Figures representing dollar-value changes in lifetime earnings are based on the study’s calculations, which use the Swedish rather than the US distribution of income and earnings.

** In 2017, an average of 20 million students in primary and secondary schools received free lunch from the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) during each non-summer month. The total federal cost of the program was just over $13.6 billion, of which approximately $10.9 billion went toward reimbursements to schools for free lunches—an average per-participant cost of about $546 for the school year. If all 35.9 million additional schoolchildren in prekindergarten through twelfth grade at schools tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics (which captures all local public school systems and most private schools) were to participate in a newly offered free lunch program to the same extent as the current 20 million participants, the additional federal costs for reimbursements to schools would be about $19.6 billion per year. However, this likely represents an overestimate because many students prefer to bring lunch from home some or all of the time, and the newly eligible students—whose families tend to have higher incomes—may have more resources to do so.

I discussed what happened and what this policy is all about with Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor under President Obama.

Rebecca Vallas: Heidi, what is this policy that the Trump administration is advancing and what are they hiding?

Heidi Shierholz: In December, the Trump administration released a proposed rule to try to make it legal for employers to take workers’ tips. There were regulations on the books from 2011—it was a long-standing practice at DOL that tips cannot be taken by employers. But the Trump administration is trying to rescind those regulations, and it’s really bad for workers.

But now the Department of Labor is bending over backwards to try to make it seem like it’s not terrible for workers. For instance, they talk about how theoretically employers who take tips could share some of those tips with the back of the house workers or other untipped workers. But there is nothing in this rule that says they are required to do so. So, what’s going to happen is employers will end up just pocketing a lot of those tips themselves.

The controversy that broke is that the DOL claimed that they could not do a quantitative analysis of how much in wages and tips would be transferred from workers to employers as a result of this rule. But what was revealed today is that that was all untrue. They actually did the analysis, and it showed billions of dollars being transferred from workers to employers. They actually took it to the Secretary of Labor who said something to the effect of, “Okay, we can’t publish something that shows this because this will make us look terrible. Take this back to the drawing board and see if you can bring me back smaller numbers.” They did that, but they never got it down as small as was comfortable for Secretary Acosta, so they just got approval from the White House to remove the analysis entirely. So this proposal was released without any quantitative economic analysis about the impact the proposed rule would have on workers, even though they are legally required to quantify the economic impact to the extent possible.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

RV: So not only did they try to figure out a methodology to get a number they were comfortable with—in terms of how much employers were going to end up pocketing in the way of workers’ tips and wages—but they decided because they couldn’t get the number down they were just going to pretend they’d never done it at all? Is that what we’ve learned?

HS: Yes, that’s what we’ve learned. They said in their proposal that they were—quote—“unable to quantify how customers would respond to the proposed regulatory change” and that the department “currently lacks the data to quantify possible reallocation of tips.” So they just said in a bunch of different ways, “We can’t do this.” But we know they did do it. The numbers looked bad for them, so they buried it. This is real malpractice. The public deserves to have those numbers. They make the department look like it is not living up to its mission of actually protecting workers—in fact, it’s just going to transfer a whole bunch of money from workers to employers and they wanted to hide that fact.

RV: When they went to crunch the numbers on this policy it looks like they found something similar to what you guys at the Economic Policy Institute had already been telling people for a while. You did some analysis finding that if this rule goes into effect, workers will lose billions in lost tips and wages.

HS: So we don’t know exactly what the DOL estimate was. We know it’s in the billions but no one knows the actual number. I worked at the Department of Labor. I worked on many, many analyses like this. I have full confidence that the analysis that we did at EPI likely used the same data that DOL used for their analysis. And when we did it we came up with an estimate that $5.8 billion would be shifted from workers to employers as a result of the rule and that nearly 80% of that, or $4.6 billion, would be taken from the pockets for women who work for tips, and that’s primarily because women are much more likely to work in tipped jobs.

RV: It’s not just tipped workers who are actually at risk of being hurt here, correct?

HS: One of the interesting things that’s the backdrop to this is that the DOL has been trying to sell this rule as something that will make restaurants more egalitarian, because now we’ll have this sharing between better-paid tipped workers and lower-paid back of the house workers like dishwashers and cooks. But it is very unlikely that they will do that. The rule does not require them to do it. They would be no more likely to share tips with back of the house workers than they would be to make any other choice about what to do with that shiny new revenue stream, which is what being able to confiscate tips would mean to them. They could increase executive pay. They could make capital improvements to their establishment. They could just line their own pockets. Under basic economic logic, those back of the house workers are not going to get more pay.

RV: This is hardly the first time that the Trump administration has been caught either lying or hiding evidence about the policies they’re looking to advance or the Obama-era policies they’re looking to roll back. You mentioned that because there are very specific rules governing how rule-making is supposed to happen in this country—rules that it appears that the Trump administration has clearly broken here by withholding and lying about evidence in their possession about this rule during a [public] comment period—can you explain a little bit about how that works?

HS: In this particular case, they are simply required as part of the rule-making process to quantify to the extent possible the economic impact so that the public has that information in hand in order to comment on the purposed rule.

The rule-making process in general is really basic in some sense: The agency puts out a proposed rule, anyone can comment on it. The public, advocates, business groups, anyone has the right to tell that agency what they think about their rule. The agency is actually required to read [the comments] and to take them into account as they’re crafting their final rule. So it’s absolutely crucial the public is given all the information so it can understand the impact of the rule and comment on it.

DOL claimed it wasn’t possible for them to do this quantification. But we produced an estimate in less than two weeks. It wasn’t rocket science. And now we know that they did do an analysis, buried it, and then claimed that they couldn’t do it.

Given all that has happened, they need to withdraw this rule, re-do the economic analysis, and let the public comment with all the information at hand.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on February 2. It was edited for length and clarity.

It’s especially insincere, given the Trump administration’s proposal to gut existing workforce development programs. Its 2018 budget cut funding for the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act by 43 percent, which would cause 571,000 workers to lose job training and job search assistance. President Trump is also in the process of advancing an apprenticeship proposal that would lead to a proliferation of low-quality programs that don’t offer job-relevant skills or decent wages.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

For his part, Ryan seems to be confused about what workforce development actually entails. He told his caucus last night that it needs to “focus on closing the skills gap” by training unemployed workers to take currently open jobs. This incorrectly assumes that a lack of skills is the only thing that’s keeping workers out of the labor market—it’s possible that workers are struggling to find good jobs that pay decent wages. Indeed, 2017 saw the slowest job growth since 2010, and the weakest wage growth in 4 years. Trump and congressional Republicans have also fought to make work worse by advancing policies to weaken workplace protections, make it harder for workers to collectively bargain, make it easier for employers to steal wages from tipped employees, and make it easier for employers to discriminate against workers.

If Speaker Ryan and congressional Republicans truly cared about helping people transition into the labor market, they would support policies like raising the federal minimum wage, strengthening collective bargaining rights, and advancing policies like paid leave and universal child care, which actually help improve the quality of work.

Instead, participants at the GOP retreat where Ryan initially floated this idea reported that his proposal would impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients – of whom more than 7 in 10 are caregivers or in school. The move would put at least 6.3 million people at risk of losing their health care outright, and force others into low-quality, low-paying jobs that are more harmful than helpful.

Ultimately, this workforce development push, like welfare reform before it, is about kicking struggling workers while they’re down, and taking away essential benefits from families when they need them most. And while Ryan may have ditched the racially-coded welfare rhetoric for now, his policies are still ripped right from Trump’s divisive handbook.

When he was a candidate, Trump pledged to turn the Republican Party into a “worker’s party.” He claimed that each of his policy decisions would hinge on whether it creates “more jobs and better wages for Americans” and promised to side with workers instead of “special interests” and the “financial elite.” But throughout his first year, he sided with corporations and the wealthy instead.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

In 2017, Trump used his executive authority to pare down worker safety protections, make it harder for workers to receive the pay they earned, and hamstring their ability to collectively bargain for decent wages and benefits. His administration took action to weaken mine inspection rules, undermine the quality and pay of apprenticeship programs, and delay and roll back rules that will prevent construction and agricultural workers from being exposed to toxic chemicals.

Under Trump’s watch, the Department of Labor has signaled that it will use its regulatory power to roll back overtime coverage and protections for millions of workers and allow companies to legally confiscate employees’ tips. It withdrew guidance that held corporations accountable for wage theft. And the National Labor Relations Board is trying to slow the process for workers to request a union election.

Already, Trump’s agency appointees overturned a 2015 precedent that protected workers’ rights to bargain with companies that influence their workplaces. These so-called “joint-employer” protections are increasingly important since large corporations are more often relying on temporary staffing agencies, labor subcontractors, and franchises to supply their labor force. Now corporate interests are pushing even more extreme legislation: A bill to roll back protections for minimum wage, overtime, and child labor violations by joint employers has already passed the House. A president who cares about the rights of workers would fight hard against such a proposal.

Trump’s war on workers extends to the public sector as well. The Trump administration has backed union opponents that want to eliminate fair-share fees in the public sector, attempting to overturn a 40-year-old Supreme Court precedent and weaken public sector unions. And last night, he promised to make it easier for political appointees to fire federal public sector employees.

Just like last year’s joint address to Congress, the president promised last night to create jobs with a new infrastructure program. However, his fiscal year 2018 budget shows that this “new plan” is a shell game, since it would be paid for in part by cutting $138 billion from the Highway Trust Fund, which currently funds highway and public transportation projects across the United States, and eliminating existing job-creating infrastructure programs like TIGER and New Starts grants.

And while Trump touted his infrastructure plan, he didn’t guarantee that the jobs created will actually support a family. While the federal government has upheld Davis-Bacon prevailing wage standards for nearly 90 years to ensure that construction jobs funded through federal spending provide decent wages, many on the right are pressuring the administration to leave out these protections. Trump failed to mention them last night. If the president really wants to help workers, he should guarantee that all jobs created by the infrastructure package include the prevailing wage protections and pay at least $15 per hour, and expand contracting job quality protections broadly to ensure that all government spending creates well-paying jobs for workers.

The president also boasted about the performance of the U.S. stock market and the benefits of his tax cut bill. Yet neither today’s market performance nor the tax bill will make substantial, long-term improvements in the lives of everyday Americans. The run-up in stock market value predominantly benefits the rich, as 80 percent of U.S. stock value is held by the wealthiest 10 percent of households. Meanwhile, despite Trump’s false claim that “we are finally seeing rising wages,” the average wage of production and non-supervisory workers rose by only four cents in 2017 when adjusted for inflation—a growth rate of just 0.17 percent, below the last four years of wage growth.  And the tax bill—which Trump previously justified by saying working- and middle-class taxpayers would “receive the biggest benefit – it won’t even be close”—in fact gives the most to the richest taxpayers. This year, taxpayers making over $1 million will bring home a tax cut 100 times larger than the average tax cut for families in the bottom 80 percent by income. And in 2027, once individual tax cuts expire, nearly 92 million families making less than $200,000 annually will be paying more in taxes.

Viewers also heard Trump boast about one-time bonuses from companies seeking favor with the administration. However, the fact that some of these companies laid off thousands of workers as they were announcing the bonuses failed to make it to the presidential teleprompter.

Trump’s claims during last night’s speech can’t hide the truth: Month after month, the Trump administration took action to benefit wealthy donors instead of working people. From denying overtime protections for millions of Americans, to raising health insurance premiums, to weakening safety protections for workers, he has continually failed to stand up for those he claims to support. His pledge to lead a new “worker’s party” was a bait-and-switch, and he should be held accountable for this failure.

“Really?” Trump replied. “Then what are they?”

Statistically, they were probably white. But given the United States’ history with the word “welfare,” it’s not all that surprising that Trump was confused.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Despite the fact that white Americans benefit more from government assistance than people of color, means-tested aid is primarily associated with black people and other people of color—particularly when the term welfare is used. For many Americans, the word welfare conjures up a host of disparaging stereotypes so strongly linked to stigmatized beliefs about racial groups that—along with crime—it is arguably one of the most racialized terms in the country.

Martin Gilens, a professor of political science at Princeton University, has studied the relationship between whites’ racial attitudes and their opinion on welfare extensively. In one study, he finds that white people’s racial attitudes are the single most important influence on their views on welfare. In other words, white people who are more prejudiced toward black people are also significantly more opposed to welfare. Numerous studies in the social sciences have substantiated this claim.

That has tremendous consequences for the types of policies that are proposed and passed. Public support for programs associated with the term welfare are generally weaker than support for other programs, like unemployment insurance, primarily because welfare is so strongly linked to the negative attitudes white people possess about black people. However, the public is willing to support redistributive benefits generally when they are not called welfare. For example, in 2014, 58 percent of white people thought that we are spending too much on welfare, whereas only 16 percent reported that we are spending too much on the poor.

Source: Author’s analysis of 2014 General Social Survey data.

These same racial attitudes also structure the way policies are designed. They inform which groups we think are deserving of assistance, and which are not. Nicholas Winter, for instance, notes that part of why Social Security is so relatively popular compared to welfare is because of how both policies are racialized. Social Security, he argues, has been framed as a policy that is both universal—that is, it benefits all groups—and as one that has been contrasted with welfare as an earned reward for hard work (stereotypes associated with white people), rather than a handout for the lazy and dependent (stereotypes associated with black people).

In contrast, negative beliefs about the beneficiaries of programs we think of as welfare have arguably lead to a system of surveillance and sanctions. After Reagan popularized the disparaging stereotype of the

in the 1980s, Bill Clinton passed welfare reform policies that restricted access to benefits to satisfy racist attitudes. In addition to placing significant and often unfair burdens on the individuals seeking assistance, these restrictions—like required drug-testing of program applicants, restrictions on where benefits can be spent, and specifications on what types of work count toward required hours—relied on stereotypes and reinforced the belief that beneficiaries of these programs are undeserving. According to work by Joe Soss and Sanford F. Schram, more people believed that welfare benefits lead to dependency in 2003 than in 1989.

The media have played a significant role in establishing the link between poverty, welfare, and race in the public mind. According to Gilens, these trends were forged in the 1960s, when race riots drew the nation’s attention to the black urban poor. In just three years—from 1964 to 1967—the percentage of poverty news stories that featured images of black people grew from 27 percent to 72 percent. These trends have persisted in the present day.

But both Gilens’ and Winters’ work suggests that the media can also help promote anti-poverty legislation by avoiding racialized terms, like welfare, to talk about public assistance. But if they keep leaning specifically on the term welfare—as they have during Speaker Ryan’s recent push to cut anti-poverty programs by referring to them as “welfare reform”—then otherwise popular policies may be dragged down with the word’s racialized history.

In a series of tweets, Seema Verma, the Trump official who oversees Medicare and Medicaid, argued that work requirements will “improve health outcomes” and cause improvement in “mental and general health, and well-being.” The administration’s guidance allowing states to deny people Medicaid makes similar claims.

#Claimants who move off benefits and (re)-enter work generally experience improvements in income, socio-economic status, mental and general health, and well-being.” #TransformingMedicaid https://t.co/TgmgCk6Bb2

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) January 11, 2018

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The administration points to two research reviews it says support its case for allowing state officials to deny Medicaid to low-income people not meeting state work requirements. In fact, neither of the studies say that imposing work requirements as a condition of receiving health care will improve health. Moreover, both of the studies rely heavily on research from countries with universal health coverage—that is, countries that provide health care and coverage to all of their people regardless of employment status and without imposing work requirements. In these countries, people are empowered to make work and education choices without being threatened with the loss of health insurance if the state doesn’t like their choices.

In short, the reviews don’t tell us anything about the impact of Medicaid work requirements on health. What they actually do tell us is the that relationship between health and employment is much more complicated than the administration suggests.

The most rigorous and recent of the two reviews found insufficient or inconsistent evidence that employment was beneficial for general health, except for depression. The authors also cautioned that selection effects—the fact that more healthy people are more likely to work—may have caused an “overestimation” of their findings that work was beneficial for depression. In theory, one could conduct a demonstration study that denied employment to some people while providing it to others in order to isolate the causal effects of employment on health. But, as the authors note, this would be unethical.

The older and less rigorous of the two reviews, a 2006 evidence review commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Department of Work and Pensions, concludes that “the balance of the evidence” shows that work is “generally good for health and well-being, for most people.” But it goes on to detail what it calls “major provisos.” These include that “health effects depend on the nature and quality of work” and its “social context,” and that “jobs should be safe and accommodating.” The more rigorous review makes a similar point and notes research concluding that “low-quality jobs can lead to reduced health, while high-quality jobs can lead to improved health.”

These findings about how low-quality jobs can negatively impact health are particularly relevant for Medicaid beneficiaries. As researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation have documented, most non-elderly Medicaid enrollees (who do not also receive SSI disability benefits) are employed, but typically in poorly compensated jobs that do not offer health insurance. Among non-elderly Medicaid enrollees who are not employed, physical and mental health impairments are common.

If we truly care about able bodied, working age adults on Medicaid, then we have a responsibility to help them rise out of poverty. https://t.co/0cXxSyAmQF

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) January 17, 2018

If the state officials and the administration want to improve health and well-being, they should offer real help with finding well-paying, safe, and accommodating work to all Medicaid enrollees, but on a voluntary basis. This help should include child care assistance and other work supports. But allowing state officials to coerce people to take any job—or work even more—under threat of losing their health insurance takes away people’s agency and will cause far more harm than good.

Finally, if the administration is serious about improving the health of working-class people, then it should stop rolling back important labor standards and worker protections. And it should get serious about improving job quality, including by raising the minimum wage as President Trump made a campaign promise to do.

Bottom line: All the happy Orwellian Twitter talk from Trump officials won’t change the fact that their policy will hurt millions more than it will help.

“If you’re well off, great, if you’re not—too bad,” he said.

McGovern is right. The congressional GOP tax bill, which is expected to win final approval today, is effectively a bid to weed out people struggling to make ends meet. It could have dire consequences for the social safety net—and for the 70 percent of us who will turn to a means-tested program like Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at some point in our lives. And it could impact millions who expect to rely later in life on Medicare and Social Security.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Think of it as a two-step project. A deficit-exploding tax giveaway to the very wealthiest corporations and individuals is step one. You cannot invest in the strategies that have been proven to help lift families out of poverty—we’ll get back to that in a moment—without adequate revenues. Not only will revenues take a hit at the federal level, but it’s expected that local and state governments will roll back investments in necessities like schools, drug treatment centers, pensions and more to lessen the tax burden on residents who will no longer be able to take the same federal tax deduction on property, state, and local income taxes.

Then, by adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit, the tax plan sets in motion the second step: in the name of deficit reduction, congressional Republicans will move to cut the programs that help Americans experiencing financial hardship have at least some shot at affording basic necessities like food, housing, health care, education, and a little dignity in our later years. Indeed, according to The Hill, House Speaker Paul Ryan intends to fast-track so-called “welfare reform” in 2018, in a bid to push it through with a simple majority. President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order reflecting similar priorities.

The skids for these cuts have been greased by decades of lies about anti-poverty programs and their effectiveness. Conservatives usually refer to cutting the safety net as an attempt to reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse,” or end a “culture of dependence”—but in reality it’s simply looking squarely at our neighbors, demonizing them, and then turning our backs. The only thing missing is a spit in the eye for emphasis. The underlying problem is that Americans often buy into conservative rhetoric about “welfare” and an all too often complicit media. A long history of racially coded language has painted people with low incomes as undeserving of assistance, and there is a persistent lack of education about what our safety net is, and who it benefits. How many Americans know that more than 1 in 2 of us will experience at least a year of poverty or near-poverty during our working years?

While conservatives say that people are living off their food stamps, few Americans know that the average benefit is $1.40 per person, per meal. The notion of supporting a family on that is absurd. The public also envisions extensive subsidized housing—it has no idea that only 1 in 4 families that qualify for federal rental assistance actually receive it, and that their average income is approximately $12,500 per year. They think people are getting “free cash,” but cash assistance (TANF) only goes to 23 of every 100 families in poverty nationwide, and the program is virtually nonexistent in many states.  (It’s little surprise that a gutted TANF “block grant” is the model for what congressional Republicans would like to do with nutrition assistance, Medicaid, housing, and more—watch it lose value with inflation over the years, and watch fewer and fewer people receive it.)

It also doesn’t matter a whit to conservatives what the evidence says about the kinds of things that make a difference in people’s lives. It doesn’t seem to matter that our antipoverty programs cut poverty in half—that poverty would have been as high as nearly 30 percent in recent years without them; or that girls who had access to food stamps (SNAP) saw increases in their economic self-sufficiency as adults—including less welfare participation—compared to their disadvantaged peers who didn’t have access; or that a little assistance for children up to age 5 is associated with boosted educational performance, and increased work and earnings as adults; or that children under 13 who were able to use a housing voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood were 32 percent more likely to attend college and earned 31 percent more annually as young adults, compared to their peers in families that didn’t receive a voucher.  Or even that expansion of Medicaid eligibility has reduced infant mortality and childhood deaths, and that children eligible for Medicaid are more likely to go on to graduate college.

You’d think some of these data would make an impression on Speaker Ryan, who is constantly clambering about the need for evidence. The fact is he simply doesn’t like the evidence he sees. When he wrote a report on the “War on Poverty” in 2014, concluding that our antipoverty investments have failed, numerous academics came forward to say that he had misrepresented their work; apparently that was the only way Ryan could support his fictitious thesis.

Ironically, despite Ryan and his conservative brethren’s concern with “dependence” on government assistance, rewarding work just doesn’t seem to register as a key antipoverty strategy. In the late 1960s, the minimum wage was enough for a full-time worker to lift a family of three out of poverty—now that same family is about $5,000 below the poverty line. But Republican leaders vote against raising the minimum wage every chance they get. (Ryan himself has voted against raising it at least 10 times since he’s been in office.) The Trump administration is also making it harder for low-wage workers to unionize, collectively bargain, enforce labor standards, or even collect the tips they receive to supplement their $2.13 an hour tipped minimum wage.

In the coming months, the fight against conservative proposals that target struggling Americans should transcend the specifics of the policy debate, much as the electoral contest between Doug Jones and Roy Moore transcended the candidates. This is a fight about who we are as a nation, and who we want to be; whether we are comfortable treating people as disposable, or whether we invest in human potential and dignity; and whether we’ll accept conservative charlatans as serious leaders on decisions that have such high stakes. All of the evidence suggests we should reject them.

This article was produced in partnership with The Nation.

These allegations inch the media coverage closer to the reality many women face, in part because many of the people reporting are ordinary restaurant employees rather than high-profile actresses or news anchors. There’s also the matter of the industry they work in: Low-paid working women are often at the greatest risk for abuse, particularly if they are in service professions.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

At the same moment, the Trump administration is pushing a rule that could make tipped workers even more vulnerable to harassment. In early December, the Labor Department—urged on by the restaurant lobby—announced a plan that could allow employers to steal tips from their workers. Under the new rule, employers could pool all tips and distribute this money to other workers, including non-tipped workers—or keep it for themselves. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the rule could allow employers to pocket $5.8 billion in workers’ tips each year, in an industry where 66 percent of workers are women and 25 percent of workers are women of color.

This could result not only in the theft of tipped workers’ wages—even though they are already nearly twice as likely to live in poverty as other workers—but it could also increase their likelihood of being sexually harassed. Tipped workers are often at the mercy of customers to make ends meet financially, and the new rule would add additional pressure from employers and managers who would control the distribution of tips. That could drive conditions from bad—accommodations and food service workers already account for 1 out of 7 sexual harassment charges filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—to worse.

And the proposal’s effects don’t stop with tipped workers. If employers choose to redistribute the tips to other non-tipped employees, they could classify them as tipped workers and knock their base wage down to $2.13 per hour. This could raise their risk for sexual harassment as well as wage theft because, while employers are legally required to ensure tipped workers are paid the minimum wage, evidence shows employers often don’t.

There is, of course, another option: Instead of rushing through a rule that will lower wages and increase vulnerability to harassment for tipped workers—all with a very limited period for public feedback—the Trump administration could focus on paying tipped workers fair wages. That means eliminating their separate minimum wage, which is something the minimum wage bill before Congress would do. Evidence shows this would work: In the seven states that have abolished the separate tipped minimum wage—where employers are now required to pay their workers at least minimum wage—tipped workers take home higher pay and are less likely to experience harassment. Pair that with solutions to reduce sexual harassment in the workplace, and you’re poised to make progress not only on economic security but also on reducing the number of workers who have to say #MeToo.

The only thing not up for debate is why Jones won: It’s because people of color—particularly African Americans from Alabama’s impoverished “Black Belt”—turned out to vote for him. But lost in the political discussion of the election is one key question: What does the election mean for the lives of Alabamans—especially the millions who voted for Doug Jones?

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The state Doug Jones now represents is one of the poorest in the country. According to the latest county health rankings report, nearly 2,900 Alabamians died prematurely—in large part due to the toxic conditions within the state. The state’s school quality report card shows that it lags behind the national average, with a solid D for K-12 achievement, and more than a quarter of residents are struggling to pay their water bill, which is an average of just $32.09 a month.

The state’s poor rural residents—disproportionately people of color—face conditions that recently stunned investigators from the United Nations. In a damning report on the living conditions in Alabama’s Lowndes and Butler counties, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights found communities suffering from hookworm outbreaks—a parasitic illness that was thought to have been eradicated in the United States more than 30 years ago. Known as a disease born of extreme poverty, researchers have linked the resurgence of hookworm in Alabama’s Lowndes and Butler counties to the broken and inadequate septic infrastructure that creates open cesspools of raw sewage in residents’ backyards.

Lowndes county, much like the rest of Alabama, has a long and brutal history of racism and inequality. Nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes,” the county is most known for its violent opposition to the civil rights movement and extreme racial oppression. It remains a hot spot of poor health, premature death, callous neglect, and severe disenfranchisement that harkens back 150 years to the time when it was part of the bedrock of the South’s slave economy. The historical and ongoing plight of counties like Lowndes highlight the dogged mistreatment of vulnerable communities who can least afford it.

The tax bill currently making its way through Congress would exacerbate inequality in one of the most unequal states in the country. By 2027, it would raise taxes on 87 million Americans—including more than 640,000 Alabamans. It would repeal the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act—jeopardizing health care coverage for 183,000 Alabama residents, a disproportionately high number—and strip the state of $419 million in Medicare funding next year alone.

The tax bill would also pave the way for deep cuts to benefit programs that keep people out of poverty. As House Speaker Paul Ryan signaled in a radio interview last week, House Republicans are planning on moving forward with deep cuts to so-called “entitlement programs” (permanent programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security) next year and have been quietly convincing President Trump to support the effort. “I think the president is understanding that choice and competition works everywhere in health care, especially in Medicare,” Ryan said. With an aging population and a disproportionate number of people in poverty, Alabama is particularly vulnerable to these cuts.

It’s rare for a political victory to immediately benefit its voters. Major national legislation can take decades to cobble together and is often passed with votes to spare after months of debate. But in Doug Jones’ case, his Senate win could help stop one of the biggest shots of inequality adrenaline the country has ever seen—one that will hit Alabama particularly hard. And, while far from guaranteed, the election could jeopardize Senate Republicans’ chances of passing the bill this year.

The people of Alabama turned out in record numbers on Tuesday. Now it’s up to Jones to make sure his supporters aren’t openly attacked in the coming legislative onslaught.

That tells you a lot about Congress’ priorities—especially since, for less than the cost of the Republican tax plan, Congress could eliminate child poverty in the United States. Twice.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 5.7 million poor families with children would need an average of $11,400 more to live above the poverty line in 2016. In total, the income needed to boost these families—along with the additional 105,000 children who were not living with their families—above the federal poverty level is about $69.4 billion per year in today’s dollars. Over ten years, that adds up to about 46 percent of what Congress plans to spend on its tax plan. There would be so much money left over after we boosted these kids out of poverty that the United States could also pay tuition and fees for all of them to get an in-state education at a four-year public university, and it still wouldn’t costs as much as the tax plan.

If Congress wanted to really let loose, and spend just 12 percent more than the tax bill does—for a total of $1.74 trillion—we could completely eliminate all poverty in America.

But instead of reducing poverty in the United States, Congressional Republicans are chipping away at the existing programs that support low-income people. Congress was so fixated on repealing the Affordable Care Act this summer that it ran out of time to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which insures 9 million kids. It has been 73 days since CHIP’s funding expired, and more than half of states could run out of money in the first months of 2018. Some are already paring back services in preparation.

And now, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and his fellow Congressional Republicans have announced that their next priority is cutting critical programs such as Medicaid, which provides health care to 2 in 5 U.S. children, and Social Security, which is the nation’s largest children’s anti-poverty program. To pave the way for these cuts, Ryan and friends are already rolling out poisonous rhetoric that paints low-income families as lazy and idle—even though Census data show that most families with children living in poverty do work, and are just being paid so little they can’t make ends meet.

These policies are obviously cruel. But, for a group of lawmakers who fancy themselves business-minded, they’re also stunningly financially irresponsible. Child poverty costs the United States a lot of money: an estimated $672 billion per year in lost productivity, worse health outcomes, and increased criminal activity.

Instead, congressional Republicans are choosing to saddle the nation’s kids with debt—the very thing they’ve repeatedly accused past administrations of doing—to finance a massive giveaway to the wealthy.

It’s all-out war on the poor at this point. https://t.co/v89ZgmRQCd

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) November 17, 2017

The FCC’s actions are the latest in a year-long assault on low-income Americans. They come at a time when Senate Republicans are trying to pass a tax bill that would strip health coverage from 13 million Americans and eliminate dozens of federal programs that support low-income families—including protection for crime victims, food for the elderly, and affordable housing—to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

But those are just the headline battles. There is a quieter war being waged in the trenches: in state legislatures and federal courts, in congressional committees and governors’ mansions, and—as with the FCC’s recent decisions—in federal agencies.

Here’s a brief recap of what this war has looked like in just the past few months.

The administration is legalizing discrimination

While the ADA Education and Reform Act has been quietly making its way through Congress, threatening to undo decades of progress for people with disabilities, two separate agencies have undertaken actions of their own to repeal even more protections. The Department of Transportation yielded to pressure from airline industry lobbyists and delayed implementation of an Obama-era rule designed to prevent airports from routinely losing or breaking wheelchairs and other equipment that belongs to disabled passengers. And last month, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos rescinded 72 guidance documents that help schools enforce protections for students with disabilities. The revoked guidelines include a policy that helps students with disabilities get federal financial assistance and guidance for states on how to meet the needs of students with hearing loss.

The courts are chipping away at civil rights, too. Trump’s Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, could cast the deciding vote in a case from a business owner who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. If his appeal is successful, it could allow business owners to use their religious beliefs to deny service to customers on the basis of their sexual orientation, or even other protected identities such as race, religion, or national origin. This would hit low-income residents of rural communities particularly hard, who might not have other businesses they can turn to if they’re denied service (research shows they won’t).

Trump is also stacking lower courts with anti-worker judges: He appointed Thomas Farr, a lawyer who has defended voter suppression and built his career undermining workers’ rights, to a district court in North Carolina. Perhaps more frightening, he appointed Don Willett to the 5th Circuit—a pro-corporate judge who voted to give himself the authority to strike down regulations that “interfere with the free market.”

Federal agencies are chewing giant holes in the safety net

The Department of Health and Human Services is encouraging states to adopt work requirements for Medicaid, which would punish unemployed workers for not being able to find a job by taking away their health care. This continues the administration’s trend of using work requirements to gut safety net programs, after Trump’s presidential budget proposed work requirements to help pay for $193 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Days before Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, FEMA was already coordinating the recovery, setting up supplies and personnel. But Trump’s administration was extremely slow to help citizens in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico recover from Hurricanes Maria and Irma, withholding aid until after the hurricanes made landfall. More than 20 percent of Puerto Ricans still don’t have access to clean drinking water, more than half the territory doesn’t have access to electricity, and 60 percent of U.S. Virgin Islands residents are still without electricity. (If the House budget passes, things will only get worse: The budget cuts nearly $1 billion from disaster relief to help pay for Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall.)

The administration’s xenophobia is getting even worse

Months after the Trump administration ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), they denied a few thousand DACA renewal applications for being late, even though many of these applications were sitting in a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services mailbox before the deadline passed. The administration also ended Temporary Protected Status for 60,000 Haitians and 2,500 Nicaraguans, forcing them to uproot their lives in America and return to regions that have been devastated by imperialist U.S. foreign policy.

And, as expected, Trump has ramped up deportations—even from the historic highs taking place during the Obama administration. The United States has deported 34 percent more immigrants so far this year than in the same period last year. For many immigrants fleeing violence and instability in Latin America, deportation means a return to poverty, or worse.

Jeff Sessions gets a section all to himself

Earlier this summer, Attorney General Jeff Sessions strengthened the federal government’s ability to seize assets from people before bringing any criminal charges against them. In other words, this lets police officers take people’s money and property without due process. One more time: This lets police officers take people’s money and property without due process.

Sessions also declared that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act will no longer provide employment protection to transgender Americans, potentially allowing employers and insurers to deny coverage to a group that already experiences extremely high rates of poverty. This came after Sessions’ Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that Title VII also doesn’t cover sexual orientation—opening the door to more workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people. Other guidance from the DOJ on religious liberty could mean more discrimination in other areas of life as well, including discrimination in programs that low-income communities rely on for their health, safety, and security.

“I know that you’re Catholic, as am I, and it seems to me that most of the Republicans in the Congress are not willing to stand with the poor and working class as evidenced in the recent debates about health care and the anticipated tax reform. So I’d like to ask you how you see yourself upholding the church’s social teaching that has the idea that God is always on the side of the poor and dispossessed, as should we be.”

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

It’s a tricky one, but if you want to simultaneously cut taxes for rich people and benefits for poor people, you need to be ready for it. So, just in time for the tax debate, I’ve written a handy step-by-step guide on how to convince your constituents that a help-the-rich, whack-the-poor agenda is really what’s best for everybody:

1. Say you share the same goals.

Let’s be honest: It sounds pretty bad to say that you want to take from the poor to give to the rich. So, don’t do it! The trick here is to convince people that you’re with them on the importance of helping the poor. You just disagree about “how to achieve that goal.”

Congratulations! You’ve just turned a profound moral question about whether we should help the poor or the rich into what appears to be a minor disagreement between ethically equivalent opinions.

2. Direct attention away from what it means to be poor.

Lots of people think poor people simply don’t have enough money to meet their families’ basic needs. You know better. Tell them what the poor really need is “upward mobility,” “economic growth,” and “equality of opportunity.” Not only do these airy concepts all sound really good—who could be against any of them?—they also let you pivot away from the obvious solution: giving people the money, food, health care, and other necessities they lack.

True, Ryan’s agenda doesn’t provide any of those things. But don’t worry! If you just repeat the lie that tax cuts for the rich spur economic growth, no one will even have time to dig into the intimate connection between inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity.

3. Imply that poor people’s personal failings are what’s holding them back.

You can’t pull off the enlightened nice-guy routine if you’re blaming poor people for their problems outright. You need to do it subtly. Instead of saying, “Poor people are poor because they’re lazy,” try saying, “We’ve got to change our approach … and always encourage work, never discourage work.” Never mind that most people who can work already do, or that wages are so low it’s possible (and quite common) to work full-time and still be in poverty. People are predisposed to believe that our success relative to those less fortunate is a result of our superior work ethic and talents, rather than a product of race, class, gender, and/or other forms of privilege and sheer dumb luck. The more you tap into that inclination, the more people will oppose helping those less fortunate and support imposing burdensome requirements on the Have Nots instead.

4. Choose unrepresentative examples and statistics.

Paul Ryan loves to tell people that “our poverty rates are about the same as they were when we started [the] War on Poverty,” which is more or less what the official poverty measure shows. Does it bother him that the official measure excludes the effects of the very programs he says aren’t working? Nope. It shouldn’t bother you, either. You also shouldn’t feel obligated to mention the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which shows that anti-poverty programs cut poverty nearly in half and have reduced poverty by 10 percentage points since the late 1960s. After all, Ryan doesn’t!

Similarly, Ryan likes to lament the case of “a single mom getting 24 grand in benefits with two kids who,” because of the way the safety net is designed, “will lose 80 cents on the dollar if she goes and takes a job.” The extraordinary rareness of this case doesn’t phase him, nor does the fact that his proposed remedies for this problem make life for that single mom—and thousands of others—much worse. He’s fine with leaving those inconvenient details out, and you should be fine with doing so, too.

5. Hammer “focus on outcomes” rhetoric.

Focusing on outcomes is popular in many fields, so this talking point—that “instead of measuring success based on how much money we spend or how many programs we create or how many people are on those programs … [we should] measure success in poverty on outcomes”—is very effective. The fact that nobody actually measures program effectiveness by how much money we spend or by the number of programs we create is irrelevant, as is the large and growing body of research showing that the safety net boosts the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. As long as you contend that we currently don’t focus on outcomes, you can make our anti-poverty programs seem misguided.

There will always be those who oppose funneling money from low- and middle-income Americans to the wealthy and corporations. But if you stick to these tried-and-true steps from Paul Ryan, before you know it, you’ll have convinced a constituency (and perhaps even yourself!) that helping the rich is actually about helping the poor. Or, at the very least, people will be too confused to know the difference.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on 34justice.com. It has been edited for length and content. 

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

According to analysis by the Center for American Progress based on Tax Policy Center data, 36 million working- and middle-class households would see a tax increase by 2027 under the House tax bill. Based on the latest version of the tax plan, 22.5 percent of tax units (tax parlance for households) in the bottom 80 percent of the income scale would see their taxes go up by 2027, at an average cost of a whopping $1,130 per family with a tax increase. With more than 159 million households in these income brackets, 36 million would end up facing a tax increase.

Source: Tax Policy Center.

And what’s most striking is just how many of the tax increases in the bill fall on middle class and struggling families. In fact, the middle and working class will comprise the overwhelming majority of those facing tax increases under the House bill (36 million out of 45 million households facing tax increases).

So, how does this happen? The short answer is that the House tax bill is so heavily tilted toward corporations and high-income taxpayers that they have to raise taxes on many middle-class families in order to pay for it. The largest tax cut, which would lower the corporate rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, would cost about $1.5 trillion over 10 years. There is also a new tax loophole for President Donald Trump himself—cutting the top rate on “pass-through” income from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. The bill eliminates the Alternative Minimum Tax, which also exclusively benefits households with incomes above $200,000. And it repeals the estate tax after 5 years, which is paid by the wealthiest 0.2 percent of estates and will cost about $240 billion over the next decade.

As Rebecca Vallas and I outlined last week, this is partially offset with a series of tax cuts on the working and middle class. Some of the hardest hit will be student loan recipients: Nearly 12 million will be affected by repeal of the student loan interest deduction. Graduate students will be hit even harder, since the House tax bill proposes taxing tuition paid by their universities, which will raise taxes by nearly $10,000 on some students.

The plan also eliminates the Work Opportunity Tax Credit—an incentive for businesses that hire disabled veterans and people who have been looking for work. And, perhaps most egregiously, the House bill ends tax benefits for people with high medical expenses. This would fall particularly hard on seniors in need of long-term care and families of Alzheimer’s patients.

Importantly, the bill’s “Family Flexibility Credit”—a provision in the bill that does benefit the middle class—would expire after 5 years, even though nearly every other tax cut (corporate tax cut, the Trump “pass-through” loophole, estate tax elimination, and the elimination of the alternative minimum tax) would continue indefinitely.

Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell may want to tout the middle-class benefits of their tax bill, but if one thing is clear from the current tax legislation, it’s this: It’s a great deal for the wealthiest Americans and large corporations, and a lousy one for the middle and working class.

Alex Thornton, Seth Hanlon, and Alex Rowell all contributed analysis.

I teach at an urban public university—a “Research 1,” top-of-the-Carnegie-rankings institution. I’m not one of Philadelphia’s school teachers; I’m a professor with just one class to teach each term and a big research budget. But those trappings of prestige no longer shield me from the realities of poverty in our city, and more importantly, they don’t help my students.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Since 2008, my team’s research on how students finance college has revealed that the main barrier to degree completion isn’t tuition; it’s having a place to sleep and enough food to eat. The best estimates suggest that food insecurity affects as many as 1 in 2 college students—much higher than the rate in the general population. Just as many struggle with housing insecurity, and a significant number (14 percent at community colleges) are homeless.

This is a largely invisible problem. Stereotypes of Ramen-noodle diets and couch-surfing partiers prevent us from seeing it. They trick us into thinking that food insecurity is a rite of passage, that hunger and even homelessness among our students is normal. But it is time to admit that we have a serious problem in higher education.

Some campuses have begun implementing small reforms to address food insecurity. The College and University Food Bank Alliance has more than 525 members from coast to coast, with food pantries housed at community colleges and universities, public and private. This is a stunning increase, since in 2012 there were just over 10. That provides emergency assistance to the students who are lucky enough to know about them, though what they actually stock varies. Sometimes there are fresh fruits and vegetables, but usually there are cans and bags, some bread, and the occasional bottle of shampoo or body wash.

In some cases, colleges are moving beyond food pantries. Just over two dozen schools operate a program known as Swipe Out Hunger, which reallocates unused dollars on meal plans to students who need them. Homegrown efforts such as Single Stop are helping students apply for SNAP, and some institutions are beginning to accept EBT on campus. In Houston, the local food bank is offering “food scholarships” to community college students, proactively providing groceries rather than waiting for emergencies to occur. There are food recovery networks, nutrition programs, and educational activities like Challah for Hunger, where students gather to break bread and learn about poverty. These efforts are entry points to systemic change, and they make it possible to envision a time in which the National School Lunch Program operates on all campuses, providing breakfast and lunch to every student who needs it.

But when it comes to housing, things don’t look so good. When colleges and universities think about housing, they see dollar signs to be gained from residence halls catering to wealthy and international students, rather than opportunities to facilitate affordable living. Given massive state disinvestment throughout the country, it is hard to blame the public institutions. But it means that a growing number of students are being left out in the cold.

Students who struggle to pay rent are at risk of eviction, like so many other low-income adults around the country. Those who seek out shelters find the same overcrowded and sometimes dangerous conditions that have long plagued those temporary accommodations, and students often miss out on beds because the lines form while they are still in class. Even young people who grew up in public housing can lose their housing when they enroll in college if their local housing authority deprioritizes full-time undergraduates.

The financial aid system contributes to these problems. Consider a 23-year-old adult living on the streets, estranged from two middle-class parents because he is queer. Under federal law, his parents’ income is used to determine his financial aid, even though he lacks access to those resources. His only hope of disregarding their income and qualifying for more support is to endure a “special circumstances” process that requires documentation verifying that he is homeless, which can be challenging if he was not homeless in high school and is not in the shelter system. In 2015-16, nearly 32,000 college students completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) verification process and were officially deemed homeless for financial aid purposes. However, more than 150,000 students indicated that they were homeless on an initial filtering question, but could not complete the necessary documentation process.

The oversight of the very real housing and food needs of undergraduates is hypocritical given the intense pressure we place on people today to complete college degrees. It is very difficult to complete anything—whether it is a vocational training program for a welding certificate, an associate’s degree in nursing, or an engineering program—without first having your basic needs met.

I am trying, in my own way, to do what I can. Last year, I created the FAST Fund to provide students with cash, quickly, when it is needed. And I added a statement to my syllabus that will remain there indefinitely:

Any student who has difficulty affording groceries or accessing sufficient food to eat every day or who lacks a safe and stable place to live, and believes this may affect their performance in the course, is urged to contact the CARE Team in the Dean of Students Office for support. Furthermore, please notify me if you are comfortable in doing so. This will enable me to provide any other resources that I may possess.

It is but a start, meant to help establish a culture of care in my classroom, one that I hope can be transmitted and reflected throughout the university. We can and must go further. Every college and university must help its students connect to every public benefits program for which they are eligible. That support, coupled with emergency cash assistance, can help shield students from hunger and help them keep a roof over their heads. Colleges should also pursue external partnerships with local food banks, housing authorities, and homeless shelters. And most of all, higher education has a responsibility to tackle poverty among its students in a data-driven way that acknowledges that students without resources do not lack talent, drive, or intellect. They simply need access to the same sorts of supports that students from families with money enjoy every day.

Talk about social mobility is all the rage in higher education right now. But let’s get real: College is a great route out of poverty, but for that path to work students must escape the conditions of poverty long enough to complete their degrees.

Many of the most extreme tax increases come in the form of eliminated tax credits or deductions buried deep in the text of the bill—and ignored by lawmakers and the media. With tax increases affecting groups ranging from seniors and people with disabilities, to families facing costly medical bills, to immigrant children, to people with student loans—to name just a few—the bill is a virtual laundry list of tax increases on populations who are often struggling to make ends meet.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Here are eight of the most horrifying provisions buried in the tax plan.

1. It raises taxes for people with student loans

Americans now owe more than $1.4 trillion in student loan debt—nearly double all credit card debt. The average monthly payment is up to $351 (or more than $4,200 a year) for borrowers between the ages of 20 and 30—a large chunk of income for young Americans.

Thankfully, under current law, borrowers can deduct up to $2,500 of the interest on these loans per year, which helped more than 12 million Americans in 2015. But the House tax plan eliminates that deduction. If the plan passes, the average borrower will see their taxes go up by $275 each year just on student loan interest. And a borrower who pays the full $2,500 in interest would see their taxes go up even more—by a whopping $625.

2. It raises taxes on people facing high medical expenses

Under current law, people are able to deduct medical expenses that exceed 10 percent of their income for the year. This benefits thousands of people facing serious illnesses or with long-term care needs—and gives them some financial relief in the face of high medical bills.

But the House Republican plan eliminates that deduction, too. This will hit people with disabilities as well as elderly nursing home residents particularly hard, as they often pay tens of thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs for long-term care. Much like their earlier plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the change is also aimed directly at states that supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, where residents are more likely to be uninsured and have higher medical costs.

3. It ends a tax credit that helps parents adopt

For thousands of adoptive parents, adoption is only possible because of the adoption tax credit, which helps parents recoup up to $13,000 of the cost of adoption. House Republicans would eliminate the adoption tax credit, making it harder for countless would-be parents to have children. There are more than 100,000 children in U.S. foster care today (not to mention millions more orphaned or abandoned), and eliminating the credit would make it significantly harder for them to find a permanent home.

4. It makes disability accessibility more expensive for small businesses

Under current law, small businesses can claim a tax credit to offset 50 percent of the cost of accessibility for people with disabilities for expenses between $250 and $10,250. But the House GOP tax bill would eliminate that tax credit, effectively raising taxes on small businesses trying to make sure their doors are open to people with disabilities. This comes as legislation currently pending in the House—misleadingly titled the “ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017”—would gut the very part of the Americans with Disabilities Act that requires public places to ensure accessibility for people with disabilities.

5. It eliminates a tax credit that spurs investment in poor communities

Trump has repeatedly promised to save and bring back jobs in communities left behind. But the House Republican tax bill would eliminate a tax credit that encourages businesses to invest in hard-hit rural and urban areas. Investors who qualify for the New Markets Tax Credit get a tax credit to partially offset their investments in distressed communities where the poverty rate is 20 percent or higher. The vast majority of the tax credit’s funding has benefited communities with unemployment rates more than 1.5 times the national average and/or poverty rates of at least 30 percent.

6. It allows churches to be manipulated for political purposes

Under current law, 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations—including churches—are prohibited from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Trump has long made known his desire to repeal this policy, known as the Johnson Amendment—as far back as the early 2000s, as well as throughout his presidential campaign—claiming it violates churches’ First Amendment rights. And hidden in the House GOP tax bill is a provision that would make good on Trump’s promise, despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of Americans say they do not support political endorsements in church. As a letter from more than 4,000 faith leaders opposing this change states: “Faith leaders are called to speak truth to power, and we cannot do so if we are merely cogs in partisan political machines.”

7. It takes away critical income from immigrant families with kids

While House Republicans are busy patting themselves on the back for including modest enhancements to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in their tax bill, they have changed the credit so that many immigrant families with citizen children will not be able to receive it. The bill would require all filers to provide a Social Security number, instead of an Individual Tax Identification Number, which immigrant workers with qualifying citizen children can currently use to claim the credit. According to the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, more than 5.1 million children of immigrant parents would lose access to the CTC under this provision.

8. It gives fetuses legal status as people

Buried in House Republicans’ tax bill is their latest effort to advance the GOP’s anti-choice agenda. Specifically, they use a provision in the bill that would allow parents to buy 529 college savings plans for unborn children as a smoke screen to, yet again, try to give fetuses legal status as people. The provision goes out of its way to define unborn child as a “child in utero … a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.” This comes on the heels of Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services’ strategic plan draft released last month, which bent over backwards to define life as beginning at conception.

The question of financial privilege does, however, make one enormous difference: If you’re poor, you may find it that much harder to escape the abuse, or to recover and heal.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The reasons for this are myriad, complex, and mutually reinforcing, much like the causes of poverty itself, but they can be roughly assigned to two categories: Questions of power and questions of access.

Sexualized violence is a statement of power—harassment is not flirting, and assault is not sex. In both, the perpetrator is establishing themselves as having the right to treat another human being as they will. The victim’s right to safety is void; the perpetrator has the power to say or do what they wish, and the victim has no choice but to accept those choices.

Indeed, men who harass and assault women routinely prey on those who are clearly less powerful than their attackers. Harvey Weinstein consistently visited his depravity on Hollywood’s young and aspiring; R. Kelly has long been known for plucking girls from high schools on Chicago’s South Side. As Donald Trump said in 2005, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

One needn’t be a star to have relative power over a woman, though. In a society in which women are dehumanized in private, in public, in statute, and in practice, women as a class are axiomatically less powerful than men as a class. Poverty serves to exponentially increase that power differential.

Women in the lowest income bracket experience sexual violence at six times the rate of women in the highest. That statistic supports something poor women already know: The poorer you are, the more likely you are to endure a man’s unwanted attention. You can’t quit the job that barely pays, you can’t argue with the uncle in whose home you must live, and you can’t afford the classes that might allow you to leave both behind.

Poverty is not only a risk factor for harassment and assault, though—poverty is often the result of harassment and assault. The victim who leaves her job may have no other source of income, and more than one-third of women who leave their abusers’ homes end up homeless. Weinstein’s victims understood all too clearly that he ultimately held power over their ability to make a living, and a vindictive restaurant manager might be all that stands between a server and her ability to feed her kids.

Then there’s the question of access to medical or psychological support. Non-consensual sexual contact is often violent; rape can of course lead to pregnancy; studies have found that alarming numbers of harassment and assault victims develop PTSD; and even short-term experiences with shock and anxiety can be temporarily debilitating or permanently life-altering. But treating all of those things costs money. Even something as simple as transportation can present an obstacle—what if there’s no bus from your neighborhood to the nearest free clinic?

Every survivor’s experience is different, and trauma is not made untraumatic by a middle class income. Women of color, trans women, undocumented immigrants, and women with disabilities all face further hurdles, complications, and intersections, regardless of income.

Yet poverty places an undeniable additional burden on anyone who has survived sexual harassment or assault. Even as we reel from the unending revelations out of Hollywood or Silicon Valley, it’s worth remembering that even healing is a privilege.

The details of the Child Tax Credit are not yet public, including the amount of the expansion and whether she would make changes to help children in families with very low incomes who cannot currently receive the full credit. But one thing is very, very clear: This credit is clearly designed to help make the Trump tax plan, which is heavily skewed toward tax breaks for the wealthy, more politically palatable.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that 80 percent of the tax breaks would go to people in the top 1 percent of earners. In other words, people like Ivanka Trump.

Just repealing the estate tax—which is only one of many planned tax cuts—would amount to a $1.1 billion windfall for Ivanka Trump and her siblings. That’s enough to pay for 100,000 children to go to child care for an entire year. And that’s before accounting for the trillions it would cost to slash the top income tax rate, give low rates to pass-through businesses, and re-open loopholes for the wealthy.

But Trump, the dutiful soldier, is sticking to her message. That means continuing to insist that her child care plan will support most Americans, even though the plan she pitched during the campaign would have given the average family in a county that swung heavily toward Trump in the 2016 presidential election just $5.55 per year. (Residents in Ivanka Trump’s former Manhattan neighborhood would stand to gain more than $7,000 in tax benefits.) A year later, the same principles apply. The Trump administration is looking to use empty rhetoric to appeal to working women to sell a major tax break for wealthy people like her.

To be clear, the Child Tax Credit can provide a vehicle for improving economic security among families with young children. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 16 million children in low-income working families would not receive the benefit because their families’ earnings are too low. Proposals to make the credit refundable would allow lower-income families to actually benefit, and proposals to make it more generous could go a long way to defray costs associated with raising children.

If she wanted, Ivanka Trump could go even further than taxes. She could support Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Bobby Scott’s (D-VA) bill to guarantee child care assistance to low-income and middle-class families, or she could challenge her father’s requests to cut the program that offers child care assistance to low-income working families and eliminate on-campus child care and afterschool programs.

Or, if taxes are really what speak to her, she could move on to expanding child care assistance through the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC). Right now, the CDCTC primarily reaches upper-middle-class families, and the $1,050-per-child credit pales in comparison to the $10,000 annual price tag at a child care center.

If Ivanka Trump wanted to make a difference, there’s no shortage of ideas. But instead, she’s selling another “by Ivanka, for Ivanka” child care plan that won’t work for the millions of families who struggle to pay for the child care they need.

Inmates are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that workers are paid at least the federal minimum wage. That makes it completely legal for states to exploit inmates for free or cheap labor. More than half of the 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons work while incarcerated, and the vast majority only make a few cents per hour.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Most inmates work in their own prison facilities, in jobs such as maintenance or food service. These jobs pay an average of just 86 cents an hour, and are primarily designed to keep the prison running at a low cost. Others may be employed in so-called “correctional industries,” where inmates work for the Department of Corrections to produce goods that are sold to government entities and nonprofit organizations. The highest median wages for these jobs top out at less than $2 an hour, and they’ve dropped over time—an incarcerated worker is paid less today than they were in 2001. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, most inmates working in prison facilities aren’t paid at all.

It is impossible to discuss prison labor without acknowledging the deep ties the criminal justice system has to the legacy of slavery in the United States. Targeted mass incarceration policies, racial bias, and other structural disadvantages have led to an overrepresentation of people of color—particularly African Americans—in prisons and jails. As activist and author Shaka Senghor notes in Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th, “The 13^th amendment says, ‘no involuntary servitude except for those who have been duly convicted of a crime.’ So once you’ve been convicted of a crime, you are in essence a slave of the state.”

Though we run the risk of stating the obvious, there is a clear solution available: treating prisoners like people rather than chattel. That means paying prisoners a minimum wage for their work, and making sure the employment options in prison are designed to help people transition into their communities once they are released.

Apprenticeship programs, which provide paid training that combines on-the-job learning with classroom instruction, may be the perfect solution. These programs can equip inmates with a marketable skill, a wage, and a credential that holds value in the labor market and can help them get a job upon release. A recent Center for American Progress report suggests using paid apprenticeships during incarceration to help inmates and their families support themselves after incarceration and reduce recidivism.

However, these programs frequently suffer the same pitfall as other prison work programs—they pay breathtakingly low wages. Since 2008, the median starting wage has been 7 cents an hour and the median exit wage 35 cents an hour—hardly enough to put inmates on the road to financial stability.

If these programs paid decent wages, they could increase economic stability of inmates, effectively easing the path to re-entry. They would allow inmates to pay off debts from their interactions with the justice system and reduce recidivism. They’re not a panacea, but well-paid apprenticeships can help put returning citizens on the road toward a good job and a secure future.

The criminal justice system has historically relied on a system of punishment and exploitation instead of rehabilitation, but we can change this going forward. Treating incarcerated people like human beings by paying them for their work is a good place to start.

It may sound fanciful to adults, but President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress put together a wish list of tax cuts for the wealthy that are far more extravagant than ponies. It turns out for the cost of just one of these tax cuts—repealing the tax on wealthy estates—we could literally buy every single American a pony.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

A lovely little Shetland pony, specifically. For all 325 million of us. In fact, the benefits Trump’s own adult children could get from his estate tax repeal would fund nearly 1.4 million ponies—that alone is enough to cover giving a pony to everyone in the state of Maine.

Let’s break down the numbers. Shetland ponies range in price from $300 to $1,500. We’re not lavish people, but we also don’t want to buy a cut-rate horse, so we assumed $800 per pony (and, of course, that there are enough ponies to go around). The larger expenses are the continuous costs of keeping our ponies healthy, active, and thriving: Every year our ponies will need lodging ($2,400), food ($1,200), and visits from the vet ($300) and farrier ($500).

These are sizeable expenses; on average, purchasing and caring for a pony will cost about $44,800 over 10 years. But the Senate is already considering a budget that includes a far more sizable expense: $1.5 trillion over 10 years in higher budget deficits for tax cuts that will mostly benefit the wealthy.

If Congress abandoned its tax cuts for millionaires and wealthy corporations, it could use that $1.5 trillion to purchase and care for a pony for roughly every American child ages 8 and below. Given the current dynamics in the United States—where economic inequality is skyrocketing and My Little Pony: The Movie is now playing in theaters—giving ponies to children is probably a more appropriate policy response than giving tax breaks to millionaires.

Alternatively, instead of providing tax cuts for millionaires or ponies for children, lawmakers could also use $1.5 trillion in many other ways to create jobs, reduce child poverty, end homelessness, make college free, or provide paid family leave.

In reality, of course, average Americans will miss out on the pleasures of ponies. A lot of them will even miss out on the tax cuts Trump is promising: 1 in 4 families will actually see their taxes rise under his plan by 2027, while 80 percent of the tax cuts go to households in the top 1 percent. Those tax cuts for the wealthy are enormously expensive, and Congress cannot enact them without severe trade-offs.

Like the continuous costs of pony upkeep, maintaining America’s economy requires ongoing investments—in education, in transportation, in research and scientific innovation. Yet as we’ve seen time and again, when policymakers slash tax revenue by giving handouts to the rich, they turn around and cut these very investments by complaining that we can’t afford them. And policymakers have made no secret that that’s what they plan to do: Trump’s budget gets two-thirds of its draconian spending cuts by slashing programs that serve low- and moderate-income families, to the tune of $2.5 trillion over a decade.

At a time when 44 percent of Americans couldn’t come up with $400 in an emergency—and 9 in 10 prefer economic stability to greater economic mobility—Americans aren’t asking for ponies, presents, or parades. And they’re really not asking for massive tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and corporations.

Seventy-five percent of Americans agree that “the wealthiest Americans should pay higher tax rates.” President Trump and Congressional Republican leaders want to give away the horse, the cart, and the country’s future to the rich, leaving little or nothing for the rest of us.

The bill passed by the D.C. Council goes into effect in 2020, granting eligible workers eight weeks of paid leave per year for a new child, six weeks toward care for an ill relative, and two weeks to attend to a temporary disability. It is the product of a two-year battle between advocates, who originally proposed 16 weeks of paid leave funded through a payroll tax, and a business lobby that fought for half as much leave with unclear funding mechanisms.

But since the UPLA became law in April—without the signature of Mayor Muriel Bowser, who cited concerns about the tax it imposes and the fact that it creates a new bureaucracy—four Council members have come forward with proposals to overhaul how the program is administered. Although the bills that have gained the most traction don’t reduce the length of paid leave or the wage replacement rate, they introduce new systems that threaten to compromise workers’ ability to actually access their benefits.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Under the current law, benefits will be funded by a 0.62 percent payroll tax paid by employers. The D.C. government will administer the program in its entirety, meaning that workers will submit paid leave requests to and receive benefits from a government agency instead of negotiating them with their employers. This model is a boon to workers, many of whom have seen requests for paid leave denied by managers.

But, at the behest of business and trade associations, multiple D.C. Council members have introduced alternatives to the UPLA that replace the centralized system in current law with one that gives control to individual employers––in many cases, the same employers who opposed the paid leave bill in the first place. Under the bulk of these proposals—there are five in total—employers pay significantly less in payroll taxes (in some cases a rate of just .1 percent), and instead either pay for paid leave benefits out of pocket or purchase private insurance.

This system—termed the employer mandate—replaces the predictable payroll tax with an unknown, and likely very volatile, cost to employers, who will have to pay for paid leave out of pocket, and can’t predict when employees will need to access their benefits. Because businesses’ profit margins are on the line, it creates a powerful incentive for employers to discriminate against the workers who are most likely to need to take time off from work. Currently, it isn’t uncommon for employers to pay these workers less, fire them, or just not hire them in the first place, rather than provide them paid leave. For low-wage earners, who are more often subject to intimidation by employers, the stakes are especially high.

In the United States, paid family leave is uniquely difficult to come by—unlike in literally every other industrialized country, where it’s guaranteed to workers. Only a handful of states (and now D.C.) have such laws on the books, and the majority of the nation’s employees are faced with untenable decisions between a paycheck and critical time off to care for themselves, a relative, or a newborn. On the flipside, when people have access to paid leave, their labor force participation rates improve, alongside their economic security and their health outcomes.

D.C. workers had been promised one of the nation’s strongest paid leave programs, and a full 82 percent of D.C. residents––who also, after all, live in one of the nation’s most progressive hubs––support it. But under these new proposals, some of the workers who need those benefits the most may never receive them.

In Florida, as officials rushed to open emergency shelters for those forced from their homes by Irma, some residents who had been homeless before the hurricane were forced to wear bright yellow bracelets to mark their status. In St. Augustine, previously homeless people reported that they were not only forced to wear wristbands, but that authorities warned newly homeless hurricane victims to stay away from people with the yellow bracelets because they were criminals, thieves, and drug users. One woman described her experience to a local service provider this way: “They treated me like I was non-human, insulted me and others … [They] separated us from other people.”

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

In New Smyrna Beach, Florida, a community volunteer said that previously homeless people—including some in wheelchairs—were turned away from hurricane shelters and later directed to the Volusia County Fairgrounds, which served as a segregated shelter for pre-hurricane homeless people. A homeless man in Daytona Beach said, “[We] were treated like animals … like we got a disease or something.”

The unequal treatment of “pre-hurricane homeless” people versus “hurricane homeless” people was not unique to Florida. One Houston service provider told me, “There was definitely a treatment of people who had been homeless prior to the storm that was different … [they were] told that they needed to go to agencies that are part of the city homeless service system, rather than receive services within the [hurricane] shelter.”  They were then de-prioritized for assistance too, as a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency wrote in an email to Reuters: “If an individual was homeless pre-disaster, they may not be considered for Housing Assistance and Other Needs Assistance, which both require successful verification of pre-disaster occupancy.”

The reality is, none of the people who were homeless before the storms were living “pre-disaster” lives. Before the hurricanes struck, they had already fallen victim to more routine disasters: a lost job, eviction, health crisis, domestic violence, untreated addiction, or mental illness. Any of these can lead to homelessness because of the manmade disaster that is the biggest driving cause of homelessness today: the crisis in affordable housing.

After decades of cuts to federal housing programs—which shrank as a share of gross domestic product by 30 percent between 1996 and 2016—only 1 in 4 of those who are poor enough to qualify for housing assistance currently receive it. At the same time, as many cities experience luxury development booms, lower-income people are being displaced from the private housing market. As inequality deepens, poorer Americans must crash with families and friends, live in their cars, seek refuge in emergency shelters, or try to survive on the streets.

For those living in public, there is also the risk of being fined, arrested, and even jailed. Increasingly, cities across the country are passing and enforcing laws that make it a crime to sit, sleep, and even eat in public places. Over the past ten years, such laws have increased dramatically the throughout country—including in some of the same cities that rushed to the aid of hurricane victims.

In Houston, some 6,000 people were homeless pre-Harvey, and emergency shelters had long been full. But instead of helping homeless residents, the city passed a new law just before the storm making it a crime to sleep on the street—punishable by fine, arrest, and incarceration.

The slew of storms will now worsen the already tight housing market—the destruction of millions of properties will increase demand and drive rents higher. This will likely hit low-income people particularly hard, since they are more likely to live in flood-prone areas or in shoddy, unsafe housing, making their residences particularly vulnerable to ruin. Not surprisingly, these disasters disproportionately affect people of color, who are not only more likely to be poor, but also more likely to be homeless. Those unable to receive housing assistance will be left to fight for space in overflowing emergency shelters or to live on the streets.

People often come together with generosity in the face of natural disasters, as they can remind us that we are all vulnerable to nature. But as Harvey, Irma, Jose, and now Maria have shown, the reality is that some of us are both more vulnerable and more likely to be excluded from help and human decency.

A coalition of organizations is now advocating for new policies to ensure a fair and just recovery—and to prevent those who are most vulnerable from being stigmatized, excluded, and tagged with special bracelets during future natural disasters. Responses to natural disasters must be equitable, both during and after the crisis. They must recognize the needs—and humanity—of those made homeless by natural disasters and those made homeless by manmade disasters.

Editor’s Note: This article was produced in collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

A tax framework was released last week, so House Republicans are now primed to vote on the budget and set the budget reconciliation process in motion, which, if successful, will allow Republicans in both chambers to pass a joint budget by simple majority, thus skirting the threat of a Democratic filibuster. As confusing as all that may be for non-wonks (explainers here, here, and here), it’s all technically permissible under legislative procedure.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Though it seems to have satisfied the Freedom Caucus (temporarily), there is considerable disagreement as to whether or not the White House’s nine-page framing document on taxes actually clarified much of anything. Trump and his various surrogates have done an awful lot of lying in the meantime—about who benefits, who doesn’t, and by how much—and no one seems to know how, exactly, the Congressional majority intends to pay for the trillions of dollars in tax cuts for which they’re calling. It seems to involve a fair amount of magical thinking.

Well, magical thinking, and shanking the poor. That much was clarified: The poor will, of course, be shanked.

Tax brackets, tax breaks, and just how the rich will become richer are all important details, no doubt, but among those details runs a single, shining through-line, a unifying message: Some people are worth investing in. Other people are not.

Every budget answers a question: Given a finite amount of treasure, on whom is it best spent? Should we, as a society, give $125 a month in food to people who can’t find a job, work in poorly-paid industries, or have fallen ill, or put an extra $129,000 into the pockets of people who make three-quarters of a million dollars a year? What’s better: Putting money into education initiatives and loan forgiveness programs that give those in poverty a tool with which to try to escape poverty, or helping the wealthy protect their wealth in off-shore tax havens?

Even for Trump and Congress, the calculus on who makes the cut is complex. It’s informed by race, by gender, by existing wealth, by proximity to power, by actual power. It’s informed by pettiness and greed. But at the end of the day—at the end of every single day—we still have a choice. The divide between poverty and wealth is a choice made by Americans who have arrived at a judgement about the fundamental worthiness of the lives of other Americans.

Contrary to how we usually discuss it, poverty is not a condition—it’s not dandruff, or cancer. Poverty doesn’t just appear at random, nor is it part of the natural order. Poverty is a choice, a series of choices, made and compounded across generations, by human beings. And as that choice is made by one group of people about another group of people, poverty is ultimately a relationship.  It is a direct outcome of how humans with power choose to relate to other humans.

The Ryan budget and Trump tax plan are blunt instruments with which to cement and extend the existing relationship between the extremes in American society—and the extremes are already more extreme than they’ve been in generations.

About a week before Trump unveiled his tax plan, the founder and chairman of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, made a startlingly frank comment about income inequality: At a fundraiser for Grameen America, Ray Dalio said that the United States effectively has two separate economies, and “the greatest issue of our time is the disparity of wealth and the problems that exist for the lower 40 percent of the population.”

Just days after Dalio made his comments, the Federal Reserve released a report about that very disparity, finding that the top 10 percent of American wealth holders already control 77 percent of the nation’s wealth. The top 1 percent of families control 38.5 percent.

Much of human suffering is beyond human control: Hurricanes and heartbreak will always come, no matter what we do. But poverty is a human relationship, in which humans decide who to value, and in whom to invest. Humans decide if the rich are going to get richer as the poor get poorer.

For all the commotion and legislative jargon currently swirling around the Congressional budget and tax plans, it’s important to remember that the poverty enshrined in both isn’t inevitable. It’s just that the wealthiest and most powerful people in America are doing all they can to ensure that people in poverty stay in their place.

The study’s authors matched up the timing of math tests in South Carolina to the dates when low-income students’ families received monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps). They found that kids’ test scores dropped at times of the month when nutrition benefits had run out. Put another way, access to SNAP substantially improves students’ academic performance—but only when there are actually enough benefits for families to be able to eat.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Running out of SNAP benefits isn’t an anomaly—nearly half of participating families run out before the end of the month. That means many students who receive SNAP see their academic performance dip every single month, and then rebound once their families receive more benefits. That’s not surprising, since SNAP benefits average just $1.40 per person per meal; it’s such a gross underestimation of food cost that nearly 80 percent of benefits are spent in the first two weeks. School meals provide a little bit of a buffer—in fact, kids get as many as half their calories from the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs—but these programs aren’t designed to provide all the food a child needs to survive. Plus, they can’t reach kids on weekends or during the summer months.

This new research adds to a wealth of evidence that hunger hampers kids’ ability to learn, holds back their development of social skills, and leads to behavioral problems. And it complements many careful studies that find that access to SNAP and other programs that provide basic living standards have large, positive effects on kids’ long-term outcomes.

What’s new and different about this paper, though, is that it demonstrates the immediate difference SNAP makes to kids, rather than the long-term effects. And it joins a small but growing body of research that examines how the economic insecurity many families experience on a month-to month—or even week-to-week—basis negatively impacts their lives.

This study also reveals a massive missed opportunity: For the modest cost of boosting SNAP benefits so that they’re enough to last all month—about $15 billion per year—the US could dramatically reduce hunger and significantly boost academic achievement and educational attainment for low-income students. That’s a fraction of what Trump has proposed in tax cuts: It adds up to $1 of food benefits for every $29 he wants to give to wealthy corporations and business owners.

Instead, President Trump wants to slash SNAP by a whopping 29 percent over the next decade. That could mean an average of 3.6 million families—including roughly 1.9 million families with children—would lose access to food assistance each year. Not to be outdone, House Republicans propose cutting SNAP by 42 percent between 2023 and 2027, which could leave 7 million families hungry in 2023.

The Roosevelt Institute’s Marshall Steinbaum calls out the irony here: Many elites insist—sometimes condescendingly—that education is the ticket out of poverty. If you’re poor, they imply, it’s because you should have gone to school longer to secure a higher-paying job. But while education does tend to provide some protection from poverty, this misses a key insight. Sometimes, the barrier to education is poverty itself.

It goes without saying that protecting children from hunger is far and away the most important goal of SNAP—and the only necessary one. But studies like this show that when Trump and House Republicans propose gutting programs that ensure basic living standards, they’re not just leaving kids hungry. They’re ripping away low-income kids’ chances to escape economic insecurity and experience upward economic mobility.

How can we expect our nation’s next generation to focus on a dream—especially one as ambitious as the American Dream—when they’re hungry?

But while Winner-Take-All Politics got a lot of attention, the media missed a crucial part of the book: Rising inequality comes at a high cost to individual workers. In the book, Hacker and Pierson presented calculations showing that if inequality had stayed constant from 1979 to 2006, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would make up to 36 percent more per year than they currently do.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Half a decade later, inequality is still growing. It also still isn’t getting the media attention it deserves, even though it’s making a massive impact on Americans’ lives. It’s like climate change: There is nothing “new” about growing inequality, so it gets pushed out of the news in favor of White House scandals and presidential tweets. But just like global warming, economic inequality is slowly but surely destroying the livelihoods of many Americans.

You can see this quite clearly when you look at how the distribution of household income has changed over the past 50 years. I extended Hacker and Pierson’s original calculations to include incomes from 1968 to 2015, giving us about two decades’ worth of additional data beyond other recent calculations. The wider timeframe shows an even deeper decline in income than the authors originally reported.

The table below breaks this down by income bracket. The second column shows what each group’s average household income was in 2015; the third column shows what the group’s average income would have been if inequality had stayed the same between 1968 and 2015.

Source: Author’s calculations based on 2016 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

If it weren’t for the increase in inequality, the bottom 40 percent of households would be making more than 35 percent more today.

The gains, of course, have gone to the very wealthiest Americans—especially those in the top 5 percent. Due to the rise in inequality, higher-income households—those in the top 20 percent of the income distribution but not in the top 5 percent—have seen a 9 percent increase in their annual incomes. But incomes for households in the top 5 percent are 26 percent higher—an increase nearly three times as great. This reveals something important about the nature of rising inequality: The “winners” from increased inequality are really a small group of incredibly rich Americans, who are taking increasingly large shares of the total national income.

The findings are pretty difficult to refute. Conservatives have long argued that household income statistics are unreliable because they fail to account for differences in household size. But the increase in inequality appears just as real even when we look at “equivalence-adjusted income shares,” which control for differences in household size and composition.

In fact, the figure below shows that households in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution have actually seen their share of national income decline more when we use the equivalence-adjusted household income that addresses conservatives’ concerns.

The poorest fifth of households saw their share of national income decline from 4.2 percent in 1968 to 3.1 percent in 2015, a drop of 1.1 percentage points. However, if we instead look at equivalence-adjusted income, their share of the national income dropped more than twice as much (from 5.8 percent to 3.4 percent, a drop of 2.4 percentage points). Conservatives are right to say that normal household income statistics can be misleading; but that’s because the normal statistics understate the rise in inequality, not because they overstate it.

The rise in inequality is no statistical mirage. It is undoubtedly real—and its effects have been pernicious. Our country’s poorest households lose more than $4,000 every year as a result of the growth in inequality; lower-income families lose more than $11,000; and middle-class families lose around $13,000. That money could pay for real things that families have to do without, whether it’s better food or new shoes, a trip to the doctor or a great summer camp.

If the rise of economic inequality is going to be the great untold story of our time, then reducing inequality should be the greatest progressive objective of the 21st century.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

It is encouraging that the people who saw the worst losses in the years since the Great Recession—specifically African Americans and Hispanics—saw the biggest earnings gains for the second consecutive year. Real median incomes increased 5.7 percent to $39,490 among African Americans and 4.3 percent to $47,675 among Hispanics. But the racial income gap is still stark—the median income among non-Hispanic whites stands at $65,041.

Source: Economic Policy Institute.

The racial wage gap also persists as black men earned 71 cents for every dollar earned by white men in 2016, and Hispanic men earn 66 cents on the dollar. Among women, it has actually grown worse since 2007: Black women now earn 79 cents for every dollar earned by white women, and Hispanic women earn 69 cents on the dollar.

It is therefore not surprising that although poverty rates for all groups were down, they remain highest among African Americans (22 percent) and Hispanics (19.4 percent), compared with whites (8.8 percent). African American and Hispanic children continue to face the highest poverty rates at nearly 31 percent and 27 percent, respectively. African American children are three times more likely to be in poverty than white children.

Source: Economic Policy Institute.

While the Census releases new data every September, it is notable that the solutions remain the same every year: People need investments in quality training and good jobs in their communities; they need a safety net that protects our basic living standards for food, housing, health care, retirement (Social Security); they need access to good schools and higher education; they need child care that doesn’t cost more than a year of college tuition; and they need a minimum wage that isn’t a poverty wage.

Many of the key policies that helped people in poverty achieve some gains are at stake in upcoming congressional debates on the budget. Conservatives will continue to go after the investments that cut poverty in half year-in and year-out, such as Medicaid and affordable health care. They will call for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, even though the wealthiest 5 percent already captured 22.5 percent of all income last year. Nowhere on the agenda is there discussion of a just minimum wage and a real jobs plan that would target those who continue to struggle at the economic margins—disproportionately people of color—doing low-wage or unpaid work.

Recent gains need to be protected in the current political environment, but we also need to stay focused on a vision of how every man, woman, and child has the opportunity to fully participate in our economy and thrive.

But while all this is cause for celebration, today’s data also serve as a stark reminder of how much is at stake in the current political climate. That’s because they reflect continued progress made in 2016 thanks to policies such as the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion and investments in programs that help families afford the basics, from Social Security to nutrition assistance, to tax credits for working families—all of which are at risk under President Trump’s and congressional Republicans’ budgets.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Ironically, as he’s been known to do on more than a few occasions, President Trump may try to claim credit for this continued progress, even though it predates the start of his term. But whether or not he pretends they’re his gains, the data make clear the difference policy choices make—and how much worse off struggling families would be under Trump’s Robin Hood in Reverse agenda.

New analysis by my Center for American Progress colleagues Rachel West and Kate Gallagher Robbins shines a light on just how much worse off poverty would be if Trump’s budget became law. If just three of Trump’s proposed cuts had been in place in 2015—the latest year for which data are available—a staggering 2.3 million more Americans would have been poor that year. This analysis takes into account Trump’s proposed deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (formerly food stamps); his call to eliminate the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which helps 6.7 million Americans afford their energy bills; and the increased out-of-pocket medical costs millions of Americans would face due to Trump’s proposed rollback of Medicaid expansion.

Of course, these three cuts only scratch the surface of Trump’s agenda. His budget also calls for deep cuts to Social Security, critical disability programs, education and job training, school nutrition, job-creating infrastructure investments, and nearly every program or policy that helps working families make ends meet and get ahead. The House Republican budget released this summer shares much of the same DNA. But even just the three budget cuts my colleagues looked at risk erasing all the gains we saw last year.

Meanwhile, Trump and congressional Republicans are pursuing massive tax giveaways for the ultra-rich and corporations, in an effort to bring about a historic upward redistribution of wealth under the guise of “tax reform.” Indeed, Trump’s proposed elimination of the estate tax alone—a tax that affects just the richest 0.2 percent of estates—would cost the same as feeding more than 6 million seniors through Meals on Wheels, yet another critical program he’s targeting for deep cuts.

Trump talked a good game during his campaign, pledging to fight for the “forgotten man and woman” and restore prosperity to communities that have been left behind. Meanwhile, Speaker Ryan has spent years styling himself as a supposed poverty crusader, famously taking a “poverty tour,” hosting a poverty summit featuring Republican presidential candidates, and releasing a big plan to overhaul key antipoverty programs. But today’s data serve as Exhibit A of the gargantuan gap between their rhetoric and the reality of their policies.

If Trump and Ryan were serious about cutting poverty and fighting for communities left behind, they’d embrace the policies that brought about declines in poverty and rising incomes in 2015 and 2016—like raising the minimum wage. State and local minimum wage increases were likely a major driver of the declines in poverty and rising incomes we saw over the past two years—and, tellingly, in states that had enacted minimum wage increases, low-wage workers saw faster wage growth in 2015 than workers in states whose minimum wages remained flat. They’d close the book on repealing the ACA and slashing Medicaid, programs that together have brought the nation’s uninsurance rate to historic lows. And they’d abandon their proposals to slash nutrition assistance and other programs that help families afford the basics, which cut poverty nearly in half in recent years while also boosting mobility in the long-term.

But instead, they seem hell-bent on snatching any gains working families have seen in recent years and funneling them upward so millionaires and billionaires can buy a second yacht.

So as we digest this year’s Census data, let’s not get out the balloons just yet. Instead, we should let them be a lesson to us about how much is at stake—and the policy agenda we need to build an economy that works for everyone instead of just the wealthy few.

This article originally appeared on Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. 

Except that tampons are almost never mentioned.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Americans have an abiding discomfort, bordering on revulsion, toward any discussion of menstruation. In discourse both public and private, this most human of bodily functions is treated as secret and shameful, a demi-illness that must be concealed if the sufferer is to have any hope of being taken seriously in functional society. God forbid a man catch you with a tampon in your hand.

Even as our generosity is called upon to help meet the daily needs of hurricane survivors, though, the specific needs of menstruating people are largely forgotten. Some organizations, such as food and diaper banks, include requests for period supplies in their appeals; a handful of menstruation-specific nonprofits exist; and there have been occasional media mentions, but these are by far the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, the parts of being a victim that are deemed unpleasant are studiously ignored.

Of course, for many Americans, it doesn’t take a natural disaster for the everyday to become tenuous. The poor, the homeless, the unemployed, and underemployed must regularly choose between school supplies or winter coats, diapers or tampons.

Depending on type, brand, and coverage, tampons and pads cost roughly $6 to $9 for a package of about 40, which any menstruator can tell you may not even last a month. Four weeks later that expense comes by again, to the tune of $70 to $110 a year before sales tax. For people who make $15,000 working full time at a minimum-wage job, that’s the kind of expense that can easily mean the difference between paying a bill or defaulting.

In recent years a movement has emerged to lessen this burden by eliminating sales taxes on period supplies; recently enacted laws to that effect are both hugely welcome and not remotely sufficient. What’s really needed, nationwide, is something akin to the law passed last year in New York City providing tampons and pads free of charge at schools, shelters, and correctional facilities—a move echoed by the federal government in late August, when it issued a recommendation that all federal penitentiaries do likewise.

Because lest we forget, period supplies are not optional. At the end of the day, pads and tampons serve one purpose: to contain menstrual fluid. With nothing to stop it, the combination of vaginal secretions, uterine lining, and (yep) blood can become a powerful mess. It’s a feature of the human reproductive system, not a bug—half of human bodies were designed to function this way. Forgetting that humans need period supplies is like forgetting that they need toilets (and then shaming them for urinating).

Girls and women (and some trans boys and trans men) who can’t readily meet this need are forced to make do however they can, often resorting to inappropriate or fundamentally unsanitary solutions that threaten their health, fertility, and basic ability to get things done—it’s hard to focus in math class or on the job if you know you’re bleeding all over your chair. That’s why Human Rights Watch recently released a report recognizing that menstrual hygiene is in fact not just a question of finances, but a human right.

We are right to open our hearts and our wallets to those who have had to watch as all they hold dear is literally washed away. No matter the weather, families always need food, babies always need diapers, and people who menstruate always need pads or tampons.

But what is true for the survivors of hurricanes is also true for the survivors of poverty. The deeply held misogyny that prevents us from treating female bodies as normal intersects with our dehumanization of poor people, and it prevents us from seeing that need (much less meeting it).

As we struggle to build a world that’s fairer for everybody who lives in it, it’s not enough to consider only the bodies we feel comfortable talking about. Whether rising to the challenge posed by natural disasters or acting to mitigate the unnatural disaster of poverty, we must begin to acknowledge the full humanity of all affected, reproductive organs included.

Now the Trump administration and congressional Republicans seem to be coalescing around a response: They are preparing to open a new front in the war on drugs.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The House’s fiscal year 2018 budget, which could be up for a vote as early as next week, shifts resources from treatment to enforcement. It strips hundreds of millions of dollars from public health agencies: $306 million from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and $198 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Furthermore, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will lose $219 million if the bill is passed, and Medicaid itself—which covers more than 40 percent of opioid treatment in the hardest-hit states—is also facing extreme cuts. Meanwhile the FBI will get $48 million more, the Department of Homeland Security will get nearly $1.9 billion more, and the Drug Enforcement Administration will get an increase of $98 million from 2017 levels.

By beefing up law enforcement and cutting funding for treatment, the House budget builds on the priorities outlined in Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ notorious memo that re-ignites the war on drugs. In it, he orders federal prosecutors to seek maximum sentences for nonviolent, low-level drug offenses, re-implementing draconian policies that are emotionally and economically devastating to low-income and minority communities.

Decades of evidence already make it clear that war on drugs policies don’t work. The United States’ last experiment with this approach left the country with the largest prison population in the world, without addressing the root causes of drug use and addiction. Ninety-five percent of addicts return to substance abuse when they’re released from prison, compared with just 40 to 60 percent who complete a rehabilitation program.

These relapse rates are especially relevant now, as the opioid epidemic spreads on a massive scale. There were 33,091 opioid drug overdose deaths in 2015—roughly the same amount of lives claimed by firearms and motor vehicle accidents the previous year.

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation.

To minimize this widespread growth, addiction must be met with treatment—not punishment. But currently only 1 in 10 of the roughly 20 million adults in the United States with an addiction disorder receive the treatment they need. Hacking away at the limited budget that does exist for treatment is unlikely to improve the likelihood that people with addiction disorders get help.

Unlike previous drug crises, the American people want addicts to receive treatment. At least in part due to the race of the people affected—about 90 percent of the people who died from opioid overdose were white—this crisis has garnered sympathetic attention from politicians, the media, medical researchers, nonprofits, and the public, and has largely been framed as a public health crisis. Until recently, the attention set the country up to craft a progressive, proactive policy response to the crisis; a response that needs to be scaled up in order to effectively fight this epidemic.

In March 2016, for instance, the Department of Health and Human Services released $94 million in new funding to 271 Community Health Centers with a special focus on expanding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in underserved communities—expected to treat nearly 124,000 new patients with substance abuse disorders. Furthermore, up to 11 states expanded their MAT services due to SAMHSA funding grants.

If Congress passes this budget and builds on the Sessions approach to criminal justice, the progress that’s been made in treating addiction as a public health issue—along with hundreds of thousands of American lives—will be lost.

Left unmentioned was the fact that, earlier this spring, the president of the United States called for historic cuts to FEMA’s budget. Trump’s 2018 budget blueprint proposed more than $1 billion in cuts to FEMA—11 percent of its total footprint. The proposal would make major cuts to six FEMA grants, including its two largest for preparing for and responding to emergencies. It would also entirely eliminate four grants, including funding for emergency food and shelter and training for first responders.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

The administration’s rationale is that FEMA funding cuts are needed to pay for its immigration enforcement and mass deportation efforts—along with Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the southern border. All told, Trump wants to shift $5 billion within the Department of Homeland Security, where FEMA is housed, to Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

FEMA is not Trump’s only target for cuts when it comes to disaster preparedness. The budget also takes an axe to the U.S. Coast Guard (unusual given the administration’s support for increased U.S. military spending), which has already rescued dozens from the floodwaters in Texas. The budget cuts a whopping $1.2 billion from the Coast Guard’s approximately $9 billion budget.

And despite promises to invest in the country’s infrastructure, Trump’s budget slashes the investments that are critical for disaster preparedness. He would immediately eliminate the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant, which, among other things, helped Florida build a new hurricane evacuation route in the Everglades. His cuts to the Highway Trust Fund would starve the country’s highway infrastructure of nearly $100 billion—and put more than 97,000 jobs at risk in Texas alone. Just last week, Trump announced the rollback of an Obama administration order that new infrastructure projects be designed to survive rising sea levels and climate change (FEMA was in the process of soliciting public comment).

The impact of these cuts will not be felt equally. Cuts to emergency preparedness—like the natural disasters themselves—fall particularly hard on the most vulnerable. Communities of color are the most likely to live in neighborhoods that are at risk of flooding. They’re also more likely to live near the petrochemical plants that could discharge toxic substances during the hurricane. According to social vulnerability maps, seniors, people with disabilities, immigrants, and people in poverty are all more likely to live in neighborhoods most affected by Hurricane Harvey.

The irony is that the administration is so focused on mass deportation and building a wall that it is openly neglecting real national security risks. FEMA and the U.S. Coast Guard not only respond to natural disasters and protect vulnerable populations; they also respond to terrorist attacks. As with so many other policies, Donald Trump is so focused on chasing his white whale that he’s ignoring the core functions of government.

Editor’s note: The Center for American Progress has launched a coalition of over 20 groups united in pushing back against any cuts to health care, disability benefits, nutrition assistance, and other basic living standards in the upcoming congressional budgets. Learn how you can get involved here.

Women’s rights have come a long way since then. We can expect the Equal Protection Clause to apply to us. We can end marriages that don’t work for us, and pregnancies that we didn’t plan. We can’t be fired for getting pregnant, and we can apply for our own credit cards. We can refuse to have sex with our spouses, and buy contraception without being married. We can be astronauts, Supreme Court justices, four-star generals, and nominees for President of the United States.

It’s easy to point out all the broken glass ceilings as evidence of our equality. But it isn’t the full picture—not by a long shot.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Women’s earnings are still approximately 20 percent less than men’s. And the gender pay gap persists even though women are more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees than men, and do one and a half times as much unpaid care work.

Right now, women in our country are given unreasonable and unequal choices. Either put food on the table or care for your child. Find a new job or a second job to make ends meet. Grin and bear sexual harassment, unequal pay, and disrespect, or accept a reputation as a troublemaking bitch. Choose to be a good mom, a good daughter, or a good employee.

This is not the life I signed up for, and I doubt you did either. Yes, there are a handful of women who seem to have it all. They either came into this world with privilege, possess exceptional family supports, or won the boss lottery. But none of those bits of fortune are guaranteed—we can gain them through luck, lose them through misfortune, or never experience them at all. That’s why, until all women can slay, none of us really can.

As feminists, we have a long road ahead in the struggle for women achieving economic freedom. We need to root out sexism, racism, discrimination, ageism, and gender inequality across the board, but that’s not possible until all women acquire real economic power.

The women who make our country work ought to have a say in how that work gets done and who benefits from it. Our economic liberation requires freedom in our workplaces, in our health care decisions, in our homes, and in our communities. The long-term policy shifts to make that happen won’t take place overnight. Structural fixes aren’t easy or sexy, and can’t be summed up in a hashtag or on a t-shirt.

How many women do you know who are stressed out from juggling work and caring for their spouses, children, and aging parents because Congressional leaders refuse to implement a comprehensive paid family leave program? The care conundrum cuts across race and class, yet the women who work for low-wage employers are in the worst predicament, trying to balance the fear of losing their jobs or life savings while navigating a patchwork of insufficient fixes.

And how many still have to bear the brunt of sexual harassment, for fear of losing their jobs? The Huffington Post found that 1 in 3 women has been sexually harassed at work. Nearly half of all housekeepers in Chicagoland hotels had guests expose themselves, and 65 percent of casino cocktail servers had a guest grope or grab them.

But there are signs of progress, as women band together to reclaim our power. Around the country, women are winning campaigns for paid sick days, for consistent and dependable schedules, for equal pay, for ending the sexist and racist tipped subminimum wage, and for domestic workers to be included in basic wage and overtime protections that they have been barred from since the New Deal. Through these wins, women are taking the first steps at earning a fair return on their work so they can make smart choices for themselves and their families, and for the women who follow.

As feminists, we must combine the demands of the millions of women who came before us, of those fighting for their rights today, and of our daughters and granddaughters who have yet to grasp the full weight of living in an unequal world. If we do so, together we can rewrite the rules so that women from all walks of life are in the drivers’ seat, taking control of their lives and their economic well-being.

But the media missed a key piece of context in its outcry: Programs like this aren’t actually unusual. The United States has a long history of forcibly sterilizing people, and it never really stopped.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Starting in 1907, state governments sanctioned sterilization as a form of eugenics, to prevent anyone with undesirable traits—disabilities, poverty, a criminal record, specific racial backgrounds—from procreating. This type of legislation justified the sterilization of approximately 60,000 Americans until the laws were phased out in the late 1970s. But that doesn’t mean the practice actually ended: In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that at least 148 female inmates in California received tubal ligations without their consent between 2006 and 2010. Just one year later, the Associated Press reported on at least four instances of prosecutors in Nashville including birth control requirements in plea deals.

Other recent examples of court-required sterilization throughout the country include a 21-year-old West Virginia mother who had her tubes tied as part of her probation for marijuana possession (2009), and a man in Virginia who traded a vasectomy for a lighter child endangerment sentence (2014). “We’re starting to reach a point where the courts are responsible for anyone,” explained one prosecutor involved in a Florida plea deal. “It’s one final step to have to supervise teenagers in sexual relationships they aren’t ready to handle.”

The prosecutors in each of the recent cases lean on a classic conservative talking point to justify this paternalism: the need for “personal responsibility.” Judge Sam Benningfield, who is behind the recent sterilization program in Tennessee, used those exact words in his justification: “I hope to encourage them to take personal responsibility … This gives them a chance to get on their feet and make something of themselves.”

It is strange to think that these prosecutors and judges do not connect “responsibility” to “autonomy,” and stranger still that they see no connection between the personal and the systemic. At the core of each of these stories is an individual whose body was violated. But these plea deals tap into a historical pattern of abuse against people of color, LGBTQ people, people with physical and mental illness, and those living in poverty. Instead of acknowledging the systemic failure and offering basic supports to the communities most likely to bear the brunt of these policies, they are punished in one of the most dehumanizing ways imaginable.

This disconnect is threaded through the conservative platform on reproductive justice. Campaign promises to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization providing affordable family planning services, have become canon for the GOP. Eighty-five percent of Planned Parenthood patients have an income at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Defunding these clinics would have a profound and disparate impact on those living in poverty, communities of color, rural communities, and the LGBTQ community. Many of these patients often do not have access to alternative providers for reproductive health care—including cancer screenings like pap smears and breast exams, sexual health education, sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, and contraception. These clinics empower patients to make their own reproductive decisions, but conservatives are on a crusade to take away their agency while simultaneously spouting rhetoric about individual responsibility. The contradiction appears to escape their notice.

Marginalized communities do not suffer from a lack of personal responsibility. They suffer from a lack of resources and support. Instead of dismantling organizations that serve these communities and leaving it to the criminal justice system to serve as the arbiter of family planning, let’s support the institutions and policies that empower and build capacity for self-determination.

Right now, we are looking for a story that lets us assign blame for terror and racism. The uprising in Charlottesville has knocked the wind out of us, and it is only natural to hope that the blame can be placed on something impersonal, to believe that no human being might simply be addicted to hate.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

That’s likely how it came to be that former congressman and mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to say this:

Most of the issues that we’re dealing with now are related to poverty. But we still want to put everything in a racial context. The problem with the—and the reason I feel uncomfortable condemning the Klan types is—they are almost the poorest of the poor.

They are the forgotten Americans. And, um, they have been used and abused and neglected. Instead of giving them affordable health care, they give them black lung jobs, and they’re happy.

And that just doesn’t make sense in today’s world. And they see progress in the black community and on television and everywhere and they don’t share it.

It is a good impulse to look for structural reasons for social ills. But it goes too far when it removes agency from human beings. Poverty, even the crushing sort that has you rolling pennies to buy milk, does not cause bigotry. One does not conceive a love of genocide because the economy tanks. We choose what we say, and whom we hurt.

If poverty were a causal effect for racism, then you would not expect to see quite so many virulent racists in the upper classes. David Duke and Richard Spencer were both children of some privilege. Stephen Miller didn’t grow up in straitened circumstances. These are the men who stoke the fears and resentments of the lower classes, who manipulate and misinform.

Lyndon Johnson famously said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” He wasn’t wrong, and that strategy has been used to great effect over the centuries. It’s why we have de facto segregation, it’s why we pushed through welfare reform using the boogeyman of the “welfare queen,” and it’s why the same crime gets you a different sentence depending on what color you are. Find a bit of structural racism, and behind it you’ll find a white politician pandering to the worst parts of human nature to gain or hold power.

But there is a difference between misinformation and hate. I know many good people who support bad policies; they are well-intentioned but misinformed. I don’t know many good people who take pleasure in terrorizing others, who would join hate groups and call it a fight for utopia. We live under crushing poverty and manage to not kill our horrible bosses or the uncaring bill collectors; we can surely manage to not join the Klan.

There is no excuse for willful evil, even if someone’s life is filled with pain and desperation. Someone who is very poor has few choices, but the things you can choose are all about what sort of person you want to be. It’s the one thing you can control, the one thing you can’t lose and nobody can take from you. Those choices are intentional, adult decisions. To explain them away is to say that the poor are incapable of moral reasoning. In our quest to be reasonable and kind to the less fortunate, we risk making them not human at all.

One day we will have a conversation about race in the upper classes, about the people who make the laws and set the narratives and peddle these lies. Today is not that day, and sometimes it seems like that day might never come. For now, it is enough to say: The poor cannot afford illusions about themselves or their lives. At least give them respect that any autonomous human deserves, and call evil “evil” without equivocation.

Poverty does not cause bigotry, no matter how comforting it might be to tell ourselves it does.