Jeremy Slevin Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/person/jeremy-slevin/ Real People. Real Stories. Real Solutions. Fri, 10 Jul 2020 15:12:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://cdn.talkpoverty.org/content/uploads/2016/02/29205224/tp-logo.png Jeremy Slevin Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/person/jeremy-slevin/ 32 32 Confirming Kavanaugh Would be a Disaster for Workers and People in Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/2018/07/18/confirming-kavanaugh-disaster-workers-people-poverty/ Wed, 18 Jul 2018 15:24:48 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=25957 By now, most of Supreme Court Justice Nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s decisions and speeches have been pored over by both advocates and reporters. But comparatively little attention has been paid to a posture that has defined Kavanaugh’s legal career: a consistent willingness to side with the rich and the powerful over the most vulnerable members of society.

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.

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.”

In case after case, Kavanaugh exhibits a preference for the more powerful party.

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.

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The U.N. Just Published a Scathing Indictment of U.S. Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/2018/06/01/un-just-published-scathing-indictment-us-poverty/ Fri, 01 Jun 2018 17:42:36 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=25807 The United Nations has released a scathing report on poverty and inequality in the United States. The findings, which will be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council on June 21, follow an official visit to the United States by Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, to investigate whether economic insecurity in the country undermines human rights.

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.”

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.”

“The $1.5 trillion in tax cuts in December 2017 overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality”

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.”

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A Gun Violence Expert Explains the Link Between Inequality and Gun Deaths https://talkpoverty.org/2018/03/29/gun-violence-america-isnt-one-epidemic-several/ Thu, 29 Mar 2018 19:41:02 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=25456 Support for gun safety laws is at an all-time high. Heading into Saturday’s March for Our Lives, more Americans than ever supported new laws to reduce gun violence—including nearly 70 percent of adults and half of all Republicans. But gun safety measures, while critical, are only the tip of the iceberg in addressing gun violence in the country.

In both the United States and globally, gun violence is strongly correlated with both poverty and inequality. A recent World Bank study found that inequality helped predict the difference in murder rates between states in the United States—as well as between countries. Suicides, which make up the majority of gun deaths in the country, skyrocket in times of economic distress. The Great Recession alone was linked to more than 10,000 suicides, according to one study.

At a time when the Trump administration is undertaking an all-out assault on health care, food assistance, and the broader safety net, I reached out to Mark S. Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, to discuss the link between inequality and gun violence.

Jeremy Slevin: It sounds like from your research, the primary way we can quickly address the gun violence epidemic in this country is through gun policy—reducing the amount of guns that are available in circulation. Is that fair to say?

Mark Kaplan: Limiting access to guns is a form of harm reduction. What guns do to a society that is inherently violent—and we are a violent society—is that it lethalizes the violence. So if we are able to tamp down that violence by reducing people’s access to guns, that might be a first good step in the direction we’re talking about.

JS: Could you talk a little bit about your research on how inequality correlates with levels of gun violence?

Gun deaths are only the tip of the iceberg

MK: For one, we know that the numerous studies that have looked at the intersectionality of race and class and gun violence have clearly shown that there is some relationship between issues of racial segregation and issues of deprivation—social and material deprivation. The reduction of guns is not going to alleviate those problems. But there is a very troubling and very strong association, and gun deaths are only the tip of the iceberg. Often we don’t talk about the other 90 percent of that iceberg—people who have to be hospitalized, the financial cost, members of those families, the pain, the post-traumatic stress associated with it. So it’s a much bigger problem than gun death.

JS: Is it fair to say that to address the gun violence issue, you need to tackle both the issue of guns, but also tackle the issues of poverty and inequality?

MK: There isn’t one epidemic of gun violence—there are multiple epidemics of gun violence. Suicide doesn’t come up as often, but that represents two-thirds of gun deaths in this country. And that’s a problem that is different from the interpersonal violence. But both are particularly sensitive to the issue of gun availability.

Let me give you an example. California is rated as an A+ by the Brady scorecard, which rates states by the number of gun laws they have on the books. Nationally, 51 percent of all suicides are gun-related. In some states, it runs even higher, all the way to 80, 90 percent. In California, it’s 30 percent, on average. So it means that with fewer guns, there’s a window of opportunity to intervene and possibly rescue people who are suicidal. But with the presence of a gun, the opportunities to intervene diminish dramatically.

JS: Has there been any research, either by you or other scholars, on how suicides are linked to economic factors?

MK: I did recently complete a project, funded by the NIH, looking at the impact of the Great Recession on suicides. And indeed, there is a relationship! There’s some evidence that with the Great Recession we saw a rise in unemployment, we saw a rise in foreclosure rates, we also saw a rise in the rate of poverty—which may have contributed even more than the other two measures in economic distress. That rise in poverty contributed to an uptick in the suicide rate.

There are data that seem to suggest, both coming from the United States and more so from Europe, that many European countries such as Greece went through a very hard time. The EU imposed very restrictive, draconian measures that were attached to the loans they got, and that caused a cutback in welfare and health care and all sorts of other things. And in countries that traditionally had lower suicide rates such as Greece and Italy during the Great Recession, rates of suicide went up. But we know in this country too that the long-term research looking at periods of unemployment and following up five years or more show that for each percentage-point rise in unemployment, there’s also a rise in the suicide rate.

JS: And of course, in the United States, it’s very easy to get a gun, which seems to be the most fatal form of suicide. Of all suicide attempts, those attempted with a firearm are unfortunately more likely to be fatal.

MK: Yes, that’s referred to as the “case fatality rate.” With the use of guns, it’s nearly 95 percent.

We’re dropping the safety net, meaning that people are going to get hurt.

JS: What would you recommend as policy solutions that get at both the firearm access and the social justice issues of gun violence?

MK: I think that we need to approach this in a more holistic way, a more comprehensive way. The gun issue is perhaps the first step. It’s how we tamp down the lethalization, which I brought up at the beginning. That’s something that researchers have looked at globally—the presence of guns. The first thing we need to do is lower the rate, the prevalence of gun availability, access to guns. California is a great example. Some of the most restrictive gun laws have produced very positive results, fewer gun deaths in the state. They say the winds blow from the west to the east, so hopefully that will happen.

And then we can begin to tackle some of these social inequities and inequalities, and some of the structures that promote inequality. Violence is a more difficult social problem to tackle. It represents more than just the loss of lives: The economic toll on society is huge. How do we redress the various measures of inequality? The distribution of wealth and income, the issue of racially segregated communities, the under-resourced and underfunded social welfare infrastructure that seems to be taking a hit in the current administration—those are issues that also need to be addressed. We are lowering the safety net right now. In other words, under the current government … we’re requiring work for health care, so we’re dropping the safety net, meaning that people are going to get hurt.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

 

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Congressional Republicans Met in the Second Poorest State to Plot How to Hurt Poor People https://talkpoverty.org/2018/02/09/congressional-republicans-met-second-poorest-state-plot-hurt-poor-people/ Fri, 09 Feb 2018 17:14:47 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=25168 Sammi Brown grew up in Charles Town, West Virginia. Raised in what she describes as a “barely 2-bedroom” apartment, she watched as both of her parents worked two, sometimes three jobs to put food on the table for her. “My dad worked second and third shifts so that he could walk me to the bus stop and be there when I got home,” she told TalkPoverty. “My mom worked multiple jobs … that’s kind of where I get my work ethic from.”

Brown became an organizer after seeing how challenging it was for her parents to provide basic necessities like food, housing, and health care when she was growing up. As a result, they often turned to programs like Medicaid and food assistance. “Eventually we did get off of those programs. We didn’t need them for my whole lifetime, but we were very much a working-class family,” she said.

I spoke with Brown just outside The Greenbrier, a tony luxury resort in the Allegheny Mountains, where weekend rates typically range from $358.00 to $628.00. At the time, it was playing host to nearly 300 Congressional Republican lawmakers, along with Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump, who were all gathered for an annual policy retreat. Brown was one of the lead organizers for a protest—helping to bring in more than 500 activists, union members, and storytellers from across the country.

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Sammi Brown

Dominating discussions this year were cuts to a wide range of health, food, and housing programs—the very programs Brown turned to as a child—all in the name of “welfare reform.” Despite resistance from Senate Republicans, House Speaker Paul Ryan and the hard-right Republican Study Committee were making a Sisyphean effort to build support for a wide range of cuts this year—starting with Medicaid.

According to reports from the retreat, it all came down to messaging. “You’ve got to get the framing or the phrasing right,” Republican Study Committee Chairman Mark Walker told Politico. “When we talk about ‘Medicaid reform,’ that’s not a great buzz phrase.” Lost on Walker was the fact that the cuts themselves are unpopular, not just the salesmanship.

It was ironic that the House and Senate Republican conferences chose this site for a conversation dedicated to slashing the safety net. West Virginia has the second lowest per capita income in the country. More citizens turn to Medicaid, Social Security, and food assistance than virtually anywhere else in the country.

Fatal drug overdoses in West Virginia dwarf every other state in the country

More than 500,000 West Virginians—nearly a third of the population—get health insurance through Medicaid, making it the state with the highest share of its population covered by the program. This includes the majority of all children in the state and more than three-fourths of nursing home residents. Congress’ proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act, for example, would have taken away Medicaid coverage from 227,000 West Virginians by 2029—equivalent to nearly half of those currently receiving Medicaid in the state.

The state has also been ravaged by the opioid epidemic. Fatal drug overdoses in West Virginia dwarf every other state in the country. In 2016 alone, 818 people lost their lives to drug overdoses—a 400 percent increase from 2001. Nearly 9 in 10 involved at least one opioid. And, according to a report released days ahead of the retreat, drug wholesalers flooded one West Virginia town with more than 20.8 million prescription painkillers between 2008 and 2015. Nationwide, Medicaid covers about a quarter of all substance abuse treatment. But it is particularly critical in West Virginia. Medicaid covers up to 45 percent of medication-assisted treatment for opioid misuse in the state.

*              *              *

Local rallies have become almost commonplace in Trump’s America. Indivisible, for example, now counts more than 5,800 local groups (at least 2 in every Congressional district), many of whom hold local actions and confront members of Congress on a regular basis. Still, it’s rare to gather so many activists from across the country in a single place. But something about the topic of this year’s retreat drew a crowd.

David Stauffer travelled from Waynesburg, Pennsylvania—a working-class town about an hour south of Pittsburgh. His grandfather, father, and uncle all worked in the coal mines in Greene County. Stauffer tried to buck the family trend by enlisting in the national guard at 18. “I wanted to serve my country … there was no other jobs in Pennsylvania other than coal mining,” Stauffer told me. “My uncle was a coal miner. He said, ‘David, you don’t want to go to the mine.’”

Stauffer served as an air technician until he injured his knee on a fishing trip and was no longer able to serve. After he was discharged, he spent years working odd jobs—at the sheriff’s department in Waynesburg, at the mine as a security guard, driving trucks. But when his brother became ill and turned to Medicaid, he needed a full-time caregiver. “My brother is in a wheelchair for the rest of his life,” Stauffer said. “He needs a caregiver. I lost my job working security.”

He travelled some 200 miles to West Virginia because he’s worried about cuts to Medicaid. “Without Medicaid, [my brother] wouldn’t be able to survive,” Stauffer said. “He can’t have a job, because he has a medicine pump in his stomach … Trump’s hurting coal mining communities. He says he’s trying to help but he’s not. He’s harming us. And it’s wrong.”

*              *              *

Hector Vaca grew up in an immigrant family in New York City. “My parents had to work three jobs, each. Sometimes my dad had four jobs in order to raise four kids and just to keep a roof over our heads, continuing paying the mortgage,” he said.

“There was a time in my life when we lived on food stamps. This was before they were EBT, when they were still paper money,” said Vaca. “We’d have milk and bread in the fridge for like a day or two and we had to get creative with what we ate at the house … We couldn’t afford health insurance when we were little, so we depended on Medicaid.”

Image-1Hector Vaca

After the Great Recession hit, his father lost his job working as a car mechanic. Months later, he took his own life.

Vaca came to West Virginia because of his father’s death. “I do this … so that no other family would lose any more family members,” he told me. “We benefited from that system because we needed it, because my parents who were here with documentation worked hard and they deserved it.”

*              *              *

Coverage of policy debates, like most coverage of Trump and Congress, focuses mainly on the political consequences or the legislative jockeying. Little attention is given to the people affected—the organizer from West Virginia, the caretaker from Pennsylvania, or the proud son from North Carolina. Ignored is the shear breadth of economic challenges Americans face. According to a recent survey by the Center for American Progress,* 70 percent of voters reported having at least one serious economic challenge within the past year. Forty-two percent said they had trouble paying a credit card balance, and 48 percent of Americans said they had a serious problem “finding a decent job with good wages.”

Asked why so many people were protesting, Sammi Brown’s response was simple: “We have folks that are working multiple jobs. They’re doing everything they can—and they should have quality of life, but we’re not affording them that.”

Zahra Mion contributed reporting to this article.

*TalkPoverty is a project of the Center for American Progress.

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What Doug Jones’ Win Means for People in Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/2017/12/14/doug-jones-win-means-people-poverty/ Thu, 14 Dec 2017 16:22:58 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=24850 Doug Jones’ victory in the Alabama Senate race is just over a day old, but the hot takes are still pouring in. For some, the outcome is a signal that Democrats can win both houses of Congress in 2018. For others, it is an outlier—a race that a Republican not accused of sexually assaulting children would have easily won. And for the kind folks at Fox & Friends, it wasn’t much of a win at all—“a referendum on Harvey Weinstein, not on President Trump.”

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?

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.

More than a quarter of residents are struggling to pay their water bill

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.

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This Republican State Senator is Trying to Clean Up the Failed Kansas Tax Experiment https://talkpoverty.org/2017/11/29/republican-state-senator-trying-clean-failed-kansas-tax-experiment/ Wed, 29 Nov 2017 14:42:00 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=24741 We all know the story by now. In 2012, with Republican Gov. Sam Brownback at the helm, Kansas enacted massive state-wide tax cuts. Proponents of supply-side economics insisted that these tax cuts would not only pay for themselves, but would also spur massive economic growth in the state. Brownback said the tax cuts would be “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.” He promised that they’d boost investment and increase employment; and he swore they’d “directly benefit our schools and local governments.”

Instead, over the next few years, the tax cuts wrought havoc on the state’s economy and funding for schools, health care, and other priorities. The state’s economy slowed down, their credit rating was reduced, and job creation underperformed nearly every neighboring state as well as the national average. Now, Despite Governor Brownback’s failed “real-life experiment” and dire warnings from Kansas legislators, Congressional Republicans are planning to apply an eerily similar proposal nationwide.

Jeremy spoke with Kansas State Sen. Dinah Sykes, a lifelong Republican who successfully ran for the Kansas Senate on a platform of repealing Gov. Brownback’s tax cuts after seeing what happened to her kids’ public schools.

Jeremy Slevin: So, you are a Republican—you voted for Sam Brownback when he first ran for governor, but you ended up running for your seat on a slightly different platform. Do you want to talk about how you got involved in running for office?

Sen. Dinah Sykes: I was involved in my children’s school as PTA president, and I started seeing the PTA foot the bill for a lot of things. Helping more with field trips, buying books for the library, and things like that. The classes were getting larger so it made me start asking more questions—going to school board meetings, talking to my representative. I realized that it was more of a state issue with the way that the funds were coming in, so I got involved.

Regardless of whether you agree with someone or not, you should be able to have a dialogue with them.

At the time I lived in a different section of Kansas, and when I moved just a few miles it changed my representative and my senator. I tried to open a dialogue with them as well, but I was not listened to because I had a different opinion from them. Before, I was able to talk to my Republican representative—regardless of whether you agree with someone or not, you should be able to have a dialogue with them. So, I was frustrated trying to figure out what to do next. I didn’t know if I should try to find a good candidate to get behind or start with the school board or what, and doors seemed to open and open and so I finally decided to run for the Senate seat.

JS: And at some point, Gov. Brownback and the legislators passed major tax cuts for businesses and a lot of wealthy folks in the state. How did that play a role in the schools and your decision to run?

DS: In 2012, the tax plan created a loophole for businesses so that if they were an LLC, they were not taxed on pass-through income. We also had three tax brackets and we went down to two.

It did not work. We had nine rounds of budget cuts. Borrowed $2 billion from our highway fund. Now I’m all for bonding that money when it’s building infrastructure, but that’s not what it was used for. It was there to bridge the gap and to try to do a sales tax increase. Meanwhile, class sizes were large and my school had not bought library books for five years. And we were seeing that the core function of government was not able to work properly.

JS: Was it tough to challenge someone in your own party?

DS: Yeah it was challenging, and you’re going against an incumbent that’s sitting on a pot of money. For me, someone who is new to this, I was just making sure I built those relationships with local leaders and my chambers of commerce, and talked to my neighbors. It really was a grassroots thing, trying to get the everyday Kansan more involved.

I think honestly that the everyday Kansan and the everyday American want people to work together. And it’s not, “I have this great idea and everyone needs to come on board with me,” it’s, “How do we work together?” and “I have this point of view and you have a different point of view and how do we come together and compromise?” Compromise has become such a negative word in politics, but that is how good policy is made.

JS: The reason we are talking about this today is that the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress are considering similar legislation that goes a step further from what Kansas does. What words of wisdom would you give to your colleagues in Washington who are considering this tax bill?

DS: There are differences between the federal plan and Kansas plan. When the Kansas plan was first brought on the Senate floor, the plan had pay-fors in it, and I’m seeing some of that with the federal plan. But my biggest caution is to let the process work properly. Work both sides of the aisle, come together, have the committee sessions where you vet things. Don’t look for just the

dynamic scoring Dynamic scoring analyzes the bugetary impact of major legislation under different possible economic outcomes.

or whatever that’s just going to paint your picture. Look at both sides and have those conversations. At the end of the day, make the hard choice and look at what is really in the best interest of our people.

Compromise has become such a negative word in politics, but that is how good policy is made.

JS: Are you worried that, similarly to how Kansas faced budget cuts following the tax cuts, the same thing could happen at the federal level? I think currently the federal bill costs about $1.5 trillion, not factoring in dynamic scoring as you mentioned.

DS: It is a concern, and I am going to try to stay optimistic and have faith that as more and more people are coming out and wanting to pass good tax reform, that we don’t short-change the process. That we do look at all sides and come up with a good plan.

JS: And going to back to what happened in Kansas, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We should mention that after you got elected you guys went about repealing some of these tax cuts.

DS: Yes, in the end of our session we did pass a bipartisan bill. That took us back, it got rid of the loophole for LLCs, so businesses are back on the tax roll. It increased income rates for all Kansans and we added back in the third tier on our tax plan. It was painful and a lot of compromise. Like I said, I think that’s when you make good policy: When you work together, both parties. We were writing on a white board, “What are things you want to see?” “How do we establish this?”

And at the end of the day we had to come up with an override because our governor did veto it. But we had conservatives with roles as well as moderates, and we all came together and passed the plan.

JS: And how has that affected the budget cuts? Have you seen a return to funding in the schools or is that going to take some time?

DS: It will take some time. We did put more money in and we are still in litigation with the Supreme Court on our school funding. We were able to give pay raises to state employees who have not received pay raises in 8 to 10 years. We are seeing our revenues increase monthly, but you know it’s caution. And we didn’t get in the hole that we are in overnight and we are not going to get out of it overnight.

JS: Thank you so much, senator, we really appreciate you taking the time. Hopefully, members at the national level can learn some of the lessons from what happened in Kansas.

DS: Alright, thank you.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on November 10. It was edited for length and clarity.

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Are You in One of the 36 Million Families Whose Taxes Will Go Up Under the House Bill? https://talkpoverty.org/2017/11/14/one-36-million-families-whose-taxes-will-go-house-bill/ Tue, 14 Nov 2017 16:59:47 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=24625 This week, without a single hearing, the House of Representatives is expected to vote on the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” After weeks of claiming that all middle-class taxpayers would see a tax cut, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) took the rare step of admitting to a lie over the weekend, telling The New York Times, “You can’t guarantee that absolutely no one sees a tax increase.” And on Friday, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) also sought to walk back his claims, from promising tax cuts to “everyone” to assuring “average” taxpayers that they would see a cut. Now, new analysis shows just how many middle- and working-class Americans would see a tax increase under their tax plan.

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.

t17-0256Source: 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.

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The Most Horrifying Provisions Hidden in the House Republican Tax Plan https://talkpoverty.org/2017/11/03/horrifying-provisions-hidden-house-republican-tax-plan/ Fri, 03 Nov 2017 20:26:23 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=24567 Yesterday, House Republicans released their tax plan, finally providing long-awaited details on what they really mean when they promise “tax reform.” While they billed it as a middle-class tax cut, the new legislation is filled with gifts for wealthy corporations and the richest Americans. Meanwhile, middle-class and working families would at best get scraps—and in many cases, see their taxes increase.

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.

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.

Americans owe more than $1.4 trillion in student loan debt—nearly double all credit card debt

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.”

Buried in House Republicans’ tax bill is their latest effort to advance the GOP’s anti-choice agenda

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.

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Meet the Congressman Trying to Bring Fresh Food to Low-Income Neighborhoods https://talkpoverty.org/2017/10/24/meet-congressman-trying-bring-fresh-food-low-income-neighborhoods/ Tue, 24 Oct 2017 15:15:37 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=24471 The grocery industry is increasingly consolidated. Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods for $14 billion sent grocery stocks tumbling and had many analysts worrying about the end of local mom and pop grocery stores.

Nowhere would be harder hit than food deserts—areas, mostly low-income, without access to fruits, vegetables, or other healthy food. According to the USDA, 6,500 census tracts, or about 10 percent of American communities, are food deserts, and 25 million Americans lack access to a grocery store.

One of the leading champions on issues of food insecurity in Congress is Indianapolis Rep. André Carson (D-IN). In 2014, a study by WalkScore.com rated the city as the worst in the country for food deserts. The following year, the iconic Double 8 Foods supermarkets—which served neighborhoods largely neglected by other chains—closed its four locations, citing declining revenues.

I spoke to Rep. Carson about his efforts to expand access to healthy meals and his recent legislation addressing food deserts.

Jeremy Slevin: What made you decide to take action on food deserts?

Rep. André Carson: In recent years, Indianapolis has been one of the worst food deserts in the country. Around 2014 we saw four Double 8 grocery stores close, and then last year it got even worse when several Marsh stores closed their doors. Many assumed that those customers would just get their groceries elsewhere. But unfortunately I think the implications were greater than that, and overnight we saw thousands of Hoosiers effectively lose access to the only grocery store they had available.

We’re talking about low-income families, often without vehicles or even access to public transit, and they’re living miles from the closest store. They had nowhere to go to buy fruits and vegetables and bread and milk, so they really relied on what they could find at their local convenience stores and fast food restaurants. The closure of these stores has created food deserts throughout the district.

JS: So tell us what your bill does to address this.

AC: The bill tries to address the absence of nutritious foods in many urban and rural communities by providing loans for the operation of grocery stores. The Department of Agriculture would provide grants to each state to establish a revolving fund, and each state would provide loans from its revolving fund for the construction (and even operation) of grocery stores, specifically for underserved communities. These loans would be made available to for-profit, non-profit, even locally-owned entities.

The states would handle loan processing and make awards to organizations that meet the requirements, but they have to have an emphasis on unprocessed nutritious foods, providing fresh fruits and veggies, providing staple foods like milk, bread, and wheat, charging prices below market average, and be sufficiently qualified to operate a store.

I think it’s important to note that priority will be given to applications that include a plan to hire workers from those underserved communities and provide information about healthy diet. They’re going to get their food from local gardens and farms, and a lot of these entities will not have beer and wine or tobacco products readily available—but I think in the future that’s an option that they can pursue if they want to go through the Alcohol and Tobacco Commission.

JS: So what’s at the root of this problem? Why are these stores closing in Indianapolis, and what’s the impediment to opening up new grocery stores in low-income areas right now?

AC: I think we haven’t brought enough attention to the issue nationally. It’s not specific to urban centers—rural communities are impacted as well. I think corporations and entities make corporate decisions that address their bottom line, but we have to make sure that the NGOs and other entities are in place so we can [incentivize] them to provide resources to these communities.

JS: Is part of the issue that it’s just not as profitable, unfortunately, in lower-income communities to have these grocery stores, and that’s why they need this leg up?

The demand is always there.

AC: Perhaps some would make that argument, but I would counter that and say that the demand is always there. If you look at the Double 8’s, there were customers there, but the facility was unkempt, the food offerings were spoiled or nearing spoilage, and it just wasn’t a great place to get food to attempt to live a healthy lifestyle. It wasn’t a sustainable existence. But the demand is always there. If you see a clean facility where healthy options are being presented, there’s a sense of pride that people will in doing business with that kind of operation.

JS: You mentioned transportation earlier, which seems like another huge driver of this. Do you think more investment in public transit in low-income communities could help stem this crisis as well?

AC: Absolutely, that’s always an issue. Folks who are on fixed incomes or have fewer means to purchase a vehicle, they have to rely on public transportation or friends and family.

JS: Do you see a path to this passing in Congress?

AC: We’re hopeful. It’s going to take a concerted effort to educate members of Congress, but also constituents and constituencies across the country to encourage and force their representatives to support this legislation. And the farm bill is a critical part of that conversation.

JS: And this is something that you’re hoping to be included in the farm bill negotiations?

AC: Absolutely.

JS: What’s been the response, if any, from the other side of the aisle?

AC: I think we’re in the midst of an austerity push, but we’re not in Europe. There are budget hawks that would be concerned about the cost of this, and understandably so. But this proposal helps their constituents. It helps spur economic growth, it helps their constituents live healthier lives, and have some sense of dignity about being able to go to a store that’s clean—where customer service is paramount, where food offerings are healthy, and the presentation is very professional.

JS: Obviously, we’re talking specifically about food deserts, but food insecurity is a problem that affects this entire country, particularly kids, that is not often talked about in the media. What more do you think we can do to shine a light on food insecurity more broadly?

AC: Studies have shown that when kids don’t have the nourishment they need, it impacts brain activity, it impacts retention in terms of memory, it impacts performance as it relates to their ability to contribute as a student and process information. And I think addressing these food deserts and having our schools be a part of this discussion will close the gap on many of these concerns. I even think that there are several attempts to get rid of the designation for free lunches for students because it removes the stigma. Schools have to be a part of this larger conversation if we’re going to address many of the issues in some of our schools that are underperforming.

JS: And we’ve even seen reports of school districts shaming kids for getting subsidized school lunches.

AC: That stigma’s been around for years. Kudos to those school districts and states that are attempting to remove the stigma. That’s something that’s been a source of bullying; it’s been a source of increased absences, so I think taking away that stigma will go a long way.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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A Historian Explains How Immigration Restrictions Have Always Been About Race https://talkpoverty.org/2017/09/07/historian-explains-immigration-restrictions-always-race/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 18:17:24 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=23602 President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—an Obama-era executive order protecting DREAMers DREAMers are undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. DACA allows them to defer deportation and legally reside in the United States for two years, and makes it possible to obtain driver's licenses, enroll in college, and hold jobs. Latest government figures estimate that there are nearly 800,000 DREAMers living in the United States. —earned near-universal condemnation from Democrats and Republicans. But while targeting immigrants who were brought here as children is new, Trump’s actions are consistent with a strain of American politics going back centuries.

Nativism—the often racialized view that local interests should be protected over those of immigrants—is as old as the country itself. The anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic “Know-Nothing Party” was a major political force in the middle of the 19th century, electing eight governors and more than 100 members of Congress. The Immigration Act of 1924 severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europeans, targeting Italians and Jews. Just this week, former White House adviser Steve Bannon revived anti-Catholic tropes in voicing his opposition to DACA.

I spoke with Tyler Anbinder, a historian at The George Washington University and expert on the history of nativism in the United States, about how Trump’s decision fits into nativist politics throughout the country’s history.

Jeremy Slevin: You’ve written a lot about this concept of nativism. Can you start by explaining what it means and where Donald Trump fits into it?

Tyler Anbinder: Nativism is the fear of or dislike of immigrants and the belief that immigrants make the United States a worse place to live. Donald Trump fits in the pattern of American nativism that we’ve had for several centuries in that there’s always been a certain portion of the population that has a gut reaction that immigrants are a bad thing, that they take jobs from other Americans, that they change American culture for the worse, that immigrants can never become true Americans. Those tend to be the strains of nativist thought.

JS: Is there precedent for this level of vitriol and this level of nativism at the presidential level?

TA: Probably not at the presidential level. Typically, it’s been Congress that’s been much more anti-immigrant than presidents. In the past, when you had Congress pass anti-immigrant legislation, presidents have repeatedly vetoed it, and that happened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with presidents such as Taft and Wilson vetoing immigrant-restriction legislation.

This is a rare case in which the president is the leader of the anti-immigrant movement.

So this is a rare case in which the president tends to be the leader of the anti-immigrant movement and Congress is maybe a little less willing to go along.

JS: Obviously the big news this week is DACA, rolling back President Obama’s executive order protecting DREAMers. I think what makes this shocking to a lot of people is that these are people brought here as kids, traditionally a sympathetic political group. Has there been a singling out of immigrant children, either for good or for ill, in the past? Or is this a new territory?

TA: This is pretty much a new territory, because for most of American history, children have not been immigrants. Immigrants would overwhelmingly be people in their 20s especially, late teens, maybe early 30s … immigrants rarely brought children to America. They typically came to America unmarried, trying to strike out in the world on their own. There were exceptions—during the Irish potato famine for instance, or when Eastern European Jews were escaping the Pogroms in Russia. But typically, children haven’t been a very big part of the American immigration story.

JS: The not-so-subtle subtext of all this is racism, whether against Muslims like we saw in the travel ban and now Latinos with the end of DACA. It seems like race and immigration have always been linked—how has that evolved over time?

TA: Certainly American nativism has always had a racial dimension, even though exactly what people mean by the term “race” has changed. In the 19th century, the big targets of the nativists were the Irish. The American nativists believed that the Irish were of a different race—that most white Americans were Anglo-Saxon in origin, and the Irish were different and therefore couldn’t become true Americans, and weren’t even intellectually capable of reaching the status of other Americans.

In the late 19th century, the same charges were leveled against Eastern European Jews and Italian immigrants, which were the two biggest immigrant groups in that period. People said the same things. They would go so far as to say that these groups weren’t really “white,” and therefore being “less than white,” they weren’t capable of the intellectual attainments that other whites were and they should be barred from the United States.

JS: Have nativists always wrapped themselves in the identity of whiteness?

TA: Yes, with some exceptions. In the 1920’s, when there were restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigration, African Americans were big supporters of that. They supported it primarily because they said, “immigrants are taking our jobs, and if we have fewer immigrants, better jobs would go to African Americans.”

So it’s not just that nativism is solely something that whites participate in. It can be something that others partake in, too. But in terms of the majority of American nativism, there’s always been a sense that the new group isn’t part of what the current Americans define as being American. For a long time that meant being a certain type of Protestant. Then it meant all Protestants. Then it meant all Christians. Then it meant Judeo-Christians. And that’s where we are today, perhaps.

JS: Steve Bannon said today that American Catholics have an economic interest in unlimited illegal immigration, so you’re kind of seeing that Anglo-Saxon anti-Catholic sentiment creep up again.

TA: That’s so interesting, I didn’t hear about that. Yes, that would precisely fit in with that historic trend.

JS: At the same time, there’s a tension within the modern Republican party between business leaders and Republican elites who often support immigration because it’s seen as a boon to the economy. Has that tension always existed?

TA: Yes, although the important thing to understand is that the business community won out for most of American history. Even when immigration restrictions were in place, often there would be loopholes. A great example of that is in the 1920’s, when restrictions were put in place on Southern and Eastern European Jews, there was an exception for Latinos. And that’s so those employers say, “well, we may not be able to get those Eastern or Southern European workers, but we can get Mexicans instead to do the work that those other people used to do.”

It’s only really starting in the 1960’s, when the restrictions were relaxed on groups like Asians and Africans and Eastern Europeans, that the restrictions were put in place on Latinos.

JS: So it kind of shifted—when Eastern Europeans were the largest immigrant group, they were targeted, and now that Latinos are a larger immigrant group, they’ve become the target.

Obviously, you’re more accustomed to looking backward, but what do you think is next, after DACA? Do you think we’re on a more restrictionist path like the 1920’s, or do you think this has got to shift?

It’s hard to predict where Trump is going to go.

TA: Well, it’ll be really interesting. Until very recently, I’d have said that the restriction could not win out legislatively. Politicians have found that talking tough on immigration is good, but Congressional Republicans are split between a cultural wing and a business wing, and the business wing has been very adamantly against restricting immigration for the reasons that we talked about. Because of that, there’s been this 30-year stalemate where nothing has changed.

But typically, Republican presidents have leaned toward the business wing. Clearly, it’s hard to predict where Trump is going to go, but one option he has is removing the [undocumented] immigrants that are already here. That’s something that the president can do on his own; he doesn’t need Congress, since it’s just an enforcement matter. That seems like the most likely possibility.

The next possibility would be the bill that was proposed by Tom Cotton a few weeks ago calling for a reduction in the number of legal immigrants. I find it hard to imagine that bill passing Congress, but certainly a lot of the Trump base would support that proposal, I’d imagine. I still think the most likely thing is gridlock on that, but with stepped-up deportation.

But I have to say this is a whole new ballgame, so it’s hard to predict.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and will air as part of a complete episode on September 15. It was edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview below.

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Trump Is Trying to Cut Disaster Relief to Build a Border Wall https://talkpoverty.org/2017/08/29/trump-trying-cut-disaster-relief-build-border-wall/ Tue, 29 Aug 2017 16:33:44 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=23541 On Monday, President Donald Trump was asked point-blank whether he supports cutting the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) budget in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. His response: “No.”

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.

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.

The administration is so focused on deportation that it is neglecting real national security risks

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.

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A Confederate Monuments Expert Explains How We Memorialized White Supremacy https://talkpoverty.org/2017/08/17/confederate-monuments-expert-explains-memorialized-white-supremacy/ Thu, 17 Aug 2017 13:04:25 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=23457 In the wake of the neo-Nazi attacks in Charlottesville, officials in several Southern states have renewed calls to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces.

This week, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) called for the removal of all Confederate monuments in North Carolina. Mayor Jim Gray (D) of Lexington, Kentucky, announced the removal of two Confederate statues from a historic courthouse in the city. And officials in Florida and Maryland made similar announcements.

But the conversation around the monuments’ removal is missing crucial context around how they got there in the first place. Most Confederate monuments were constructed at the dawn of the Jim Crow era, decades after the Civil War, with a second uptick in the 1960s in response to the civil rights movement. Like the popularity of the Confederate battle flag, their construction neatly aligns with backlash against racial progress.

To learn more about the evolution of Civil War iconography, I spoke to Professor Kirk Savage. Savage has spent a career studying the history of monuments. He’s written about the construction of the National Mall, the 9/11 memorial, and he is perhaps best known for Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, a book on the history of Civil War monuments.

Jeremy Slevin: I think a lot of people don’t know that most of these monuments were constructed after the Civil War, around the turn of the 20th century. Can you give us a sense of the timeline and why that happened?

Kirk Savage: The big boom in Confederate monument building was roughly between 1890 and 1920, and then there was a secondary boom in Confederate commemoration that was in reaction to the civil rights movement in the ’50s and ’60s. In both these cases, there were political reasons why those monuments were erected when they were. The first boom took place during the consolidation of Jim Crow and racial segregation in the South, the final defeat of the ideals of reconstruction and racial equality in the South. The second boom took place when that Jim Crow era came under threat from the civil rights movement.

Now, I should say that in the North, there was a less marked but similar lag in monument construction, simply because the veterans of that war were dying off. But what really distinguished the white Southern commemoration of the lost cause was the systematic campaign to build monuments, rewrite textbooks, and put Confederate flags and symbols in public schools. This was happening in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a systematic propaganda campaign to advance the racial cause of the Confederacy.

JS: And the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville was constructed at the tail end of that first wave, in the 1920s?

KS: Right, in the 1920s, if I remember correctly. That’s interesting in a way, that it took them so long. Richmond erected its huge monument to Robert E. Lee in 1890, and New Orleans a few years before that. The Richmond monument really kicked off the campaign to make the Confederacy respectable again.

JS: I was struck in your book that these weren’t necessarily initiated by the government. In a lot of cases, they were these volunteer, activist organizations that pushed for these monuments. Can you talk a little bit about that?

KS: Yes, yes, in fact it wasn’t until much later that state governments got involved. In the earlier days in the late 19th century it was these activist organizations that were in the South, largely driven by women’s groups. The United Daughters of the Confederacy was the outgrowth of that organization, which then conducted this systematic campaign that I just mentioned.

There were these pockets of resistance.

That’s the way public monuments worked in general in the 19th century. It was elite civic organizations that erected them, and only certain groups had real access to public space in that period of time. So of course African Americans, Native Americans, people of color had no access to that arena and no entry into those conversations.

JS: Was there public backlash? Of course this is the Jim Crow South we’re talking about, but was there public outcry to these monuments?

KS: There was some, which is interesting. To return to the example of Richmond and the monument to Lee in 1890, there was a black newspaper called The Richmond Planet that published a fiery series of articles in opposition to it, talking about the black community’s relationship to that monument, which of course is entirely different from the white community’s. There were these pockets of resistance. They were largely overlooked by the mainstream white media and politicians, but they were there. What it shows us is that that kind of resistance, that kind of attitude was always there. It just wasn’t reported for the most part.

JS: As you mentioned earlier, there was a second wave during the civil rights movement, which many of us associate with progress and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. But there wasn’t a systematic campaign to take down these monuments. In fact, we saw an uptick. Why do you think that was?

KS: Well, look who was in charge of the state and local governments in the South. They were still exclusively in white hands, and they were very worried about their loss of power and the potential that they might have to share power with African Americans. It was very much a backlash against that civil rights movement. You see places like Alabama for the first time in the 1960s displaying the Confederate flag on its capitol building. It was very much a defiant pushback against the forces that were trying to destroy segregation.

JS: It sounds like that mirrors the iconography of the Confederate flag as well. It became a symbol during the lost cause and was taken up by the segregationists in the 1960s. Have they followed a similar trajectory?

KS: Monuments and flags you mean?

JS: Yes.

In defining the past we define our present.

KS: Yeah, it’s interesting to me that after the Dylann Roof massacre in the Charleston church, the first symbols to be attacked were the flags. Of course, he was shown in those photographs holding the Confederate flags. So it’s interesting now that with the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville at the Robert E. Lee memorial, the attention has turned to monuments. But yes, in a sense, these always went in a parallel process. But the unraveling seems to go flag first, monument second.

JS: In the book you write, “Public monuments were meant to yield resolution and consensus … but the process of commemoration often leads to conflict, not closure, because in defining the past we define our present.” What do you see as the next step? Is there a closure? Do these monuments have to come down?

KS: That’s a really tricky question because I have, for a long time, been maintaining—hoping—that we can have a “truth commission” kind of dialogue around these monuments, so the monuments could inspire us and open the way to really confront the legacy of slavery and white supremacy in this nation. The question of what to do with any particular Confederate monument would raise those larger questions that we urgently need to explore and wrestle with as a society.

We can’t just take these monuments down and think that we have solved our problem.

Unfortunately though, I think what’s happened now with Dylann Roof and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville is that the time for dialogue is closing around these monuments. Local governments are put in a position where they have to take them down, because otherwise they’re going to be appropriated by neo-Nazis, or they’re going to be torn down by counter-protestors. It’s a little hard for me to know what the way forward is now because we need to have this dialogue. We can’t just take these monuments down and think that we have solved our problem, because we won’t have. But on the other hand, the monuments are honoring something that we absolutely need to repudiate. The easiest way to repudiate them is to take them down. And I understand why that was done in New Orleans, and I think the mayor there did an eloquent job of explaining why they had to come down. But now everything is lightning speed, and it’s hard to know where we’re going to be even a week from now.

JS: We shall see. I appreciate you joining me professor. Thanks so much, Kirk.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and will air as part of a complete episode on August 18. It was lightly edited for clarity.

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If the Media Keeps Ignoring Health Care, We’ll Lose It https://talkpoverty.org/2017/06/19/media-keeps-ignoring-health-care-well-lose/ Mon, 19 Jun 2017 17:18:40 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=23164 There is a giant scandal in Washington this week—and it’s not the one blaring from your television screen. Largely without media scrutiny, the United States Senate is quietly getting ready to pass their version of the House bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. If it looks anything like the legislation the House passed last month—and by most accounts, it does—the bill could take away health care coverage from millions (the House-passed American Health Care Act would take away health insurance from 23 million people in 10 years).

The Senate’s stealth strategy here should come as no surprise: They learned from the House.  After the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that 24 million people would lose health care under the initial version of the AHCA bill, constituents responded by flooding House offices with phone calls. Paul Ryan and Republican leadership were forced to cancel a vote in mid-March, because the public opposition to the bill made it impossible to secure the votes they needed. The House then went back to their members and passed a new version, with no CBO score or media coverage, in order to mask the effects of their bill.

That handed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell the playbook he needs to get his bill passed.  The Senate companion to the House bill is being crafted under lock and key, foregoing committee hearings, mark-up, or any public debate. McConnell went as far as kicking all non-leadership staff out of secret discussions last month to prevent them from disclosing information about the bill to the public. Even rank-and-file GOP Senators—who control the chamber and will likely be tasked with sending the legislation to the president’s desk—claim not to know what’s in it. According to Axios, the bill will not be released publicly even once it is complete. Instead, Mitch McConnell plans to send the completed text to the Congressional Budget Office for review, without any public scrutiny.

What’s shocking is not that the Senate is attempting to pass this bill under a shroud of secrecy; it’s that the strategy is working. As Vox’s Jeff Stein has been chronicling, most mainstream media outlets have either ignored the Senate health care discussions or downplayed their urgency.

Scanning the front webpages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and CNN on Monday revealed no mentions of the health care bill—and the same was true for much of last week. Even politics-focused outlets like Politico and the Hill have largely relegated their coverage of the health care fight to specialized newsletters or paywalled content.

Instead, lead stories focus almost exclusively on the Trump-Russia investigation. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week dominated national news coverage. Later in the week, news that the FBI was investigating the president himself—and the president’s histrionic response on Twitter—crowded out any discussion of the health care bill.

The media have their excuses. Without senators willing to discuss the plans publicly, reporters have found it difficult to break news on the topic. Cable news has no compelling soundbites to play for their viewers because Republican Senators are not holding public hearings, committee mark-ups, or press conferences on the bill.

There has been little public outcry because there has been little sunlight on the Senate’s process

But, as newsworthy as Russia’s interference in the 2016 election is, a bill to take away health insurance from millions is, at the very least, equally worthy of public attention. The legislation Senate Republicans are currently discussing is likely to reinstate annual and lifetime benefit limits—even for employer plans outside of the ACA exchanges. This could be a death sentence for people who get sick and require expensive care to stay alive.  Recent analysis from the Center for American Progress (full disclosure: TalkPoverty.org is a project of the Center) revealed that up to 27 million Americans could face annual limits. And the Senate is planning to go beyond repealing the Medicaid expansion—which was part of the ACA—by imposing deep cuts to the traditional Medicaid program that helps seniors, kids, and people with disabilities in every state.

What the Senate is doing is an affront to democracy, but there has been little public outcry because there has been little sunlight on the Senate’s process or underlying legislation. For the public to hold their representatives accountable, they need to have accurate—or at least basic—information on what Congress is doing. Just as dogged journalism has revealed some of most critical details of the Russia investigation, it is the responsibility of the press to draw out the contents of the Senate’s health care bill—before it is too late.

Editor’s note: For more on the healthcare news that no one is talking about, take a listen to the latest episode of CAP Action’s Off-Kilter podcast here.

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These Families Were Directly Threatened by Trump’s Agenda in His First 100 Days https://talkpoverty.org/2017/04/28/trump-100-days/ Fri, 28 Apr 2017 15:01:47 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=22978 Media coverage of Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president has largely focused on what Trump didn’t do during his brief time in office—from his stalled attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, to his reversal on campaign promises like exiting NAFTA or building a wall funded by Mexico. Indeed, Trump has either failed to accomplish, stalled, or outright abandoned many of the goals he set when he entered office.

But this narrative overlooks the very real harm Trump has inflicted on the country—and, more importantly, on individuals affected by his policies. From undocumented immigrants, to people living near coal ash, to low-income families who would feel the effects of budget cuts—Trump has already done real damage to American families.

Here are three people who illustrate the human impact of Trump’s agenda during his first 100 days in office:

1. Kim Brewer

Kim Brewer is a mother of four who lives in Dukeville, North Carolina, near a major coal-fired power plant named Buck Steam Station. According to Brewer, her first two children were born healthy. But after moving to Dukeville, she gave birth to two daughters with severe birth defects. Ava was born with Chiari malformation, a brain defect linked to exposure to toxic chemicals—including coal ash, which is generated by coal-fired power plants. Her youngest daughter, Laney, has spina bifida, which is also linked to coal ash. Both girls have also been diagnosed with epilepsy.

Buck Steam Station stores its coal ash in an unlined pit near a local waterway. The ash contains a variety of toxic chemicals—including arsenic, lead, mercury, and thallium (an active ingredient in rat poison). Living near coal ash sites is linked to heart disease, cancer, respiratory illness and stroke—the leading causes of death in the country. It’s especially toxic when it leaks, as Buck Steam Station did in 2014, contaminating groundwater, wetlands, and rivers.

In December, the Obama administration released a new rule protecting waterways from coal ash. Experts estimated the rule would have improved water quality in over 250 miles of streams every year.  But days after taking office, Trump signed legislation that quashed the rule—one in a spate of bills designed to undermine environmental protections.

Trump could still do more to protect people from coal ash, but if his Cabinet appointments are any indication, that won’t happen anytime soon. Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, has delayed a separate rule regulating the safe storage of coal ash; and Trump’s nominee to run the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resource Division—the office in charge of prosecuting coal ash violations—is a former lobbyist for the coal industry.

2. Juan Carlos Fomperosa Garcia

No community has borne the brunt of Trump’s policies more than immigrants—both undocumented and documented. Juan Carlos Fomperosa Garcia, a 44-year-old father of three American citizens, worked for years in construction in Arizona.

Last month, he and his daughter, Yennifer, visited the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office (ICE) for what he hoped would be a routine check-in. They planned to return home afterwards to celebrate the 17th birthday of Fomperosa Garcia’s son.  Instead, after an hour, ICE officers came to the waiting area and told Yennifer that her father had been detained.

The next day he was deported.

According to The Arizona Republic, Fomperosa Garcia had a worker’s permit and a pending asylum application to stay in the country—and had never committed a crime. “My father is not a criminal,” Yennifer said through tears at a press conference following his detention. “He’s not one of those people that…President Trump says. He’s not a rapist, he’s not a drug dealer and he’s not a murderer. My father’s an honest, working man, a family man that loves everyone he meets. He cares too much and that’s the only crime.”

“Please, everyone, be aware. They are taking everyone,’’ she told the crowd.

Fomperosa Garcia is just one victim of Trump’s mass deportations. Trump initially said he would focus on “bad hombres” or criminals, but ICE officers have since targeted people with minor violations, so-called “collateral arrests,” and even DREAMers who came to the country as children.

3. Martha Daniels

Martha Daniels was displaced from her New Orleans home after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina. She now lives in Houston, where she relies on Meals on Wheels, a partially federally-funded program that connects volunteers with people who can’t buy or cook their own meals—often seniors.

For many, Meals on Wheels provides more than just nutrition assistance. It is a source of companionship and, importantly, regular health check-ins for seniors living alone—seniors like Daniels.

In January, a Meals on Wheels volunteer paid a routine visit to Daniels’ home. Instead of displaying her normal bubbly personality, Daniels was sitting stiff in her lounge chair and not breathing well, according to Houston CBS affiliate KHOU. She was rushed to the hospital, where the doctor told her she was suffering from a mild heart attack. Physicians said she may not have lived through the night if she hadn’t been brought to the hospital.

“If she wouldn’t have checked on me, who knows who would have come,” Daniels said.

Under Trump’s budget, people like Daniels may not have access to Meals on Wheels and its life-saving volunteers. Trump would eliminate the Community Development Block Grant and the Community Services Block Grant —two of the main sources of funding for the program. Despite inaccurate statements by the Trump administration, Meals on Wheels receives more than one-third of its funding from the federal government—and cuts of this scale would make it hard for many local community-run programs to keep their doors open.

When we talk about Trump’s First 100 Days, we need to remember that his policies are not an abstraction. They are causing immediate—and in some cases irreparable —damage to communities across the country. For all the infighting, lies, and scandals of his administration, Trump is making progress on remaking the country in his image. And that should give everyone who lives here pause.

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The Labor Secretary Nominee Promised to Defer to Trump. That’s a Problem for Workers. https://talkpoverty.org/2017/03/30/labor-secretary-promised-defer-trump-thats-problem-workers/ Thu, 30 Mar 2017 14:30:53 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=22811 Last week’s political news was dominated by the stunning failure of congressional Republicans’ health care bill. The resulting chaos will ultimately preserve health insurance for 24 million Americans, but it allowed the March 22 confirmation hearing for Alexander Acosta, President Trump’s second choice to lead the Labor Department, to slide by unnoticed.

In a party-line vote, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions advanced Acosta’s nomination today, putting 160 million American workers one step closer to having a protector-in-chief whose views are largely unknown. During his hearing, Acosta fought to keep his opinions concealed. He repeatedly dodged questions about the department’s most significant recent activities, including updating overtime rules, reducing exposure to deadly silica dust, and requiring retirement advisers to act in their clients’ best interest.

But, despite his relative silence on labor issues, Acosta’s past has a giant red flag.

From 2003 to 2005, when Acosta was leading the Civil Rights Division of George W. Bush’s Department of Justice, the division became intensely politicized. An investigation by the Office of the Inspector General found the division violated federal law and DOJ policy by conducting hiring based on candidates’ political and ideological affiliations. Although the report did not find Acosta directly responsible for illegal behavior, former DOJ employee Kristen Clark wrote, “This egregious conduct played out under Acosta’s watch and the Inspector General found that, despite the special litigation section chief informing Acosta of the wrongdoing, Acosta failed to take sufficient action to address the illegal and unprofessional actions.”

Acosta used his authority to push the administration’s agenda.

Acosta’s worrisome record doesn’t end with turning a blind eye to illegal activity. During his tenure at DOJ, Acosta himself was accused of partisan meddling. Just days before the 2004 presidential election, Ohio Republicans challenged and purged the voter registration of thousands of mostly African-American voters through a practice known as “voter caging.” When the case was challenged in federal court, Acosta took the unusual step of sending a letter to the court claiming that the purge was allowed under the Voting Rights Act. Typically, federal agency chiefs go out of their way not to influence elections—but if this behavior sounds like déjà vu, you can thank FBI Director James Comey.

In other words, when the interests of the Bush administration—which favored restrictions on voting rights—conflicted with his responsibility as a civil rights chief, it appears Acosta chose to use his authority to push the administration’s agenda.

And if he is confirmed as labor secretary, Acosta will once again be tasked with protecting a marginalized group of Americans—workers. One of his first tasks will be deciding whether he will enforce a spate of new rules that are designed to protect workers, passed during the end of the Obama administration. The rules themselves are straightforward: companies would have to disclose worker exposure to a cancer-causing dust often found in construction, federal contractors would have to disclose labor law violations, and employers would have to pay overtime to additional eligible workers.  But in some cases, Trump has already criticized them.

If his previous actions are any guide, Acosta will likely place partisan loyalty above enforcement of his agency’s mission. And when he repeated during last week’s hearing that he’d defer to Trump as the “boss,” he gave little assurance that he won’t place ideology above the labor rights and civil rights of working Americans.

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Trump Kicked Off His Presidency By Literally Cutting Jobs https://talkpoverty.org/2017/01/26/trump-kicked-off-presidency-literally-cutting-jobs/ Thu, 26 Jan 2017 12:00:12 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=22270 On Monday, as one of his first acts as President, Donald Trump announced an immediate hiring freeze across the federal government. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the goal behind the freeze is “to respect the American taxpayer” adding, “some people are working two, three jobs just to get by. And to see money get wasted in Washington on a job that is duplicative is insulting to the hard work that they do to pay their taxes.”

Sounds pretty good, huh?  Except that a hiring freeze is a recipe not just for wasting taxpayer dollars but also for eliminating well-paying jobs.

Here are four ways Trump’s hiring freeze will cause pain in communities across the U.S.—and leave taxpayers holding the bag.

1.    It will kill jobs

Trump campaigned on a promise to save and bring back jobs.  But his hiring freeze is a recipe for large-scale job loss. In fact, experts believe that the freeze could affect at a minimum some 800,000 workers, or more than one-fifth of the entire federal workforce.

Certain groups will be particularly hard hit, including African-Americans and people with disabilities, both of whom are employed in the public sector at disproportionately higher rates. Veteran employment will especially suffer—they get a hiring preference for federal jobs, and make up more than 40 percent of newly hired federal workers.

2.    It will likely cost, not save, money

While Donald Trump may claim that a hiring freeze will save taxpayers money, all evidence suggests the opposite. Hiring freezes make government agencies more dependent on private contractors, who are paid nearly double what federal workers are for the same amount of work. As political scientist John Dilulio points out, the growth of federal contractors (as a substitute for federal employees) is one of the main drivers of waste.

What’s more, hiring freezes can cripple the parts of government that bring money in. When the IRS was forced to cut its workforce between 2010 and 2014, it cost the country $2 billion in revenue. Even Trump’s own nominee to lead the Treasury Department, Steve Mnuchin, conceded in his confirmation hearing that the IRS needs more staffing, telling the Senate, “[If] we add people, we add money.”

3.    It could undermine public safety and health

A hiring freeze could put the nation at greater risk of cyberattacks. That’s because updating government computer systems and increasing security requires personnel—and many of the agencies that protect us against cyberattacks are already understaffed. In an era of ever-increasing cyberattacks (which Donald Trump has openly encouraged in the past), some agencies are already sounding alarms. Without the necessary staff, the work will most likely need to be outsourced. (In the past, lawmakers of both parties raised eyebrows about outsourcing cybersecurity to expensive contractors.)

Food and drug safety could also be jeopardized. For years, the Food and Drug Administration has suffered from staff shortages. In November of last year alone, the FDA was short 700 positions. Inadequate staffing at this critical agency puts Americans at risk of foodborne illness and can slow the time it takes for life-saving treatments to get to market.

4.    It will keep veterans and disabled workers from accessing Social Security and medical care

Two agencies that will be especially hard hit are the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Both agencies are significantly short-staffed, which leads to long waits for care and months- (or even years-)long delays for people to access benefits. Thousands of people die waiting for Social Security disability benefits each year due to unconscionable backlogs that the agency is unable to address without additional staff.

In addition, if Trump and his GOP colleagues in Congress move forward with repealing the Affordable Care Act, many of the 3 million veterans who currently get their care through employers or on the health care exchanges could be forced to turn to the VA to get the care they need, which would further worsen delays. As Peter Kauffmann of VoteVets noted, it would be the “ultimate insult to our men and women who serve to deny them the additional doctors, nurses, therapists, and administrators that are sorely needed at the VA” and if the order “leads to preventable deaths, that will be on Donald Trump’s hands.”

***

Trump has repeatedly proclaimed himself the head of a “workers’ party,” bemoaning in his inauguration speech that there has been “little to celebrate for struggling families across the land” and promising to ring in an era of shared prosperity.

Yet, for the millions of Americans who will lose jobs, suffer delays in accessing needed benefits or medical care, or have their families’ health and safety put at risk by the President’s hiring freeze, there will be even less to celebrate now.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that women will be particularly hard hit by the freeze.

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3 People from Tom Price’s District Who Stand to Lose Everything if Obamacare Is Repealed https://talkpoverty.org/2017/01/23/3-people-tom-prices-district-stand-lose-obamacare-repealed/ Mon, 23 Jan 2017 14:38:17 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=22255 Editor’s Note: Early on Friday, February 10, Representative Tom Price was confirmed as the secretary of health and human services.  

Much of the conversation around the Affordable Care Act—and its potential repeal—has focused on numbers and figures: bending the cost curve, lowering the insurance rate, or slowing health care inflation. But lost in this conversation are the millions of people who owe their medication, treatment, preventive care, and in many cases their lives to the Affordable Care Act.

Representative Tom Price, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and oversee the ACA repeal, has proposed a replacement for the law that would leave young people, Americans with pre-existing conditions, women, and people with disabilities at the mercy of the health insurance industry. This would quite literally put the lives of his own constituents at risk.

Below are the stories of three people from Tom Price’s district in Georgia who owe their health coverage to the Affordable Care Act.

1. Vicki Hopper

Vicki Hopper had been uninsured for nearly two years before she purchased health insurance on ACA exchanges in Georgia. Two days later she went to have a mammogram and was told to come back for a more extensive evaluation. Two days after that, she found out she had breast cancer. Since then, she has had 10 surgeries, including biopsies, a double mastectomy, and reconstructive surgery.

In Vicki’s case, the Affordable Care Act may have quite literally saved her life. Mammograms, let alone cancer treatment and surgeries, are incredibly expensive and would have likely been impossible without health insurance coverage. Even if Vicki had found out she had breast cancer, insurance companies would have been able to charge her exorbitant rates or outright deny her coverage because cancer qualifies as a pre-existing condition. But under the ACA, routine health benefits like cancer screening, treatment, and follow-up care are required.

As Vicki told us, “If it wasn’t for Obamacare, I would be homeless.”

2. The Kush Family

Patricia Kush knows exactly how devastating an ACA repeal would be, because she remembers what life was like before Congress passed the legislation. In 2004, Patricia’s husband was diagnosed with diabetes. He was working over 40 hours a week, but his employer didn’t offer health insurance. He tried to get individual coverage through the insurance market, but insurance companies refused to cover his diabetes-related expenses. Because he couldn’t afford an expensive insurance plan and the out-of-pocket costs for diabetes medications, he went without health insurance.

In 2007, Patricia’s husband was hospitalized for serious complications from his illness. He survived, but his time in the hospital cost the couple almost $30,000. “We were lucky, Patricia says, “He didn’t die. The hospital forgave a chunk of the costs, and because of good credit, we were able to get a 10-year loan to pay off the rest of the medical bills. But not everyone is as lucky as we were.”

These days, Patricia’s husband is on her health insurance, but their future is far from secure. “If something happened to me, or I lost my job, and Obamacare had been repealed, he would be in real trouble,” Patricia says. Because he has a pre-existing condition, insurance companies would not be required to cover him if Obamacare were repealed outright. “Even though we don’t currently use the health care exchanges, I feel as if it is very important to tell our story from when my husband wasn’t able to get insurance,” she told us. “It would be devastating for so many families if Obamacare is repealed.”

3. Josh Carter

When his son was born in 2014, Josh was working in a stressful and difficult job. According to his wife Sarah, the anxiety and long hours were placing a major strain on the whole family, but they needed the job to be able to support themselves. By the time their son turned one, Josh’s health and the family’s quality of life were suffering. Josh was eventually able to find a contract job to provide for his family, with one major catch—it didn’t include health benefits. But because Obamacare provides people with access to insurance marketplaces, he was able to find health coverage for him, his wife, and his baby through the exchanges and take a new job.

As important as coverage was for Josh, it was even more important for his son. Since the ACA was passed, nearly 2 million kids have gained health insurance that includes essential screenings and immunizations. Josh’s son benefited from blood pressure screening, vision screening, lead screening, and oral health risk assessments.

“My husband would never have been able to take this opportunity if it wasn’t for the ACA and the ability to buy affordable health insurance outside of his employer,” his wife Sarah says. His contract job turned into a permanent job that he loves—an opportunity he would not have had without access to safe, affordable health care.

If Tom Price listened to his constituents, he would hear thousands of stories like these. Vicki, Patricia, Josh and their families all benefited from coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In Vicki’s case, it probably saved her life. Repealing the Affordable Care Act without a replacement that covers the people who currently depend on it would simply cost lives.

If Tom Price is going to continue his plot to repeal the Affordable Care Act, he owes people like Vicki, Josh, and Patricia a plan that ensures they can continue to get the coverage they need.

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Stop Blaming Low-Income Voters for Donald Trump’s Victory https://talkpoverty.org/2016/11/16/stop-blaming-low-income-voters-donald-trumps-victory/ Wed, 16 Nov 2016 18:05:29 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=21666 The emotional and political repercussions of Donald Trump’s victory as president will take days, months, and years to process. But a pernicious myth has already settled in post-election: that Trump’s victory was fueled by the working class and poor.

The myth that lower-income and working-class voters supported Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was repeated so much this election season that it solidified into conventional wisdom. And it will continue to have dangerous implications for our politics unless confronted.

As exit polls and county data trickle in, it’s become clear that the picture was a little more complicated.

How Did Low-Income People Actually Vote?

Let’s start with the data.  According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton won by 12 points among voters making less than $30,000 a year—53% to Trump’s 41% —and by 9 points among people making between $30,000 and $49,999. Trump’s support was the inverse. He won every group making $50,000 or more—albeit by smaller margins.

This is consistent with analysis of exit polls from the primary, which found that the median household income of Trump voters—about $72,000—was significantly higher than the median household income of the country as a whole—about $56,000. It was also higher than that of the average Clinton and Sanders voters—about $61,000 each.

Even among white voters—who were more likely to support Trump than other groups—Trump did better among middle income white voters than low-income ones. And a closer look reveals that the swing towards Trump was a lot bigger based on education, rather than income.

So Who Voted for Trump?

Trump did perform a lot better than previous Republicans with low-income voters, who historically have supported Democratic candidates by large margins.  For example, Trump improved upon Mitt Romney’s margin with voters making under $30,000 a year by 16 points. But he still lost them—by 12 whole points.

The bulk of Trump’s support didn’t come from people who are most down on their luck. It came from people who are afraid they’re next. In August, research from Gallup economist Jonathan Rothwell found that, nationwide, Trump performed worse in towns that lost manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007, and better in towns that gained them. According to Rothwell, Trump supporters “earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration.”

So what did correspond with Trump support?

Racial resentment among white voters was particularly determinative. And according to another recent study by Ashley Jardina and Spencer Piston, Trump supporters are more likely to hold dehumanizing views of black people. A majority of Trump supporters—52%—see blacks as “less evolved” than whites (a concept thoroughly debunked by science). And 27% of Trump supporters say that African-Americans lack “self-restraint, like animals” compared to 8% of Trump opponents. This is consistent with a study by UCLA’s Michael Tesler, which found that, even during the primaries, voters with more resentment towards blacks and Muslims were more likely to vote for Trump.

What Does This Mean for Policy?

The day after the election, House Speaker Paul Ryan declared a mandate. “What Donald Trump just pulled off was an enormous political feat,” Ryan told a crowd in his hometown of Janesville, WI. “He just earned a mandate. And we now just have that unified Republican government.”

As usual, Ryan is wrong for several reasons. First and most obviously, Donald Trump lost the popular vote. One does not have to question the legitimacy of the electoral college to believe that a narrow delegate win and a popular vote loss does not grant President-elect Trump a political “mandate.”

It’s also important to remember that Trump performed particularly poorly among the very folks he—and the media—claim he represents. And, if Trump’s plan for his first 100 days in office is any indication, they are the people who are likely to bear the brunt of his policies. His tax plan (in addition to drilling a $9.5 trillion hole in the deficit) will mainly benefit the top tax brackets and corporations—exacerbating already record-high inequality. His education plan is designed to let wealthy parents pull their kids out of public schools—fueling educational inequality and segregation. And his repeal of the Affordable Care Act would take away health care from the 20 million who have gained it under the law. This would fall most acutely on low-income people and communities of color, who were least likely to have health care coverage before the law. Even his plan to renege on our climate commitments would directly harm low-income communities, who already suffer from poorer air quality, flood protections, and less access to transportation.

If Trump listened to low-income voters, he’d find that they are more likely to support ambitious policy interventions to alleviate poverty. A recent Morning Consult poll found that a majority of those making less than $50,000 a year would be willing to pay more for Medicare and Social Security. Similar majorities would be willing to fund more aid for women with infants or children, or nutritional programs.

Maybe President Trump—unlike candidate Trump—will listen to them.

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The Americans Who Are Actually Being Robbed of Their Right to Vote https://talkpoverty.org/2016/10/21/americans-actually-robbed-right-vote/ Fri, 21 Oct 2016 13:17:15 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=21534 The United States has a long and sordid history of disenfranchisement. It took nearly 200 years for the principle of “one person, one vote” to become the law of the land, and now much of our progress towards equal voting access is being undone. In the wake of the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision, which gutted key elements of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, new barriers are cropping up that could make it harder for many Americans to vote.

The majority of voters are still unlikely to face issues on Election Day, but the new burdens fall disproportionately on a select cohort of Americans. Here are the groups of people who will face some of the steepest battles to cast their vote.

People of color

African-Americans had the highest voter turnout rates in 2012, but new obstacles could keep many black voters from the ballot box this year. Laws that require voters to present photo ID at the polls—which have cropped up in eight states since 2013, bringing the total to 34 states—disproportionately impact African-Americans. That’s because people of color are less likely than whites to have the specific forms of required photo ID, and because these laws are more common in  Southern states (where African-Americans are concentrated).

In addition to obstructive voter ID laws, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans are often plagued by language barriers. While the Voting Rights Act contains protections for language-minority voters, poll workers are not always aware of them (so they might not honor these voters’ rights, for example, to have someone assist them at the polls).

People of color often have to take more time and travel further distances in order to vote. In 2012, black and Latino voters waited nearly twice as long as white voters to cast their ballots, likely due in part to state decisions to restrict early voting. And this year, Native Americans in northern Nevada will have to travel nearly 100 miles round-trip to cast their ballot in November.

Homeless people

First, the good news: in recent years, court decisions and new laws at both the state and federal level have eliminated formal bans on voters who do not live in a “traditional dwelling.” As a result, homeless people are now formally able to register and vote in every state.

But homeless adults—of whom there are at least 400,000 nationally—still face a variety of informal barriers. Some states require voters to provide a mailing address when they register. Other states require voters to prove how long they have lived in a voting district, a task that is understandably difficult for homeless people. And again, stricter voter restriction laws—like photo ID requirements—fall particularly hard on the homeless community, who are less likely to have a driver’s license or other forms of acceptable identification.

People with criminal records

Americans with criminal records, especially those with felony convictions, face some of the steepest—and most convoluted—barriers to the ballot box. In fact, a new study found that a record 6.1 million people are barred from voting this year because of felony convictions.

Because voting for people with felony convictions has not been federally regulated, those seeking to register face a patchwork of state voting laws that range from no restrictions (in Maine and Vermont) to a lifetime of disenfranchisement (in 10 states). Ten states also restrict voting for people with misdemeanors. These restrictions disproportionately impact people of color. In Florida, felony disenfranchisement bars 23% of African Americans from voting, and four other states also suppress the votes of 1 in 5 black citizens.

Unfortunately, the confusion and misinformation around state laws can even discourage eligible Americans with criminal records from voting. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “Many people with past criminal records mistakenly believe they are ineligible to vote.” As a result, many end up staying home unnecessarily on Election Day.

Women

Even though women made up a majority of voters in 2012, voter ID laws are creating new obstacles for them, too. Thirty-four states require voters to present some kind of identification. Roughly 90% of women change their last names when they get married (and often change their names back following a divorce), and many may not realize their voter registration does not match the name on their ID until it comes time to vote. What’s more, women are also more likely to belong to other groups who face barriers at the polls—low-wage workers, seniors, students, and the poor.

Low-wage workers

More than 23 million people—disproportionately women and people of color—work in low-wage jobs. These workers are especially likely to have volatile and erratic schedules, which makes it hard for them to plan to get to the polls. Additionally, only 30 states require employers to give workers time off to vote—and even among states that do provide workers leave to vote, that time off is not always paid.

For workers who subsist on very low wages, the decision to take time off to cast a ballot can result in a difficult financial loss. That may explain the 30-point gap in voter participation along income lines: Less than half of people earning under $30,000 a year voted in the 2012 election, while over 80% of people earning over $150,000 voted. As a point of comparison, 99% of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans voted.

Transgender people

Transgender citizens have become a vocal voting bloc this election cycle, but stringent photo ID laws threaten their ability to cast a ballot. An estimated 27% of trans people lack identification that accurately reflects their gender, in large part because they face uphill legal and financial battles to update their ID documents. For example, in at least 15 states, trans people are required to show proof of a gender reassignment surgery—a task that is simply not possible for those who are unable or choose not to have the surgery.

People with disabilities

People with disabilities face a wide range of voting obstacles, but chief among them are transportation, lack of accommodations at the polls, and poll workers who are ill-equipped to offer help. A full 30% of people with disabilities are unable to drive, which makes it hard to get to the polls in the first place—particularly for those voters who live alone or in rural areas. Even if they manage to make it to their polling location, a lack of ramps or curb cuts and limited support for voters with vision impairments make it difficult for people with disabilities to vote—even though laws like the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and the Americans with Disabilities Act were designed to improve ballot access. These barriers help explain why turnout rates among voters with disabilities—especially those with cognitive disabilities—tend to be lower than voters without disabilities. In fact, it can be difficult for people with disabilities to even register to vote, since most online voter registrations are not accessible for people with vision-related or cognitive disabilities. All told, these barriers to access could account for as many as 3 million votes.

None of these barriers are inevitable. Most are the consequences of policy decisions, some of which were made with the deliberate intent of disenfranchisement. Election Day gives Americans the opportunity to reverse these laws, and to elect policymakers who will work on behalf of those who don’t always have a voice.

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Why Did Voters Ask Better Questions Than the Debate Moderators? https://talkpoverty.org/2016/10/20/voters-ask-better-questions-debate-moderators/ Thu, 20 Oct 2016 20:02:16 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=21518 After four debates, six hours of discussion, and dozens of questions on everything from personal scandals to the economy, one thing still missing from this year’s presidential and vice presidential debates was this: a conversation about the more than 40 million Americans who live in poverty.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The debates got off to a promising start. In the very first question of the first debate, moderator Lester Holt mentioned the record-breaking wage growth of 2015, as well as the millions of Americans who still live paycheck to paycheck. But the question itself was as unremarkable as they come: “Why are you a better choice than your opponent to create the kinds of jobs that will put more money into the pockets of American workers?” Holt failed to press the candidates on the specific policies they would pursue to fight poverty and inequality.

The second debate was supposed to be different. The moderators agreed to consider asking the top 30 questions submitted by the public through PresidentialOpenQuestions.com, a project of the Open Debate Coalition. Nearly four million people voted, with the most voted-on questions focusing on background checks for gun sales, expanding Social Security, climate change, and money in politics.

In conjunction with the Open Debate Coalition, TalkPoverty launched our campaign, #WhereDoYouStand, which focused specifically on questions related to poverty and economic opportunity. Literally thousands of voters asked the candidates where they stand on issues that affect low-income families—everything from equal pay for equal work to food insecurity to tax credits for working families.

But moderators ignored all of those topics in the second debate. In fact, the only question they included was a query on WikiLeaks that received a grand total of 13 votes (the 30 most popular questions that they had agreed to consider all received more than 20,000 votes).

Last night’s forum wasn’t any better. Moderator and Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked just one question on the economy, and it was particularly unhelpful: “Please explain to me why you believe your plan will create more jobs and growth for this country, and your opponent’s plan will not.” The only question from the Open Debate Coalition was a conservative question on the Second Amendment.

Ironically, the questions generated through the online petition ended up demonstrating how sophisticated most voters are compared to the debate moderators. Not one of the top 30 submitted questions was about a scandal, gaffe, or personal foible of the candidates. The popularity of questions about the 42 million Americans facing food insecurity or the tax rate for Social Security benefits prove that people want to hear questions about policy.

This chart from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting shows the breakdown of questions asked in each general election debate.
This chart from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting shows the breakdown of questions asked in each general election debate.

Lest we get cynical, this is progress. General election debates historically don’t take questions submitted online. The mere fact that Americans were able to vote on the questions they wanted to hear in the debates represents an acknowledgment that our voices matter.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this year’s debates, it’s that we can’t expect the media to ask about issues just because they matter to voters. The media responds to movements. Black Lives Matter, the Fight for $15, and Occupy Wall Street all gained attention from the media and lawmakers because they organized and gained traction with the public.

If we want the media to talk about poverty, we need to turn anti-poverty work into an anti-poverty movement.

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It’s Time to Ask the Candidates: #Wheredoyoustand on Fighting Poverty?   https://talkpoverty.org/2016/10/03/time-ask-candidates-wheredoyoustand-fighting-poverty/ Mon, 03 Oct 2016 15:29:35 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=21401 Last week’s first presidential debate got off to a promising start.  The very first question of the night focused on the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us.

“There are two economic realities in America today,” said moderator Lester Holt. “There’s been a record six straight years of job growth, and new census numbers show incomes have increased at a record rate after years of stagnation. However, income inequality remains significant, and nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”

Holt is right about the challenges Americans are facing. Nearly 50 percent of all U.S. households report that they would struggle to come up with $400 during an emergency. And 80 percent of Americans will experience at least one year of economic insecurity—either living in poverty, needing public assistance, or having an unemployed head of household.

The fact that inequality and income volatility were mentioned at all is a big deal.

In 2008, as millions lost their jobs in the midst of the financial crisis, the first presidential debate featured no questions on poverty or income inequality. And in 2012, just as Americans were beginning to climb out of the Great Recession, poverty was ignored by debate moderators—although President Obama still managed to talk about issues like low-wage work, access to community colleges and training, affordable healthcare and childcare, and pay equity. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the presidential election this year, news networks have devoted less and less attention to poverty and inequality in favor of horse-race election coverage.

But just talking about poverty isn’t enough.

It’s critical that we move beyond talk, and focus on real solutions. Case in point: According to a recent analysis by Media Matters for America, Fox News covers poverty more than any other network on the air—but rather than educating the public on solutions, their stories reinforce stereotypes and false narratives about those of us who are struggling. Similarly, conservative politicians like Paul Ryan have delivered high-profile speeches and put forward so-called “poverty plans” for low-income communities, while still supporting trillions of dollars in cuts to antipoverty investments over ten years.

The same goes for the presidential debates. We need to know where the candidates stand on the policies that would dramatically reduce poverty and expand opportunity for everyone in America.

Where do the candidates stand on Unemployment Insurance, which is woefully underfunded and currently reaches only 1 in 4 workers who need it? What would they do to address college affordability—at a time when student debt has ballooned to about $1.3 trillion and too many low-income students are simply priced out of a college education? Where do they stand on raising the minimum wage—even $12 an hour by 2020 would lift wages for more than 35 million workers and save about $17 billion annually in government assistance programs. What about expanding Social Security—the most powerful antipoverty program in the nation—which lifted 26 million people out of poverty in 2015?

It’s time to ask the candidates: #Wheredoyoustand

The idea is simple: if the media isn’t going to dig into the candidates’ policies, we will.

That’s why this election season, TalkPoverty.org is working to push questions about where the candidates stand on poverty solutions into the presidential debate.

Unlike the first debate, the next forum will be a town hall featuring questions submitted through social media. Building off a successful 2012 #TalkPoverty campaign led by The  Nation magazine and the Center for American Progress, today we’re launching our #Wheredoyoustand campaign encouraging you to share the questions you want to hear in the next presidential debate. The idea is simple: if the media isn’t going to dig into the candidates’ policies, we will.

Share your question now.

Whether it’s through a photo, a video, or a tweet, we want to know the questions you think need to be asked. Once you’ve tweeted your questions using #Wheredoyoustand, share them on the Open Debate Coalition website so that more people can vote to hear them in the debate.

Below are some examples of questions to get you started.  It’s time to move beyond focusing on whether someone said “the p-word,” and make sure the debates address real solutions to poverty.

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Everything You Wanted to Know About the 1996 Welfare Law but Were Afraid to Ask https://talkpoverty.org/2016/08/22/everything-wanted-know-1996-welfare-law-afraid-ask/ Mon, 22 Aug 2016 14:16:34 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=17123 Table of Contents

What’s TANF?
What’s a Block Grant?
Isn’t State and Local Control More Effective?
Does It at Least Help People Prepare for Work?
Why Does All This Matter?
So Where Do We Go From Here?

What’s TANF?

In 1996, Congress replaced the New Deal-era Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a new program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), under the guise of “ending welfare as we know it.”

The new law built on decades of anti-welfare sentiment, which Ronald Reagan popularized in 1976 with the racially-loaded myth of the “welfare queen.” In the two decades that followed, progressives and conservatives alike put forward reform proposals aimed at boosting work and reducing welfare receipt. Progressive proposals included expanded childcare assistance, paid leave, and tax credits for working families. Conservatives, on the other hand, tended to favor punitive work requirements—without any of the corresponding investments to address barriers to employment.

In 1996, after vetoing two Republican proposals that drastically cut the program’s funding, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act into law. The new legislation converted AFDC into a flat-funded block grant—TANF—and sent it to the states to administer.

The law’s stated purpose was to move families from “welfare to work.” By that measure, supporters initially heralded TANF as a success during the strong, full-employment economy of the late 1990s. But too often, the narrative stops there, ignoring significant failings in the program that surfaced after the economy slowed down.

What is a block grant?

A block grant is essentially a pot of money that the federal government gives to state governments to administer a program subject to federal guidelines.

One of the key limitations of block grants is that they can lose value over time. The TANF block grant, for example, has been flat-funded at $16.5 billion since the law was first implemented 20 years ago. In other words, despite the rising cost of living, TANF’s funding hasn’t increased at all. As a result, it has lost more than one-third of its value since 1996, leaving fewer low-income families able to access the help they need. Fewer than one in four families with children living below the federal poverty line are helped by TANF today—down from more than two-thirds in 1996.

Another major limitation is that block grants are unable to respond to economic downturns. During the Great Recession, the number of families helped by TANF barely budged—the number of unemployed workers spiked by nearly 90%, but families able to access TANF only ticked up by 16%. TANF’s failure to respond to rising economic hardship not only hurts struggling families; it takes away a critical tool to lessen the impact of recessions.

Isn’t state and local control more effective?

Not in TANF’s case. There’s very little accountability with regard to how states must spend this money, so many states treat the program like a slush fund by diverting the funds to a range of other purposes—including closing budget gaps.

As a result, just 1 out of every 4 TANF dollars goes to income assistance for poor families with kids—policymakers, the public, and the media lack even the most basic information on where the rest of the funds go. By comparison, over 95% of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) dollars go to helping struggling families purchase food.

Does it at least help people prepare for work?

Not well. Preparing people for work was one of the stated goals of the 1996 welfare law, but only 8% of TANF’s funding goes to employment preparation services. What’s worse, states aren’t actually required to track whether TANF recipients get jobs—employment isn’t even an outcome that gets measured (nor is poverty reduction, for that matter).

Conservatives claim the law gives states flexibility, but states face stiff constraints when it comes to helping participants prepare for and find work. For example, states aren’t allowed to provide “job search and job readiness assistance” for more than four consecutive weeks and six weeks in the entire year—no matter how hard someone is looking for work. In addition, vocational training only counts towards required work activity for 12 months. It’s no wonder that governors from both parties have requested greater flexibility in designing work programs for TANF.

Why does all this matter?

Great question. TANF’s shortcomings don’t just matter to the millions of poor families with kids who aren’t getting the help they need through the program. A full 70% of Americans will need to turn to the safety net at some point—whether it’s TANF, nutrition assistance, Supplemental Security Income, or Unemployment Insurance. Without these programs, our nation’s poverty rate would be nearly twice as high as it is today.

But despite TANF’s dismal record, many congressional Republicans want to model effective antipoverty tools, including nutrition assistance and housing aid, after TANF—by converting them to block grants.

In total, Speaker Ryan has called for ending 11 antipoverty programs—including housing assistance, food assistance, and child care—and combining them into a single block grant. Just like TANF, the funding would be fixed—making it woefully unresponsive to recessions or changes in the unemployment rate.

So where do we go from here?

To begin with, the federal government should require states to spend a certain share of TANF funds on the law’s core purposes—income assistance, child care, and work programs. Requiring states to spend even half of TANF funds on these priorities would ensure that more families get the help they need. We should also hold states accountable for meaningful outcomes such as actually helping TANF recipients get jobs, and reducing poverty.

In addition, Congress should stop rewarding states for ending aid to families in need. Right now, states receive a so-called “caseload reduction credit” for reducing the number of people they help—regardless of whether they have jobs when they leave the program. In effect, instead of giving states incentives to provide needed assistance, we’re doing the opposite.

We also need to increase benefits so that families can meet their basic needs. In no state are benefits equal to even half the austere federal poverty level (the maximum benefit was about $10,000 per year for a family of three in 2015).

Strengthening TANF is critical to ensure that our nation’s safety net provides adequate protection against life’s unpredictability. But it is just one part of a broader antipoverty agenda.

Building an economy that works for everyone—not just the wealthy few—will require creating good jobs and ensuring a living wage; adopting work-family policies that ensure parents are not forced to choose between work and caregiving; putting childcare and high-quality education within reach for all families; and removing barriers to opportunity so that all families have the opportunity to succeed.

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The ‘Save Our Social Security Act’ Proves Conservatives Lost the Social Security Fight https://talkpoverty.org/2016/08/11/save-social-security-act-proves-conservatives-lost-social-security-fight/ Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:33:40 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=17050 Earlier this summer, lawmakers introduced a bill to “save” Social Security that reads like a desperate attempt to appeal to the growing movement to expand the program. The proposal, introduced by Rep. Reid Ribble (R-WI), is called the “S.O.S. Act”—short for the “Save Our Social Security Act of 2016” (get it?).

The new legislation includes many of the stealth benefit cuts that conservatives have been pushing for years. It calls for increasing the retirement age from 66 to 69. Even a one-year increase in the retirement age is equivalent to a 7 percent cut in benefits for all retirees, so raising the full retirement age to 69 would cost millions of Americans thousands of dollars in benefits. It would also have a disproportionate impact on low-income workers, who get a larger share of their income from Social Security.

The bill also includes the now-infamous “chained CPI”—a measure of inflation that would chip away at Social Security benefits over time. In the long run, the new formula would cut earned benefits by an additional $1,000 a year.

But the new proposal does more than just cut Social Security—it includes something few Congressional Republicans were advocating just a few years ago.

Section 2 of the bill—titled “Increase Contribution and Benefit Base”—calls for raising the cap on the payroll tax that funds Social Security benefits from $118,500 to $308,750. In other words, the wealthiest Americans would be asked to contribute a little bit more to fund the program. The bill also increases benefits for the oldest beneficiaries, and creates a minimum benefit for beneficiaries who are at or near the poverty level.

These—albeit modest—concessions underscore just how far the Social Security debate has moved under President Obama.

These—albeit modest—concessions underscore just how far the Social Security debate has moved under President Obama. In 2010, with post-recession deficit concerns still running high, President Obama created a “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform” (often referred to as “Simpson-Bowles,” after its co-chairs) that proposed an increase in the Social Security retirement age and a new, more meager measure of inflation. Future House Speaker Paul Ryan’s budget plan that year went a step further: He not only put forward massive cuts, but set up private accounts that would bankrupt the program over the long haul.  Then in 2011, the White House offered cuts to Social Security and Medicare in “grand bargain” negotiations with Republicans.

The shift that followed the failed attempt at a “grand bargain” is now well-known. Progressives, led by groups like Social Security Works, organized labor, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, shifted from defense to offense. In 2013, New America released a comprehensive plan to expand Social Security. Last year, one of the program’s staunchest advocates, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, rallied all but two Senate Democrats to support a resolution to “expand and protect” Social Security. And in June, the President publicly endorsed expansion.

The “S.O.S Act” is nowhere close to the emerging progressive consensus around Social Security. In addition to benefit increases, it includes many of the same cuts proposed in Simpson-Bowles. And, since the Republican author of the bill is retiring at the end of this Congress (along with three of the bill’s original cosponsors), any progress should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

But for the first time, conservatives are cloaking benefit cuts with the rhetoric of “strengthening” Social Security. The center on Social Security policy has moved—and conservatives don’t know how to catch up.

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Mitt Romney Says He Wants To “Get Wages Up.” So Why Did He Campaign Against A Minimum Wage Increase? https://talkpoverty.org/2016/07/06/mitt-romney-minimum-wage/ https://talkpoverty.org/2016/07/06/mitt-romney-minimum-wage/#comments Wed, 06 Jul 2016 13:59:46 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=16797 Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney made waves last week when he reflected on the reasons for his failed 2012 presidential bid. “I was talking about policy when it would have been more effective to talk about why I favor that policy—to get wages up,” Romney told a crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “And of course our Democrat friends they wisely point out, ‘He’s talking about business all the time. He only cares about business people.’ Heck no! Business people do fine under Democrats and Republicans! It’s the middle class and the poor that need conservative principles to see rising real wages.”

First of all, this may be the most Mitt Romney-esque statement of all time (and last we checked, Mitt Romney was “not concerned about the very poor”).

Wages for low-income Americans actually decline under Republican presidents—and increase under Democrats—in part because of changes to the minimum wage.

Second, Romney’s claim that the middle class and the poor “need conservative principles to see rising real wages” flies in the face of the evidence. Researcher Larry Bartels found that income growth is not only faster, but more equal under Democratic presidents. Wages for low-income Americans actually decline under Republican presidents—and increase under Democrats—in part because of changes to the minimum wage.

In other words, “getting wages up” is a policy. It’s called the “minimum wage.” It’s been raised 22 times since 1938—by both Democratic and Republican presidents—but has remained at a meager $7.25 an hour (a poverty wage) since 2009. The reason for that? Romney’s fellow Republican Members of Congress have blocked reasonable increases of the minimum wage. In 2014, a minority of Republican Senators filibustered legislation that would have increased the wage to $10.10 an hour.

Romney, to his credit, broke with his party and came around to supporting a federal minimum wage increase two years after his campaign ended, but his records as a governor and a candidate tell a different story. As Massachusetts executive, he vetoed a minor wage hike to $7.50 an hour (the Democratic legislature eventually overrode his veto). And contrary to his most recent statements, he did talk about why he favored certain policies during his candidacy in 2012—they just didn’t involve wages.

A review of Romney’s 2012 campaign site shows no mention of the minimum wage—or wage growth at all (he did, however, have an entire page dedicated to repealing the Affordable Care Act). When pressed on his wage policy by CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, Romney responded, “Right now there’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage. What I can tell you is had one indexed the minimum wage back to, let’s say, 1990, the minimum wage would be lower now than it actually is. Democrats make big hay of this every few years, ‘Oh, we’re going to raise the minimum wage,’ and get a lot of hoopla for it.”

Romney’s about-face is not uncommon among’ former Republican politicians. In 2014, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty said the GOP should favor “reasonable increases to the minimum wage.” But Pawlenty vetoed an attempted minimum wage increase in 2008. And when he left the governorship, Minnesota had one of the lowest minimum wages in the country. And former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum—the only 2016 Republican presidential candidate to support a minimum wage increase—also opposed the legislation to raise the wage floor to $10.10 an hour.

To be clear, Romney and other former elected officials’ support for a minimum wage increase is welcome—if only their views were reflected by Republican leaders in Congress.

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Maine’s Governor Just Threatened to End the State’s Food Stamp Program. Here’s Why That’s Illegal. https://talkpoverty.org/2016/06/23/maine-governor-just-threatened-end-food-stamp-program-illegal/ Thu, 23 Jun 2016 13:07:40 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=16679 Maine Governor Paul LePage is no stranger to food stamp cuts. The Republican executive kicked more than 6,000 people off of food assistance last fall, after he reinstated stringent time limits for the program. And in December, the U.S. Department of Agriculture threatened Maine with fines for its failure to adequately process food stamp applications.

But now LePage has taken his attacks on the program a step further. This month, he wrote the Obama Administration threatening to stop participating in the food stamp program if the Administration didn’t add restrictions on how recipients use their benefits. Specifically, LePage wants to “prohibit the purchase of candy and sugar-sweetened beverages with food stamp benefits in Maine.” If not, the Governor wrote, “I will be pursuing options to implement reform unilaterally or cease Maine’s administration of the food stamp program altogether. You maintain such a broken program that I do not want my name attached to it.”

In other words, LePage would effectively end food assistance in Maine.

His claims are shaky at best. A comprehensive survey by the Department of Agriculture found that food stamp recipients’ diets largely mirror those of other Americans. In fact, consumption of candy, ice cream, and cookies is lower among food stamp recipients than it is among higher-income Americans.

It’s still unclear whether LePage can actually do this. Legally, states administer food assistance, and the federal government funds the program. According to Robyn Merrill, Executive Director of Maine Equal Justice Partners, “There’s no precedent in a state actually pulling out and refusing to administer the program.” On top of that, state law requires Maine to administer a statewide food assistance program that follows federal regulations.

But if Governor LePage were to follow through with his threat, it would have a devastating impact on his constituents. Nearly 1 out of every 7 residents in the state—190,000 people—rely on food stamps. SNAP also has important economic benefits—in 2015 alone, the program provided almost $280 million in federal dollars to the state, which were distributed among more than 1,500 state retailers. And as a program that is counter-cyclical—meaning it provides greater benefits during economic downturns and fewer during economic expansions—SNAP plays an important role in stimulating the economy during a recession.

The effort also demonstrates the risk of giving state executives like LePage more authority over antipoverty programs. Republican leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan have proposed giving states more “flexibility” on food stamps, housing assistance, and child care. But in practice, empowering state leaders has resulted in conservatives enacting a number of counterproductive and punitive policies, including banning low-income people from using cash benefits at public pools or movie theaters and drug testing program recipients.

LePage’s threat to end food stamps is just the latest chapter in this effort.

 

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Nightly Newscasts Have Virtually Ignored Poverty in 2016. Here’s Why. https://talkpoverty.org/2016/06/09/nightly-newscasts-virtually-ignored-poverty-2016-heres/ Thu, 09 Jun 2016 12:50:39 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=16514 One in two Americans will experience poverty or near poverty during their working years. But you wouldn’t know that from watching the news.

Nightly news broadcasts on the three major television networks barely mentioned the 47 million Americans living in poverty in the first quarter of 2016. According to a new report from Media Matters for America, NBC Nightly News ran just two segments on the topic in the first three months of this year. What’s worse, ABC and CBS failed to cover the issue entirely.

Even when it comes to income inequality—a trend gaining increasing media attention—the networks fell down on the job. NBC aired just 5 segments on the topic (out of hundreds), compared to just one from CBS Evening News and zero on ABC’s World News Tonight.

Cable outlets and Sunday shows performed marginally better, as Fox News and MSNBC each aired 32 segments on inequality and CNN ran 17. But less than half of those—48 segments across all three cable networks—focused on those most acutely affected by income inequality: Americans living in poverty. And, it should be noted, cable news outlets have 24 hours of airtime to fill—a total of 48 segments among thousands of hours of coverage hardly amounts to significant media attention.

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This should come as no surprise. A separate survey of nightly newscasts in 2015 found that economic stories received less coverage than in any year since 1988. Of the economic stories that were covered, very few focused on poverty. The top economic story of the last year? The stock market.

And the guests discussing issues of inequality and poverty are hardly representative of those experiencing it. Women accounted for less than a third of guests during segments on inequality or poverty on TV News programs, despite the fact that women are more likely to experience poverty at every stage of life.

One simple explanation? The 2016 election. The presidential race has been the most-covered story of the year—with one candidate, in particular, occupying the lion’s share of coverage. Donald Trump has received more earned media coverage than every other candidate combined in 2016. His candidacy alone is on track to earn more than double all media coverage of the economy in 2015.

And a deeper dive shows that most of the limited coverage of poverty came in the context of presidential elections. Interviews with Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders accounted for six of the nine Sunday show segments mentioning poverty.

While the data speaks to the TV news’s indifference to issues that affect low income Americans, it also proves that presidential campaigns—and the activists, operatives, and public thinkers who influence those campaigns—have an increasingly outsized ability to steer that coverage.

Another silver lining? TV news is dying. 35 percent of millennials (18- to 29-year-olds) found social media to be the most helpful new source in 2016. In contrast, just 12 percent say cable TV news was the most helpful. And at 4 percent, network news barely registers. While cable news is still the most popular source among older age groups, all trend lines point toward the growth of mobile and video content in the future.

As the TV audience shrinks, online outlets are filling the void. The list of top 50 online news outlets is littered with news organizations who eschew horse race coverage of the election in favor of substantive coverage. Not-for-profit outlets like The Marshall Project, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and this very site all take different approaches to covering issues that affect low-income Americans.

So while the current TV landscape may look bleak for Americans working in poverty, the future of news is bright.

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If You’re Low-Income, America Is Still an Oligarchy https://talkpoverty.org/2016/05/13/youre-low-income-america-still-oligarchy/ Fri, 13 May 2016 13:03:12 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=16296 The U.S. isn’t an oligarchy after all.

At least that’s the argument in a recent article by Vox’s Dylan Matthews. Matthews cites new research finding that the rich and middle class agree on about 90 percent of bills that come before the United States Congress. He adds:

That leaves only 185 bills on which the rich and the middle class disagree…

…on these 185 bills [in which the rich and middle class disagree], the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant.

Of course, that leaves out another group of Americans entirely: the poor. Admittedly, individuals cycle in and out of poverty so the notion of who is poor isn’t static. But that doesn’t change the fact that the poor are not only the least-represented group in American society, they’re also the contingent arguably most affected by federal policy decisions. So how do bills supported by low-income Americans fare? Not so well. The passage rate for bills favored only by low-income groups is 18.6 percent—slightly lower than those that lack support from all of the income groups. In fact, as the study’s authors conclude, “These results suggest that the rich and middle are effective at blocking policies that the poor want.”

What’s more, policies favored by the middle class and poor, who together comprise a majority of Americans, passed just 20.4 percent of the time, while those favored by only the rich passed 38.5 percent of the time. In other words, the rich had more success getting their policies enacted than the middle class and poor combined—which is the very definition of an oligarchy.

slevin1Underscoring how little representation low-income Americans receive at the federal level, another recent report found that Members of Congress from states with higher poverty rates were also less likely to support measures that help their low-income constituents.

Each year, the Shriver Center ranks Members of Congress from every state based on how they vote on a series of anti-poverty measures, ranging from the Child Tax Credit to Medicaid. Given that these programs earn overwhelming support from low-income voters (and most income groups), the Shriver rankings also illustrate the responsiveness of elected leaders to the concerns of low-income people.

In most cases, the divisions fall along party lines. In California, for example, every Democrat received either an A or A+, while every Republican received either a D or F. But party identification wasn’t the only predictor of a Member’s voting record. States like Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, and Arkansas all have poverty rates above 19 percent—some of the highest in the nation. Yet each of these states has a state delegation grade of D or F. In Mississippi, the state with the highest poverty rate in the country (21.5 percent), Senators Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker both received F grades.

In contrast, Connecticut and Maryland—ranked 48th and 49th in poverty levels—received A grades for their state delegation. Massachusetts, the state with the best average voting record in the country, also has one of the lowest poverty rates.

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slevin3Of course, correlation isn’t causation. The fact that states with higher poverty levels also have records that fail to reflect the preferences of many low-income voters doesn’t mean a higher poverty rate leads to undemocratic voting records. More likely, the two share some root causes. Many of the states with the highest poverty rates are located in the Deep South, a region that has historically been hostile to worker organizing and political participation by low-income people in addition to its legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

But the report sheds some critical light on the paradoxical relationship between families who live in poverty and the politicians charged with representing them. And it suggests that for the most vulnerable Americans, the U.S. is far from democratic.

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Why Support for Fighting Poverty is Already Higher Than You Think https://talkpoverty.org/2016/05/04/why-support-for-fighting-poverty-is-already-higher-than-you-think/ Wed, 04 May 2016 12:52:25 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=16135 Public support for fighting poverty is growing.

A muchpublicized poll from Harvard’s Institute of Politics last week finds that millennials increasingly favor government action to reduce poverty and expand opportunity. In fact, 47 percent of those between the ages of 18-29 agree that “basic necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that government should provide to those unable to afford them.” That’s up from 43 percent last year and 42 percent in 2014.  A similar number of millennials—45 percent—believe the government should spend more to reduce poverty.  That’s a dramatic increase from the 40 percent who shared this view in 2015, and the 35 percent who did in 2013.

But what the media missed in covering this poll is that these numbers actually understate the broad, bipartisan support for key safety net programs that help low- and moderate-income Americans.

A Vox/Morning Consult poll last month found that 60 percent of people ages 18-29 would be willing to pay additional taxes to fund “welfare benefits, such as help for women with infants or children, or nutrition programs”—significantly higher support than the Harvard findings.  A majority—51 percent—would also pay more taxes to provide additional income assistance for those living below the poverty line.

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Moreover, support for antipoverty programs is not limited to younger voters.  53 percent of Gen Xers—those between the ages of 45 and 54—support more benefit funding for women, infants or children.  And when it comes to Social Security, a majority of voters in every age group would be willing to pay additional taxes to fund the program—including 56 percent of millennials. In fact, a Pew poll this year found that 54 percent of respondents from all age groups think aiding those in poverty should be a “top priority” for Congress and the President this year.

The lesson from this data is clear: the American public overwhelmingly supports investments that expand opportunity for low- and moderate-income people, and they are even more sympathetic when asked about specific programs.  This sentiment shouldn’t come as a surprise.  From Medicaid to Pell Grants, Americans have long supported public efforts to reduce health care costs, improve education, and expand opportunity.

Now they just need their leaders to listen.

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