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

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

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A similar series of events played out in Washington, D.C., just this year, when the supposedly progressive D.C. council repealed a ballot initiative to eliminate the tipped minimum wage just four months after the voters passed it.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what’s behind the MLK50 Justice Through Journalism project, a year-long reporting project on economic justice in Memphis, which takes a hard look at the institutions that are keeping so many of the city’s residents in poverty.

I spoke with the project’s founder, editor, and publisher, Wendi Thomas.

Rebecca Vallas: Just to kick things off, tell me a little bit about the project and the story behind its founding.

Wendi Thomas: I guess its initial origins were out of a writing project I was doing at The Commercial Appeal when I was a Metro columnist there. I was covering the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, and I was thinking even then what we would do to mark the 50th anniversary. And so I’ve been ruminating on this for about ten years—what would it look like to honor the dreamer in Memphis? If you know anything about King’s legacy you know that that means you better reckon with jobs and wages, because that’s why King was in Memphis. It was for underpaid public employees who wanted higher wages and the right to a union. So many of those issues are so relevant still today that my team has had no shortage of stories to write and things to cover.

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RV: Why commemorate Dr. King’s legacy and the anniversary of his passing through journalism? And what does journalism have to do with justice?

WT: I think King spoke truth to power. A lot of the things he said were controversial, some of the parts we don’t remember: his opposition to the Vietnam war, his critique of capitalism … and I think good journalism also speaks truth to power, at least the kind of journalism that I’m interested in doing. And while there’s a notion that journalism is completely impartial and doesn’t take sides, I think there are some things we can take sides on. I think we can take sides and say that all children should have an education, right? That shouldn’t be a controversial political position.

Similarly, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that all workers should make enough to live on. If you work full time you should make enough to make your ends meet. To the extent that we can help eliminate the systems and structures that keep that from happening, that keep poor people poor, then there is a role for justice in journalism.

RV: Did you launch the project as its own separate entity because you didn’t feel that these stories were being told adequately in mainstream media?

WT: After I left the daily paper here in Memphis I did a fellowship at Harvard at the Nieman Foundation. That’s where I incubated this project and figured out exactly how it’s going to work. And I don’t think that you would find this kind of journalism in most mainstream news publications, because it is very critical of the status quo. Advertisers and readers aren’t used to having their perspectives and practices challenged. That’s all new for them. And I don’t think traditional mainstream news outlets would want to rile up their advertisers like that—they’re trying to keep them happy, which unfortunately has the side effect of reinforcing the status quo, which is to keep poor people poor.

RV: As part of this project, your team conducted a living wage survey of Memphis employers. What did you find in that survey?

WT: Yeah, so we took a look at the 25 largest area employers who collectively represent about 160,000 employees. And what we found was that most companies don’t want to say how much they pay their workers. So I talked to an economist about that—what can you conclude if a company doesn’t want to tell you how much they pay their workers, whether they pay a living wage? And the answer is they’re hiding something. If companies have good news to report, they’re glad to share that.

We were actually surprised to find that the City of Memphis government, Shelby County government, and Shelby County schools all do pay their workers fairly well. I mean we’re not talking $20 an hour—but we’re talking 85 percent more than $15 an hour. And the Shelby County schools have recently made a commitment to pay its workers $15 an hour, so that’s a good thing. But when you get into other employers, say private employers like FedEx, which is headquartered here and employs 30,000 people—FedEx doesn’t want to say. They answered some of our questions, but when pressed for more information about benefits and whether they use temp workers or outsource work, they sent us a statement about how much money they give to charity events. And charity isn’t justice.

RV: A lot of the stories in this project are focused on Memphis in particular, and they really put a face on the fight for a living wage. I’d love if you would tell some of the stories that your reporters have been telling through this project.

WT: Let’s see, gosh, where would I start? We’ve written a series of stories about companies that pay their workers enough to live on—unfortunately it’s not a long list of companies and they tend to be really small, maybe nonprofits or family-owned businesses—to show that it is possible, you can have these discussions within your organization. We ran a story about a woman who works at a company that she started making $15 an hour, and now she’s able to afford a home. And so these wages aren’t just so you can get your hair done or your nails done, it’s so you can have some kind of stability for you and for your family. So those stories are always fun to tell.

We did a story about hotel housekeepers, and what it’s like to work as one where you’re having to do more work with less. One of the hotel housekeepers told us that she has to bring her own cleaning supplies because they don’t supply her with those.

We even have some stories on the site in the last couple of days about how this anniversary commemoration is really not for the people who live right around the Civil Rights Museum. So if you just walk a block over from the museum, Lorraine Motel where King was killed, you walk just a block over and it’s just abject poverty, and people who feel like this commemoration is not for them. The signature event tonight is going to be $100-a-plate gala. You’d have to work 14 hours if you make minimum wage to afford a ticket. And so there’s this tension between honoring this man who came here about labor and then also respecting the labor that’s still here today.

RV: How do you think that Dr. King would want us to be commemorating his legacy and the anniversary of his passing 50 years later?

WT: Yeah, I don’t think he would give two whits about, what would be the nice way of saying it. I don’t think he would care about these galas and these celebrations and these big shindigs with lots of people pontificating. I would like to think he’d be out here in the streets with the protestors and the activists. We have about 8 protesters that were outside the jail yesterday that got arrested, dragged on the street by police, cuffed in plastic zip ties. I like to think he would be with them today were he alive. I think he would be disappointed to know that Memphis is the fourth largest metropolitan area in the nation and 52 percent of the black children here live below the poverty line. But that’s what we’ve got. And the question we need to answer is the question posed by King’s last book, which is, where do we go from here?

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on April 5. It was edited for length and clarity.

The order, titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility,” carries little weight by itself. It directs a broad range of federal agencies to review programs serving low-income people and make recommendations on how they can make the programs harder to access, all under the guise of “welfare reform.”

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The order’s main purpose appears to be smearing popular programs in an effort to make them easier to slash—in part by redefining “welfare” to encompass nearly every program that helps families get by. To that end, the order reads as follows:

The terms “welfare” and “public assistance” include any program that provides means-tested assistance, or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households, or families that have low incomes (i.e., those making less than twice the Federal poverty level), the unemployed, or those out of the labor force.

Redefining everything from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) to Medicaid to Unemployment Insurance to child care assistance as “welfare” has long been part of conservatives’ playbook, as my colleague Shawn Fremstad has pointed out. The term has a deeply racially charged history in the United States, evoking decades of racial stereotypes about poverty and the people who experience it. By using dog-whistle terms like welfare, Trump is erecting a smokescreen in the shape of President Reagan’s myth of the “welfare queen”—so we don’t notice that he’s coming after the entire working and middle class.

The fact is, we don’t have welfare in America anymore. What’s left of America’s tattered safety net is meager at best, and—contrary to the claim in Trump’s executive order that it leads to “government dependence”—it’s light-years away from enough to live on.

Take the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP provides an average of just $1.40 per person per meal. Most families run out of SNAP by the third week of the month because it’s so far from enough to feed a family on.

Then there’s housing assistance, which reaches just 1 in 5 eligible low-income families. Those left without help can spend up to 80 percent of their income on rent and utilities each month, while they remain on decades-long waitlists for assistance.

And then there’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996 when Congress famously “[ended] welfare as we know it.” Fewer than 1 in 4 poor families with kids get help from TANF today—down from 80 percent in 1996. In fact, in several states, kids are more likely to be placed in foster care than receive help from TANF.

Families who do receive TANF are lucky if the benefits even bring them halfway to the austere federal poverty line. For example, a Tennessee family of 3 can only receive a maximum of $185 per month, or a little over $6 a day.

Yet TANF is the program Trump is holding up as a model—hailing 1996 “welfare reform” as a wild success—despite the fact that TANF has proven an abject failure both in terms of protecting struggling families from hardship and in helping them get ahead.

In particular, this executive order directs agencies to ramp up so-called “work requirements”—harsh time limits on assistance for certain unemployed and underemployed workers—which were at the heart of the law that created TANF. But decades of research since TANF was enacted show that work requirements do not help anyone work.

Make no mistake: Pushing for “work requirements” is at the core of the conservative strategy to reinforce myths about poverty in America. That “the poor” are some stagnant group of people who “just don’t want to work.” That anyone who wants a well-paying job can snap her fingers to make one appear. And that having a job is all it takes to not be poor.

But in reality, millions of Americans are working two, even three jobs to make ends meet and provide for their families. Half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have even $400 in the bank. And nearly all of us—70 percent—will turn to some form of means-tested assistance, like Medicaid or SNAP, at some point in our lives.

Trump claims his executive order is intended to eliminate “poverty traps.” But if he knew anything about poverty—aside from what he’s learned on Fox News—he’d know the real poverty trap is the minimum wage, which has stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour for nearly a decade. That’s well below the poverty line for a family of two—and not nearly enough to live on. There isn’t a single state in the country in which a minimum-wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at market rate. Many low-wage workers are forced to turn to programs like Medicaid and SNAP to make ends meet, because wages aren’t enough.

If Trump were really trying to promote “self-sufficiency”—a concept he clearly doesn’t think applies to the millionaires and billionaires to whom he just gave massive tax cuts—he’d be all over raising the minimum wage. In fact, raising the minimum wage just to $12 would save $53 billion in SNAP alone over a decade, as more low-wage workers would suddenly earn enough to feed their families without nutrition assistance.

Yet there’s no mention of the minimum wage anywhere in Trump’s order to “promote opportunity and economic mobility.”

Which brings us back to the real purpose of this executive order: divide and conquer.

Trump and his colleagues in Congress learned the hard way last year how popular Medicaid is when they tried to cut it as part of their quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And it’s not just Medicaid that Americans don’t want to see cut. Americans overwhelmingly oppose cuts to SNAP, housing assistance, Social Security disability benefits, home heating assistance, and a whole slew of programs that help families get by—particularly if these cuts are to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. What’s more, as polling by the Center for American Progress shows, Americans are less likely to vote for a candidate who backs cuts.

By contrast, vast majorities of Americans across party lines want to see their policymakers raise the minimum wage; ensure affordable, high-quality child care; and even enact a job guarantee to ensure everyone who is able and wants to work can find a job with decent wages. These sentiments extend far beyond the Democratic base to include majorities of Independents, Republicans, and even Trump’s own voters.

That’s why rebranding these programs as welfare is so important to Trump’s agenda. Rather than heed the wishes of the American people, Trump’s plan is—yet again—to tap into racial animus and ugly myths about aid programs in order to pit struggling workers against one other. That way, he can hide his continued betrayal of the “forgotten men and women” for whom he famously pledged to fight.

Now, in a groundbreaking new study by a team of researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and the Census Bureau, he’s changing the conversation yet again. This latest study finds that even when children grow up next to each other with parents who earn similar incomes, black boys fare worse than white boys in 99 percent of the country. And, perhaps even more staggering, those gaps only worsen in neighborhoods with low poverty rates and good schools.

I spoke with Chetty to unpack this new study and what it means for our understanding of racial inequality in America.

Rebecca Vallas: So the racial income and wealth gap has long been documented, but your study sheds new light on what’s driving income inequality across racial groups. What did you find with your colleagues?

Raj Chetty: What’s new about the study is that it takes a perspective across generations. So most prior work on racial inequality in the United States has looked at people with a snapshot at a point in time—comparing adults who were, let’s say, 40 years old who were black versus white versus Hispanic and looking at how their incomes and other outcomes differ. But what we do here is use data that span across generations where we can link kids to their parents. And in this case we’re able to use anonymized data covering about 20 million kids and their parents and look at how these disparities evolve across generations.

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The key finding that emerges from this analysis is that there are very large differences by race, especially when it comes to kids’ chance of climbing and staying at the top of the income ladder. Most strikingly, even among kids who grow up in high-income families, if you’re black, you have a much lower chance of remaining in the next generation at the top of the income distribution or even in the middle of the income distribution than if you’re white. Black kids have almost an equal chance of ending up at the bottom as they do of staying at the top if they start out in a high-income family.

The reason that’s so important is that it tells us these disparities are not just arising from something that’s happening today. Trying to climb the income ladder for black Americans is almost like you’re on a treadmill. You climb up in one generation only then to fall behind again and have to climb up once more, and it’s that feature, that cycle that has to be broken to combat these disparities in the long run.

RV: Your study also found that racial inequality can’t be explained by differences in cognitive ability, which maybe sounds common sense to a lot of folks listening, but is actually pretty important as an empirical finding considering a lot of the narratives that still persist out there about what explains poverty in America.

RC: That’s right. We really don’t think differences in ability explain the gaps that we’re documenting, and there are two simple reasons for that. The first is the pattern that I just described of downward mobility across generations. It’s really only there for black boys. Black women do just about as well as white women once you control for their parental income. And that suggests first of all, if you look at most prior theories of differences in cognitive ability, The Bell Curve book for example, it does not present evidence that you’d expect these differences to vary by gender. Furthermore, if you look at test score data, which is the basis for most prior theories about differences in ability, the fact that black kids when they’re in school tend to score lower on standardized tests than white kids, that actually is true for both black boys and for black girls to the same extent. In contrast when you look at earnings there are dramatic gender differences.

And so that suggests that these tests are actually not really capturing in a very accurate way differences in ability as they matter for long-term outcomes, which casts doubt on that whole body of evidence. So, based on that type of reasoning, we really think this is not about differences in ability. One final piece of evidence that echoes that is if you look at kids who move to different areas, areas where we see better outcomes for black kids, you see that they do much better themselves, which again demonstrates that environment seems to be important. This is not about immutable factors like differences in ability.

RV: You mentioned gender differences. One of the most interesting pieces of the study—to me in particular—was that when it comes to women, it seems to be a very different story.

RC: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think we were quite surprised by that. So there is earlier evidence showing that gaps in wages, for example, are smaller for women between black and white relative to black and white men. What we were struck by is if you just control for parental income so you look at two children, say growing up in a family making $50,000 a year, if you look at their daughters they have essentially the same outcomes in terms of earning, wage rates, employment rates, their chance of going to college. Lots of different outcomes you can look at.

If you look at boys, it’s a completely different picture. If you compare black boys to white boys you see enormous gaps in earnings and employment rates, perhaps most starkly in the context of incarceration. One in five black men born to a low-income family is incarcerated on a given day, which is just an astonishingly high rate. You don’t see anything like that for both black and white women.

Now, one thing I want to emphasize here is that in some of the public discussion following the paper, people have been a little bit surprised. “Are you saying there is no issue here for women? That doesn’t really sound right.” I want to emphasize that that is not what we’re saying. First of all, if you just look in the raw data, there is still a significant difference in the earnings of black women and white women, and the reason for that is black women still grow up in much lower-income families than white women. So it’s only once you control for parental income that their outcomes look much more similar. The second important point to note is that black women, white women, and black men all have relatively similar levels of earnings, that it’s really white men who have considerably higher levels of earnings. The reason we focus on black men is when we look at certain outcomes like the probability that they have a job or their odds of being incarcerated or their chances of completing high school, they do look like an outlier relative to all the other groups. Black men are significantly less likely to be employed than black women, they are significantly more likely to be incarcerated, they’re significantly less likely to complete high school. And so it does seem like there are a special set of challenges confronting black men. That’s not to say that there’s no issue for black women or that gender equity is not an issue, that’s just not the focus of this study.

RV: The gaps that you found in your research only worsen in neighborhoods with low poverty rates and good schools. Why is that?

RC: Both black kids and white kids do much better in places that have better schools, that have low poverty rates, that you might think of intuitively as “good neighborhoods.” So we’re not challenging that intuition at all. However, what you see in the data is that white kids gain more from being in these lower-poverty areas and from attending better schools than black kids do. And as a result the gaps between white kids and black kids are larger in those areas. So the takeaway from that is not that schools are not important or that having lower-poverty, lower-crime areas are not important; all of those things would help black kids and white kids as we’ve shown in our prior work.

What this study is showing is it is not adequate by itself to close black-white disparities. You need to do more than that. You need to perhaps integrate black kids into these better schools so that they can take advantages of the resources they offer to the same extent that white kids do.

To put it differently, thinking about socioeconomic class and neighborhood is not a substitute for thinking about race. We need to think about how to narrow racial disparities separately.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on March 23. It was edited for length and clarity.

The state’s Republican leaders appear to have no qualms about taking health insurance away from Tennesseans who can’t find work or get enough hours at their job—even though taking away someone’s health insurance isn’t going to help them find work any faster, and can actually make it harder to find and keep a job. Instead, debate around the legislation has reportedly centered on how to pay for the new policy. Lawmakers’ own estimates put the price tag for enforcing the new work rules at $10,000 per person disenrolled from Medicaid—which advocates note could be more than the new policy saves.

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This is where Tennessee’s proposal gets really evil. Unwilling to foot the bill for their new policy out of the state’s general budget, Republican lawmakers have decided to pay for it with funds from the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program—which provides meager cash assistance to very poor families with children.

While news reports, such as the Nashville Public Radio story noted above, make it sound as though Tennessee’s TANF program is flush with unused cash due to a “booming economy and historically low unemployment,” the real story is much more dire.

Nearly one-quarter of Tennessee children live below the federal poverty line, making it one of the worst states in the nation when it comes to child poverty. But fewer than 1 in 4 poor Tennessee families with children get help from the state’s TANF program, which is one of the stingiest in the country. A Tennessee family of three lucky enough to get temporary assistance can expect to receive a maximum of $185 per month—or a little over $6 a day.

Why is Tennessee failing so horrifically to help so many of its poorest children? In part, this failure is the legacy of 1996 “welfare reform,” which converted the nation’s main source of assistance for poor families—then called Aid to Families with Dependent Children—into TANF, a flat-funded block grant with very little accountability for how the money is spent.

Many states use TANF as a slush fund to close budget gaps, with just 1 in every 4 TANF dollars going to cash assistance for struggling families with kids. But Tennessee has made an Olympic sport out of diverting TANF funds away from poor families in need of help, squirreling away more than $400 million in unspent funds in recent years rather than using the money to help struggling families with kids avoid hunger and homelessness.

Now the state’s lawmakers want to use those unspent funds to bankroll the disenrollment of thousands of struggling Tennesseans from Medicaid.

The bill is expected to clear Tennessee’s conservative Senate in the coming days and has the support of Gov. Bill Haslam (R), who is expected to sign it into law. If passed, both the state’s proposed work rules and their proposed pay-for will require the approval of federal health officials. If the state’s scheme gets a thumbs up from the Trump administration, other states will likely follow suit. Kentucky, Indiana, and Arkansas have all received permission from the Trump administration to enact work requirements for Medicaid, following Trump’s widely criticized invitation to states earlier this year, and more than a dozen states are actively seeking similar approval. Many—if not all—of these states are looking for ways to pay for the costly bureaucracy required to implement this type of policy.

One would be hard-pressed to cook up a more twisted irony than taking money intended to help poor families with children avoid hunger and hardship and using it instead to take health insurance away from, in some cases, the very same struggling workers and families. But there’s a deeper rot at the core of Tennessee’s plan that cuts across conservative proposals to slash not just health care but food assistance, housing, and more—both in Congress and in the states. And that’s an ideology-fueled willingness to spend whatever it takes to take aid away from struggling workers and families—even when bureaucratic disentitlement costs more than it saves.

Currently, immigration officials can only consider the use of cash assistance, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—a program that serves very few people—in determining whether someone is likely to become a “public charge.” But under Trump’s new rules, immigrants could be barred from legal status for turning to a whole range of public programs that millions of families rely on, including Head Start, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), nutrition assistance for Women Infants and Children (WIC), housing assistance, home heating assistance—even the Children’s Health Insurance Program and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.

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To understand what this new policy will mean for immigrant families if it goes into effect, I spoke with Shawn Fremstad, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Hidetaka Hirota, professor of history at the City College of New York and author of Expelling the Poor, which examines the United States’ long history of keeping out immigrants who come from poverty.

Rebecca Vallas: What is the Trump administration considering in this moment, and what do we know about the rules they’re working on from the leaks?

Shawn Fremstad: So, as we all know, this is not a very pro-immigrant administration. Just this week they’ve taken out the “nation of immigrants” language from the actual motto of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), what used to be known as the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service]. But now we know the administration is doing a stealth campaign using this longstanding “public charge” provision in immigration law. It’s a way to undermine the family-based immigration system we have and target working-class immigrants from low-income countries, from Mexico, from countries that Trump called “shithole countries.”

RV: I was going to say it if you didn’t.

SF: At its core, it’s about keeping out poor immigrants. This is a rewriting of a longstanding rule. What it meant historically is that you’re a “public charge” if you’re basically going to become completely dependent on welfare-cash type benefits, or institutionalized for long-term care with Medicaid. So it’s really someone who is not working, not able to work, and doesn’t have anybody else supporting them and they’re primarily dependent on benefits. So it’s a very limited thing.

But what the administration is saying is that it’s no longer going to be about whether you’re primarily dependent and not working; it’s are you going to be low-income? Are you going to be below median income? What they say is they’ll weigh it heavily in your favor if you have 250 percent of the poverty line as an income, which is basically around median earnings for a white male worker in the United States.

They also have a long list of benefits that if you’re likely to access them after being admitted to the United States as a green card, as a lawful immigrant, those are the kind of things that will be held against you. This is quite radical. It includes things like the Premium Tax Credit that was part of the ACA, which goes up to 400 percent of poverty. For many families that’s a middle-class benefit. That would not be something that “makes you a public charge.” You could be working full time, making a good salary, and the only issue is you’re not getting health care from an employer, so you need to access this.

They also include things like Head Start, Pell grants—it’s an extraordinary list.

RV: Even the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

SF: Yes. It’s a long list of programs that legal immigrants are often eligible for in the United States.

RV: Help us understand how this is actually going to look in practice.

SF: This public charge test comes up in two broad scenarios. One is you’re a family member here in the United States, you want to bring over a family member and get a family-based visa for them. They are subject to this public charge test so they have to meet that before they can get the visa. So if that person looks like somebody who might get any of these benefits, then the public charge test could be used to exclude them.

The other situation is there are a lot of people in the United States—some undocumented, some under different lawful statuses—who have children in the household who are U.S. citizens, and the child is getting Medicaid because they’re eligible as U.S. citizens. The child is getting SNAP or WIC. Now the test can be applied to the parents simply because they got food stamps or Medicaid or other benefits for that child. So there’s a potential to keep people out who haven’t come to the United States and to penalize people who are here now. It’ll make people much less likely to turn to programs that could help their child’s healthy development, education, et. cetera.

RV: Professor Hirota, effectively barring entry to immigrants who come from poor or low- income backgrounds is something that you’ve called “poverty-based immigration control.” Tell us about the history of this public charge provision that Shawn’s been describing and how it fits into the country’s broader history of keeping out immigrants for economic reasons.

Hidetaka Hirota: The public charge clause has a really long history in the United States, with origins in the colonial period. British settlers essentially brought their mother country’s poor law, which banished the “transient beggar”—that is, the poor people who did not belong to the community beyond the boundary of the community. This kind of poor law was eventually inherited by states after the American Revolution, and when a large number of impoverished Irish immigrants arrived in the US over the first half of the 19th century, these laws eventually developed into immigration laws. So America’s first immigration law really originated from poor law, and the primary purpose of the law was the deportation back to Europe of the destitute Irish immigrants already in the US.

In the late 19th century these poor laws developed into the nation’s first national immigration law—the Immigration Act of 1882. This law, along with the Chinese exclusion law of 1882, laid the foundation for subsequent national immigration law. And the anti-poverty clause, or likely to become “public charge” laws, remained in national immigration laws. So anti-poverty sentiment was really deeply integrated into the American system of selecting immigrants and this has a longer history than we think.

SF: In different nativist periods this has been interpreted in different ways to target different communities. So in the 1930s refugees from Nazi Germany became targeted. In some periods it’s been so-called “degenerates,” denying people based on sexual orientation. Nobody says public charge in real language today. It’s an archaic, ancient term and it gets filled with whatever the animus is today.

HH: I would add that a central feature of this “likely to become public charge” law is massive discretionary power of the inspecting officer. They have tremendous power to determine who could be enter and who should be expelled thanks to this vague clause.

In the mid 19^th century, when there were Anglo-American officers, Irish people suffered disproportionately because of this clause compared to other immigrant groups like Germans. And in the early 20th century, Asian immigrants like Japanese and South Asians were targeted for this clause. There were middle class Japanese immigrants with some cash, and they did not appear likely to become a “public charge” from an economic point of view. But the officers excluded them as potential paupers on the grounds that in America, racism was too strong, so these immigrants wouldn’t gain employment. Despite the possession of potential cash and middle-class appearance, they were deemed likely to become public charge.

The whole clause can operate with very strong racist dimensions, and this also applies to the Trump administration’s proposed new rule. The new rule would not apply to immigrants equally. The officers could have very strong discretionary power in deciding whose visas can be renewable by simply manipulating this “likely to become public charge” rule.

RV: Shawn, how do we expect this to move forward in the weeks ahead and how should folks get involved if they want to try to stop this from becoming the policy of the land?

SF: Right now it’s still in a draft form but we think it will get published in what’s called the Federal Register as a proposed rule probably in the next 30 to 60 days. And this will be an opportunity to formerly comment and an important point to really lift this up and focus. I think it’s been very under the radar so far because it isn’t out there officially and there’s so much else going on right now.

RV: And we’re seeing chilling effects playing out in communities across this country with immigrant families, actually going into social services office and saying stop my food stamps, stop my kid’s Headstart, because I’m afraid this is exposing my family to danger and perhaps the risk of being split up.

SF: I think at this point people should not panic, one important thing to know is that the draft version of the rule says it will be prospective so it’s looking forward; if you had received these benefits in the past we’re not going to count that. So making sure you’re in touch with immigrant advocacy organizations who can tell you more about this is important.

RV: As the National Immigration Law Center has put it, and I think these are probably the right words to end on with a heavy and truly demoralizing topic: if this policy goes into effect, “no longer would we be the country that serves as a beacon for the world’s dreamers and strivers. Instead America’s doors would be open only the highest bidder.”

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on February 23. It was edited for length and clarity.

As Emily Badger and Margot Sanger-Katz write in The New York Times’ Upshot, “Across centuries of use, [the term] has consistently implied another negative: The able-bodied could work, but are not working (or working hard enough). And, as such, they don’t deserve our aid.”

I spoke with Badger to unpack the 400-year history of the term able-bodied.

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Rebecca Vallas: Emily, I have to admit I nerded out hard reading this piece—a 400-year history of the term that is centrally housed in every debate around the deserving versus the undeserving poor, something we’re very much living through in this political moment—just how very cool that you did this. Help tell that story, where does it go back to 400 years ago?

Emily Badger: The genesis for this piece is that my colleague Margot and I realized that we had this mutual suspicion of the term “able-bodied.” People constantly use it in conversation with us in Washington and in policy circles and the think tank world. But we both felt like we shouldn’t use this term ourselves as journalists, at least not without quotation marks around it, because it’s loaded, it carries a lot of connotations that people don’t explicitly express. And in Washington, it’s quite common that we fight about politics through rhetoric.

So Margot and I asked, what is the story behind the term? Where did it come from? How have we come to use it? What do people really mean when they use it?

We started reaching out to historians, and other people who are familiar with the backstory of the Medicaid program. Over and over again people told us that we need to learn about English poor law dating to 1601. It turns out that this set of laws—which are really the foundation of social policy in the United States—included the phrase “able-bodied.” They include from the very beginning this distinction between the impotent poor, meaning people who are powerless to help themselves, and the able-bodied poor. And the idea that we should provide resources and aid to the impotent poor but we shouldn’t freely give stuff away to the “able-bodied”—maybe what we should do is set them up at workhouses, try to connect them to work opportunities. But very early on there was this distinction between people who we thought should be working, and people who couldn’t work for a reason.

RV: The first distinction between the deserving and the undeserving.

EB: Exactly, and the idea that some people are worthy and some people are not gets expressed now in a lot of different ways. We talk about people who are lazy versus people who are industrious, or people who are able-bodied versus people who are crippled or disabled. Whatever language we use, there’s always this idea that one group unquestionably should be given help without judgment and the other group is probably trying to freeload off of the public. As one historian pointed out to me, that’s part of the reason we have these really expensive government bureaucracies in the United States around anti-poverty programs—we construct these elaborate bureaucracies to try to separate these two groups of people.

When we require people to qualify or submit new paperwork multiple times a year, or when we’re talking about work requirements, or when we require people to show that they’re in a job training program or that they’re actively looking for work even if they don’t have work available … all of that is part of this expensive process of trying to identify who is deserving and who is not.

RV: And one of the points that your piece makes is that “able-bodied” isn’t just an inherently political term—it’s also a heavily moral term, and that’s a large part of why politicians and elected officials are using it.

EB: Yeah, one of the historians put it really perfectly—he said that the physical distinction always implies a moral distinction. And even though this dates back to Elizabethan England, this idea is very American, too: that work is moral, if you are a good person you are working hard. If you are not working hard, that’s a result of some kind of moral failing on your part. That’s a very old puritanical idea but obviously it’s one that carries through to debates that we’re having in 2018 about programs like Medicaid.

RV: Today we’re familiar with the vast and expensive government bureaucracies you were describing that create hurdles for getting assistance—how did it work back in the 17th century?

EB: So the 1601 poor law in England codified what a lot of communities were already doing. It basically said we’re going to collect taxes from people and then redistribute them to support and help the poor. It placed the onus on people in individual communities, like parish wardens and overseers of the poor, to be responsible for collecting and redistributing that money. So there were people living in the community who knew, for instance, that David over here has tuberculosis and he can’t support his family and he’s got 8 children and they’re all dependent on him and obviously the mother can’t work because she’s also trying to take care of the children. It’s quite clear to the parish warden that David and his family are worthy.

Translating this idea over the years, we’ve erected these larger and more centralized government programs. Someone who is sitting in a Medicaid office in Kentucky doesn’t personally know you and your story to be able to say if they think you are clearly worthy or not. So these same distinctions are made through these other very complex processes: Can you show us a doctor’s note that explains why you aren’t capable of meeting a work requirement that we’ve imposed on you? Or some other qualification criteria. Essentially these bureaucracies are trying to do what the parish warden was trying to do 400 years ago.

RV: I was fascinated to read in your piece that apparently at some point the English came to recognize not just the able-bodied versus those who were not able-bodied, but a third group of people: the able-bodied who were blocked from work for reasons that weren’t about their bodies.

EB: Yeah, I think once you start separating the poor into two groups of people and make these distinctions, it will become clear that there are people out there who appear to be physically capable of work but they’re not working, and it doesn’t seem like they’re lazy, so there must be other things that are preventing them from working. Maybe the economy is really bad, or there aren’t enough jobs in the local community. Maybe this person isn’t very mobile and so they can’t travel to where the jobs exist.

If you deploy any thoughtfulness you recognize that there are plenty of people who don’t work for reasons that don’t have to do with their body. There are barriers to employment that are in the community, in the structure of the economy, embedded in discrimination in the labor market. And this process of setting everyone who is poor into one of these two categories becomes murkier once you realize that the world is more complicated than that.

But what was so striking to us about this history is that the language they were using to debate this, 300, 400 years ago, is identical to how we talk about the poor today. Not only are we still talking about the able-bodied and the deserving, but we’re still having arguments today about why aren’t “able-bodied” people working? Is it their own fault or is it because there are structural obstacles? And just as was the case 300 years ago, I think today we often have a hard time distinguishing between personal failings and structural obstacles. People still wind up frequently conflating structural issues with some kind of moral deficiency on the part of people, which is fundamentally unfair.

RV: One of the bureaucratic hurdles that has been set up over the years to make it harder for struggling folks to access basic assistance is drug tests. I was fascinated to learn from your reporting that modern-day drug tests actually have origins in the 18th century.

EB: Yeah, this is one of the particular moments in reporting this where everything came together for me and I realized how much we are having the same conversation today that we were having 400 years ago. One of the historians, Susannah Ottaway, told me that back in Elizabethan England, they started to set up these rules to try to distinguish who is worthy, and who is not. Things like, if anyone in the community has seen you getting drunk in the local alehouse we know that you are not worthy.

RV: Here was the rule, quote: “Nobody who tipples in the alehouse will get poor relief.” That was the 18th century drug test, right?

EB: Exactly. So if you can’t figure how to distinguish who is worthy from who is not then you set up rules that effectively force the poor to reveal themselves. This rule was about people who are drunk. Today we would set up a rule about drug-testing which is basically a hoop that we make the poor go through in order to reveal themselves as being someone who we ought give assistance to. And this is so similar to what you often hear in Washington today, when we talk about creating more onerous eligibility criteria. If you really need aid, you’re going to be willing to come in to the local bureaucratic office and fill out new paperwork every month, or you’re going to be more than happy to take this job training program as a condition of receiving aid, because if you really need it you will do anything to get it. And that’s the exact same idea that you could reveal yourself to be someone who desperately wants this by your willingness to overcome all the obstacles we’re putting between you and the aid.

And of course it ignores the fact that people may have a difficult time meeting all of those requirements for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their willingness or their desire. Maybe you don’t have a car and it’s not practical for you to get to this meeting every month, maybe your housing situation is really unstable and you don’t receive bureaucratic mailings that are sent to you twice a year reminding you to sign up for things.

RV: Now the Medicaid program itself is actually in many ways a historical tracker of the evolution of this kind of thinking. Medicaid began in 1965, with, as you put it, “Elizabethan notions in tact,” but over time has evolved to something that looks very different. Tell us a little bit of that story of the evolution of Medicaid.

EB: The Medicaid program originally recognized these very familiar classes of the “deserving” poor. If you are a pregnant woman, if you are blind, if you are physically disabled, these are classic categories that everyone has agreed to going back a long time, these are people who are worthy of help. And over time the Medicaid program has extended help to people beyond those core groups that would be familiar even in Elizabethan times. It’s extended to women who had certain kinds of cervical or breast cancer, it was extended to more parents, it basically became more expansive and more generous over time. And that kind of culminates in the Affordable Care Act when we’re finally saying it doesn’t matter if you’re a parent, if you have dependents, if you have some kind of physical condition that prevents you from working, whatever you are, if you make below a certain income, you qualify. We’re going to get rid of all of these other distinctions about who qualifies and who doesn’t and set an income cut-off.

That’s what the Affordable Care Act tried to do with the Medicaid expansion, which ultimately a lot of states declined to participate in. But that story, that evolution, marks a kind of progress from this history that we’ve been talking about. But what’s so notable about these new work requirements that are coming through Medicaid waivers from the Trump administration is that we’re now moving backwards. We’re rolling back that long-term story of expanding to more and more people. I think the term able-bodied has particularly come into fashion in the last five years or so because it has been used specifically to refer to the Medicaid expansion population.

But conservatives in particular who are concerned about all of the “able-bodied” are saying wait a minute let’s scale it back, let’s go back to trying to make some distinctions between who is able-bodied and who is not. But of course as we were talking about before, once you start saying that you want to make these distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving, then you realize wait, we have to carve out an exception for these people and for these people and for these people, and that exercise of carving out all these exceptions reveals the underlying folly of trying to make these distinctions in the first place.

RV: So given this history lesson, what’s your takeaway in terms of what we are seeing today?

EB: The main thing that Margot and I really wanted to get across in writing about this is that this is not a neutral term. It doesn’t have a technical definition. It’s being used in a slippery way to imply lots of unspoken things. And so just stop and take pause when you hear it. I think Margot and I are sort of secretly hoping that other journalists will realize that they should not just repeat this language when it comes out of politicians’ mouths. I would stick it in quotes if I had to use it in a story. We’re always going to fight about our politics through rhetoric in Washington. That’s not going to change. But at the very least let’s all be honest about what’s happening with this term.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on February 9. It was edited for length and clarity.

I discussed what happened and what this policy is all about with Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor under President Obama.

Rebecca Vallas: Heidi, what is this policy that the Trump administration is advancing and what are they hiding?

Heidi Shierholz: In December, the Trump administration released a proposed rule to try to make it legal for employers to take workers’ tips. There were regulations on the books from 2011—it was a long-standing practice at DOL that tips cannot be taken by employers. But the Trump administration is trying to rescind those regulations, and it’s really bad for workers.

But now the Department of Labor is bending over backwards to try to make it seem like it’s not terrible for workers. For instance, they talk about how theoretically employers who take tips could share some of those tips with the back of the house workers or other untipped workers. But there is nothing in this rule that says they are required to do so. So, what’s going to happen is employers will end up just pocketing a lot of those tips themselves.

The controversy that broke is that the DOL claimed that they could not do a quantitative analysis of how much in wages and tips would be transferred from workers to employers as a result of this rule. But what was revealed today is that that was all untrue. They actually did the analysis, and it showed billions of dollars being transferred from workers to employers. They actually took it to the Secretary of Labor who said something to the effect of, “Okay, we can’t publish something that shows this because this will make us look terrible. Take this back to the drawing board and see if you can bring me back smaller numbers.” They did that, but they never got it down as small as was comfortable for Secretary Acosta, so they just got approval from the White House to remove the analysis entirely. So this proposal was released without any quantitative economic analysis about the impact the proposed rule would have on workers, even though they are legally required to quantify the economic impact to the extent possible.

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RV: So not only did they try to figure out a methodology to get a number they were comfortable with—in terms of how much employers were going to end up pocketing in the way of workers’ tips and wages—but they decided because they couldn’t get the number down they were just going to pretend they’d never done it at all? Is that what we’ve learned?

HS: Yes, that’s what we’ve learned. They said in their proposal that they were—quote—“unable to quantify how customers would respond to the proposed regulatory change” and that the department “currently lacks the data to quantify possible reallocation of tips.” So they just said in a bunch of different ways, “We can’t do this.” But we know they did do it. The numbers looked bad for them, so they buried it. This is real malpractice. The public deserves to have those numbers. They make the department look like it is not living up to its mission of actually protecting workers—in fact, it’s just going to transfer a whole bunch of money from workers to employers and they wanted to hide that fact.

RV: When they went to crunch the numbers on this policy it looks like they found something similar to what you guys at the Economic Policy Institute had already been telling people for a while. You did some analysis finding that if this rule goes into effect, workers will lose billions in lost tips and wages.

HS: So we don’t know exactly what the DOL estimate was. We know it’s in the billions but no one knows the actual number. I worked at the Department of Labor. I worked on many, many analyses like this. I have full confidence that the analysis that we did at EPI likely used the same data that DOL used for their analysis. And when we did it we came up with an estimate that $5.8 billion would be shifted from workers to employers as a result of the rule and that nearly 80% of that, or $4.6 billion, would be taken from the pockets for women who work for tips, and that’s primarily because women are much more likely to work in tipped jobs.

RV: It’s not just tipped workers who are actually at risk of being hurt here, correct?

HS: One of the interesting things that’s the backdrop to this is that the DOL has been trying to sell this rule as something that will make restaurants more egalitarian, because now we’ll have this sharing between better-paid tipped workers and lower-paid back of the house workers like dishwashers and cooks. But it is very unlikely that they will do that. The rule does not require them to do it. They would be no more likely to share tips with back of the house workers than they would be to make any other choice about what to do with that shiny new revenue stream, which is what being able to confiscate tips would mean to them. They could increase executive pay. They could make capital improvements to their establishment. They could just line their own pockets. Under basic economic logic, those back of the house workers are not going to get more pay.

RV: This is hardly the first time that the Trump administration has been caught either lying or hiding evidence about the policies they’re looking to advance or the Obama-era policies they’re looking to roll back. You mentioned that because there are very specific rules governing how rule-making is supposed to happen in this country—rules that it appears that the Trump administration has clearly broken here by withholding and lying about evidence in their possession about this rule during a [public] comment period—can you explain a little bit about how that works?

HS: In this particular case, they are simply required as part of the rule-making process to quantify to the extent possible the economic impact so that the public has that information in hand in order to comment on the purposed rule.

The rule-making process in general is really basic in some sense: The agency puts out a proposed rule, anyone can comment on it. The public, advocates, business groups, anyone has the right to tell that agency what they think about their rule. The agency is actually required to read [the comments] and to take them into account as they’re crafting their final rule. So it’s absolutely crucial the public is given all the information so it can understand the impact of the rule and comment on it.

DOL claimed it wasn’t possible for them to do this quantification. But we produced an estimate in less than two weeks. It wasn’t rocket science. And now we know that they did do an analysis, buried it, and then claimed that they couldn’t do it.

Given all that has happened, they need to withdraw this rule, re-do the economic analysis, and let the public comment with all the information at hand.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on February 2. It was edited for length and clarity.

I sat down with Rebecca Cokley, a senior fellow for disability policy at the Center for American Progress, to discuss this.

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Rebecca Vallas: So I’ve had conversations with a lot of folks who say “Why does it matter? People can use all kinds of language but isn’t this just about people being a little too PC?”

Rebecca Cokley: I’m going to read a quote from Leslie Templeton from the Women’s March Disability Caucus. She just posted a series of snapshots of news clips talking about the mental status of Trump. She said, “When you read stuff like this, having said issue yourself, it makes you feel small. It makes you feel inferior, it makes you feel weak. Not only do I feel like my rights are being attacked by Trump, I feel who I am is being attacked by the American people.”

These are people’s lives. The accusation of someone’s unfitness to serve in any sort of role—whether as a parent, a colleague, a boss, an educator—is impacted by the slightest accusation, especially around mental health. It’s not about someone being PC or not, it’s really about a lack of understanding of the impact of labeling someone without irrefutable proof.

RV: So there’s a connection being made between his negative behaviors and his unpopular policies that people are explaining by this labeling. You’re saying that by extension people who themselves have mental health disabilities, mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and so forth are being implicated in these negative behaviors.

RC: Definitely. I also think one of the challenges with all these armchair diagnostics is that the people that are doing it aren’t even clear on what a mental health disability is. We sit there and see articles titled like, “Can someone with the attention of a kitten on crack make a decision?”, “Trump has social autism,” “Trump has a dangerous disability.” People still like to think about the other, the unknown, the shadow in the corner of the room, the thing we don’t talk about, versus acknowledging that it’s your son seeking therapy, it’s your best friend who is grieving the loss of their mother, it’s your boss who is now taking anti-anxiety meds. It’s much easier to castigate those folks than to say, “No, these are real people, and in some cases even me.”

RV: There’s a particular significance of this conversation having to do with the presidency or really with any elected office. It’s basically gospel that people with mental illness or mental health disabilities are unfit to serve. If someone has ever sought treatment—whether for depression or for substance misuse—even just that can stop someone from being taken seriously as a potential candidate. So in reinforcing this kind of narrative around what mental illness is and tacking it onto Trump’s face, there is a much deeper consequence that a lot of people aren’t thinking about that has to do with maintaining the status quo or even taking us backwards in terms of representation by people with disabilities in elected office.

RC: Definitely. When we’re talking about people with disabilities writ large we’re talking about 54 to 58 million people. If you’re zooming in specifically on people with mental health disabilities or mental illness, we’re talking about 10 million people in this country. And I think as we’re talking about Trump, it really is much easier to point at “mental fitness” than to actively talk about behaviors. That’s uncomfortable, because it forces us to be specific: What are the behaviors that we’ve seen? What are the behaviors that are evident in this person’s history that we should be pointing at to say “we screwed up here.” We dropped the ball, we elected somebody who was unfit to become president of the United States.

Besides, we have a history in this country of electing people with disabilities. Right now we can look at Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) as people with physical disabilities that are currently serving in government.

RV: Your examples point out that people would not be looking at Trump and saying “man, his disability makes him unfit to serve” if it were a physical disability—that’s something that people at their core would understand would be deeply offensive. But if it’s a mental illness, all of a sudden that seems to be equivalent to unfitness to serve.

That brings us to something you often talk about, what you refer to as “a hierarchy of disability.” And what this means in the policy context, for example, is that it has been a lot easier to get health coverage if you’re a person who has a physical illness or a physical disability than it is to get mental health coverage. But that conversation is rare when it’s about social perceptions and stigma. I think what we’re seeing here is this massive gap between the trust that a lot of people in this country have for the potential leadership or decision-making by people without disabilities or people with physical disabilities, compared with people who have mental health disabilities or mental illness or intellectual disabilities and so forth. Am I right to characterize it that way?

RC: I think you’re definitely right. I’ll even use myself as an example, being a little person. I walk in the room and you can tell that I’m a little person. Nobody is going to object to me asking for a stool or jumping on the chair to push the chair down. But for a long time I wasn’t as out about having obsessive compulsive disorder and it wasn’t something I frequently talked about until I was in my 20s. I was actually challenged by a friend and mentor of mine, Andy Imparato, who is very outspoken about having a mental health disability. When Andy and I were on a four-hour car ride from Washington, D.C. to Newport News for the Virginia Youth Leadership Forum, there were two topics of conversation: One, why haven’t I proposed to my then-boyfriend, now husband and two, why don’t I talk about having OCD?

We had a conversation about why I was hesitant to talk about it, and why I had put myself out as an advocate, as a spokesperson, as somebody working in the disability space, but I was not coming to the table with my whole self there. And so I tried it that night. I addressed the fact that I walk in the room as a little person and that’s a privilege. And I often don’t think we talk about disability as privilege. There is a privilege to my existence as a person with a physical disability. There’s a privilege to the fact that unlike 80% of disabled people, I grew up in a family just like me.

And then I addressed the fact that I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and I used to wash my hands like 200 times a day. The number of young women who came up to me afterward was amazing. It was about 50 young women that pulled me aside that all wanted to talk about mental health disabilities. The fact that I had a job, the fact that I was in a relationship, the fact that I was being paid to go around the country and talk to other young people with disabilities, and the fact that I was working on a presidential campaign at the time were huge.

So I think a lot of times when we have internally stigmatized our own mental health disabilities and then we face a public that criminalizes mental health, without any criminal behaviors associated with it. We do it for no more reason other than to say that you don’t like somebody, for no more reason than to say that somebody is evil or you don’t agree with their decisions. It invalidates a part of their humanity, and makes it that much harder for folks to come out.

RV: I want to get to the solutions part—how we do better. You talked about the importance of precision in language. What’s your advice to those folks who are out there wanting to be good allies on this?

RC: I think checking in on your friends that have mental health disabilities and saying, “Hey, how is it going? Do you need anything? How are you feeling in this time?” And doing some real deep listening as to what people are encountering, because it’s hard right now. I think also connecting to organizations that work with folks with mental health disabilities, whether it be groups like Dan Fisher’s Psych Survivors Network or certain chapters of the National Alliance on Mental Illness that are doing some really good things. Engage to see what needs to be said, what is the right language to use, and ask your friends. So much of our language gets caught up on the fear of saying the wrong thing versus taking five seconds and asking your friends what’s the right thing to say.

I also think, as long as we continue to hold mental health at arms length as “the other,” we can’t have the conversation that we really need to be having. That leads to the criminalization of mental health and the knee-jerk reaction of saying, “Oh, that person can’t do that job because they’re nuts.”

RV: I want to read a tweet by Julia Bascom, Executive Director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. She says, “We can conclude that the president is unfit to serve without armchair diagnosis or violations of medical ethics. We can resist racism, totalitarianism, and a nuclear threat without ableism. We don’t need this, we can do better, progressives have a moral obligation to do better.” Powerful words. But it feels to me that that piece of call-to-action language doesn’t quite go as far as some people are wanting to go, especially given the conversations about invoking the 25th Amendment. So I would love to hear any suggestions you have about how people can handle these kinds of hard and honest conversations when folks are looking for guidance about how they can actually engage in this conversation but in a way that is not ableist.

RC: I think going back to the last line of Julia’s tweet, progressives have a moral obligation to do better. We are the party that came up with mental health parity in health care, thanks to former Senator Paul Wellstone. We are the party that is pushing for the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We are the party that is pushing to end sub-minimum wage programs for people with disabilities. We are the party that is pushing to increase access to mental health services on college campuses and programs for young people with mental health disabilities. Why are we then at the same time being so quick to use disability diagnosis as a weapon? Because we don’t like the president and we think the president is acting like a jackass. If President Obama wasn’t afraid to say Kanye was a jackass, why can’t we say that President Trump is being a jackass?

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on January 6. It was edited for length and clarity.

New analysis from the Center for American Progress estimates that as many as 6.3 million people could be at risk of losing Medicaid under this new policy.

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Adding so-called “work requirements” to Medicaid has long been on GOP leaders’ wish list. Most recently, it emerged as part of Congressional Republicans’ unsuccessful efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act last year. And Republican governors in a slew of red states have been chomping at the bit to add work requirements to their Medicaid programs; while all eyes were on the health care debate in Congress, at least 10 states requested authority to do so last year alone, with the potential to impact 640,000 people. More states are likely to follow suit after the release of today’s guidance.

While the policy might sound reasonable at first blush, upon closer inspection it’s just another strategy for ripping health insurance away from the people who need it most—unemployed and underemployed workers struggling to make ends meet.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 25 million working-age people were covered by Medicaid in 2016. Most—roughly 60 percent—were working themselves, and nearly 80 percent lived in working families. And of those not currently working, 6 percent were looking for work, 30 percent reported caregiver obligations, 15 percent were in school, 9 percent were retired, and just over one-third reported facing health problems.

Taking away these people’s health insurance isn’t just cruel; it’s wildly counterproductive. Study after study shows that having health insurance is associated not only with better health but also with increased work capacity, which translates into higher wages and earnings. Medicaid plays a central role in making it possible for people with disabilities and chronic health conditions to work, as it is the nation’s largest provider of home- and community-based services such as personal attendant care.

History also shows that work requirements not only fail to improve long-term employment outcomes—they actually leave people worse off.

In 1996, as part of the legislation that famously “[ended] welfare as we know it,” Congress converted Aid to Families with Dependent Children into Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and introduced a new policy requiring most adult recipients to participate in qualifying work activities as a condition of receiving cash assistance. While some TANF recipients did initially experience gains in employment—thanks in large part to the strength of the labor market during the booming economy of the 1990s—those gains ultimately proved to be short-lived. Few TANF recipients were able to secure stable, long-term employment with decent wages. Many others were unable to meet TANF’s stringent work requirements at all, due to employment barriers such as caregiving obligations, health problems, low levels of education, and criminal records. As a result, they were left without assistance even though they hadn’t found work.

Notably, while the letter sent to state Medicaid directors today says Trump’s new policy won’t apply to pregnant women or people receiving Medicaid on the basis of disability, the guidance itself admits that this will fail to protect the many people with disabilities and health conditions who don’t fall into that bucket, noting: “CMS recognizes that individuals who are eligible for Medicaid on a basis other than disability (and are therefore classified for Medicaid purposes as ‘non-disabled’) may have a disability under the definitions of the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

A study by researchers at the University of Michigan released in December suggests that people with disabilities and health conditions make up a large part of the population at risk of losing Medicaid under this cruel new policy. Two-thirds of Medicaid enrollees in that state who were not currently working reported a chronic physical illness, 35 percent reported having a diagnosed mental illness, and one-quarter reported having a physical or mental condition that interfered with their ability to function at least half of the time.

Meanwhile, the letter also concedes that many people may need “supportive services” such as job search help, child care assistance, transportation, or disability-related supports in order to work. But it goes on to make clear that states cannot use federal Medicaid funds to provide these types of services and supports.

In short, work requirements don’t help anyone work. Rather, at their core, work requirements are premised on a set of myths about poverty. First, that “the poor” are some stagnant group of people who “just don’t want to work.” Second, that anyone who wants a well-paying job can snap her fingers to make one appear. And third, that having a job is all it takes to not be poor.

Reinforcing these myths is core to Trump’s divide-and-conquer playbook. That’s why he’s so keen to smear Medicaid and other popular programs as “welfare”—a term with a deeply racially charged history, evoking decades of racial stereotypes about who is poor in this country. By using dog-whistle terms like “welfare,” he’s betting that he can paint people who turn to Medicaid and other public programs to make ends meet as modern-day “welfare queens” so we don’t notice that he’s coming after the entire working and middle class.

Meanwhile, a big part of the story here is an unforgiving low-wage labor market dominated by poverty wages and unpredictable work schedules. A minimum wage worker in 2016 had to clock an additional 244 hours to earn the same amount in real terms as she did the last time Congress raised the federal minimum wage back in 2009. As a result, many low-wage workers need to turn to public programs such as Medicaid and nutrition assistance, which have come to function as work supports when wages aren’t enough.

If Trump wanted to keep his campaign promises to the “forgotten man and woman,” he’d embrace policies that address the real problems facing struggling workers and families, like raising the minimum wage. Instead, the president remains hell-bent on taking health care away from tens of millions of Americans, over the objections of the American people—and he’s made it clear that he’s done waiting for Congress.

Editor’s note: To get involved and fight back, visit HandsOff.org to learn more about the Hands Off campaign to stop cuts to health care and other basics that help families make ends meet. 

Updated: This article was edited to include the number of people who would lose Medicaid in the ten states with pending waiver requests. 

I spoke with Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) to examine where conservatives are headed and what they really mean when they use buzzwords like “entitlement reform” and “welfare reform.”

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Rebecca Vallas: “Robin Hood in reverse” has always been the congressional GOP’s playbook, and their most recent budget proposals released earlier this year were basically a hit list of programs they want to slash. But is it surprising to hear them say it out loud while they’re trying to do “tax reform” that is actually tax cuts for billionaires and corporations?

Rep. Jim McGovern: I’m not surprised because congressional Republicans have never been enthusiastic about programs that feed people who are hungry or provide them health care or some sort of security. They’ve had this kind survival of the fittest approach to government—if you’re well off, great; if you’re not, too bad. But we have a group of Republicans in Congress that are determined to undo all government, and if they succeed with their agenda a lot of people are going to be hurt.

RV: I’ll have to confess, I was surprised to hear Congress dress their calls for cuts to these programs up in their same standard language about deficit reduction and unsustainable deficits. Was it surprising to you?

JM: I mean the tax plan adds over a trillion dollars to the deficit, and this is not a tax cut for the middle class. Basically this is a tax giveaway to big corporation, to those who are very well off and those who are very well connected. It will be a tax increase on middle class families, and it will be a tax increase on those struggling to get into the middle class.

RV: I want to focus on programs that people typically think about as anti-poverty programs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sent a letter to state food stamp administrators who administer the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and some people have interpreted it as the Trump administration actually encouraging states to take steps to make it harder for struggling workers and families to access nutrition assistance when they need it.

JM: We’re going to have to wait and see what USDA is up to, but they haven’t been very forthcoming and I don’t have a good feeling about this. Conservatives have for years wanted to cut programs like SNAP. They have presented as fact a version of SNAP that is clearly not true—that the program helps people who are lazy, encourages dependency. But of the people on SNAP, the vast majority are not expected to work—they are kids, they’re senior citizens, they’re people who are disabled. The majority of people who can work, do, and they earn so little they still qualify for SNAP.

There are some things we can live without, but food isn’t one of them. The average SNAP benefit is about $1.40 per person per meal. You can’t even buy a cup of coffee with that. We should be talking about expanding the SNAP benefit so that people have the resources to buy not just food, but nutritious food for their families. And we ought to remind people that this program is incredibly successful. It is one of the most efficiently and effectively run programs by the federal government and has very low fraud and error rate. It also is a program that is an economic stimulus—it helps our farmers, our grocers, our economy overall.

To the extent that SNAP needs to be improved, it is that the benefit is inadequate. Most people on SNAP end up having to go to food banks at the end of the month.

RV: So there is a huge gap between what Congressional Republicans make it sound like these programs are about and the reality of who gets helped by them. The fact is that 70 percent of Americans will turn to at least one means-tested program at some point during their lives. But that seems to be the playbook—to flat out lie about what these programs are and who they help.

JM: Right, they promote this myth that somehow programs like SNAP promote dependency. The average time that households are on SNAP is 12 months or less. We do hill briefings with people who had been on SNAP and are now quite successful, and they remind Members of Congress how important that benefit was when they needed it. But this Congress has demonized poor people, belittled their struggle, and blamed them for all of our economic problems.

I wish there was more of an outcry about making sure that work pays in this country. If you work in this country you ought not to have to live in poverty. The fact that we haven’t addressed this issue the way we should is very, very costly. There are all these avoidable medical costs that are associated with food insecurity. Kids can’t learn if they go to school hungry. Workers aren’t productive if they go to work hungry. Senior citizens who have to make choices between prescription drugs or putting food on the table and they choose to take a prescription drug on an empty stomach end up in a hospital. Women who are pregnant don’t give birth to healthy babies unless they have adequate nutrition. And so we need to take this issue more seriously than we have, and we certainly shouldn’t be demonizing people who are struggling.

RV: The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for the past almost nine years because Republicans in Congress refuse to raise it. And yet their rhetoric is all about “self-sufficiency.”

JM: The fact of the matter is that the jobs that are out there keep people in poverty. And so when I hear Speaker Ryan or Republicans talk about self-sufficiency I respond by screaming that people are working out there. They’re working harder than ever and they are still stuck in poverty. So let us address the issue of wages. Let’s help lift people up.

[Instead] we have Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker moving forward with drug testing some food stamp recipients. I have an idea. Let’s go drug test Scott Walker—maybe people who have stupid ideas like that ought to be drug tested. Because that is insulting. We’re not saying drug test big heads of defense contractors who get billions of taxpayer dollars. We’re not talking about farmers who get crop insurance, we’re not talking about testing any other recipient of government money—just poor people. That is just offensive and insulting and that’s the kind of stuff that is coming out of this Congress.

Hunger is a political condition when all is said and done.

RV: Do you think that the public still buys Speaker Paul Ryan and President Trump as champions of the forgotten man and the forgotten woman, or do you think that the tax fight has laid bare what they’re really after?

JM: Well I think the tax fight has laid bare what they’re really after. I think their attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and come up with a replacement that would throw 30 million off of health insurance has shown who they really are. I really believe that a lot of people who may have supported Paul Ryan or Donald Trump in the last go around are now seeing who they really are. These aren’t champions for the forgotten man or woman. And they are not champions for people struggling in poverty. They are the problem; they are the enemy of so many people in this country who are trying to make ends meet. And people need to stand up and fight back.

I’m proud to live in a country that has a program designed to make sure that people don’t go hungry. I’m proud to live in a country that has programs like Medicare that guarantee health care for our older population. I’m glad we have programs like Medicaid. I believe that everybody is important—that nobody should be invisible in this country and that the whole purpose of government is to be there for those who need a helping hand during a very difficult time. Donald Trump doesn’t need government. He’s a billionaire. But there are millions of families in this country that do and they’re every bit as important as he is.

We need to take back our country. We need to watch very carefully what Paul Ryan means by entitlement reform and we have to make sure that he doesn’t view programs like SNAP as an ATM machine to pay for the corporate welfare that is part of their tax bill.

This interview was originally conducted for Off-Kilter. It was edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Vallas: So just to kick us off, net neutrality is one of those wonky terms that doesn’t even sound like English. Help us understand—what is net neutrality?

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel: I think this fight around net neutrality is the free speech fight of our generation. Net neutrality is essentially the principal that all internet traffic should be treated equally. It prevents internet service providers from charging a premium for access to internet “fast lanes” or slamming the breaks on content that poses a threat to their financial or political interests.

I like the expression “the open internet,” the internet democracy. Net neutrality keeps the internet open, free, and fair; it preserves a level playing field where good ideas can prosper no matter who or where they come from. The free, democratic internet plays an essential role in our civic dialogue. And that’s why the FCC in 2015 passed rules to protect net neutrality, reclassify the internet as a public utility, and enforce the rules of a level playing field. The Trump FCC is trying to eliminate even the most basic net neutrality protections that were put in place. These would include the ban on blocking, replacing them with a “transparency” regime enforced by the FCC. Transparency is a euphemism for doing nothing. A broadband carrier like AT&T, if it wanted, might even practice internet censorship akin to that of the Chinese state, blocking its critics and promoting its own agenda. Allowing such censorship is anathema to the internet’s and America’s founding spirit.

There are some legal scholars who believe that by going this far in trying to overturn rules put in place under the Obama administration, the FCC may have overplayed its legal hand, and that this will go to the courts because government agencies aren’t free to abruptly reverse long-standing rules on which many have relied without a good reason. A mere change in FCC ideology isn’t enough. And I think we can talk a little bit about the activism that we’re going to see because the future of the internet is at stake on December 14, when former Verizon attorney Ajit Pai, chosen by Trump to chair the FCC, is going to force a vote on ending net neutrality.

RV: The main focus in the media since the announcement from the FCC last week has largely been on the battle between the so-called telecom titans, Comcast and AT&T, Verizon, and the internet giants, Google, Amazon, Facebook. But as you’re describing, there’s a lot more at play than who is going to win a big corporate tug of war—this is going to have real consequences for regular people who use the internet.

KVH: There is a corporatism at work here—the media monopolists in the telecom industry hate net neutrality. They’ve worked for years to overturn guarantees of an open internet because it gets in the way of profits. Now, if net neutrality is eliminated, these media monopolists will restructure how the internet works, creating information super-highways for corporate and political elites and digital dirt roads for those who can’t afford the corporate tolls. It’s fair to say that you’re witnessing a regime change where if Pai at the FCC is successful, he’s going to hand the keys to our open internet to major corporations to charge more for this tiered system. So it will, along with the tax bill—which will make our lives more unequal, more dirty, more unhealthy—you may well see a tiered system where powerful websites can pay to have their content delivered faster to consumers.

There’s another argument that’s been thrown out there, which is that the FCC chair says that he’s trying to make sure that new investment goes into the internet. He’s claiming that industry investments have gone down since 2015, the year the Obama administration last strengthened the net neutrality rules. Wrong, it’s just not the case. But let me step back and just ask, why should industry investments be the dominant measure of success in internet policy? Why is that the measure? What about improved access for students, or the emergence of innovations like streaming TV? So I think there’s a lot of skewing, a lot of false information being thrown around as the FCC tries to steamroll through changes that will impact and harm consumers, people with less access to capital, students, independent media, alternative voices, so there’s a real First Amendment free speech issue here, too.

RV: Some, including W. Kamau Bell, have pointed out that the end of net neutrality could be particularly devastating for artists and activists by effectively silencing the voices of people who aren’t already established or backed by those with power. He points out in an op-ed in The New York Times, “This fair internet, where everyone from an amateur comedian to a celebrity to a huge media company plays by the same rules, means you don’t need a lot of money or the backing of someone with power to share your content with the world.” And he names the example of Issa Rae, who started the web series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” which started as a YouTube series in 2011 but has now actually become a show, “Insecure,” that’s got its third season happening on HBO. It’s hard to imagine that happening in a world that doesn’t have net neutrality.

KVH: What we’re witnessing is more than a regulatory shift. It’s more than a story that should be consigned to the business pages. This is about a societal change. And if the FCC allows this digital profiteering to define the internet, it will affect all of what you spoke of, it will affect personal communications, education, commerce, economic arrangement, our politics and democracy itself. And it is a civil rights issue in a fundamental way because it’s about whose voice is heard. The most vulnerable are usually those who have a harder time making their voices heard, and a free internet lifts up and can amplify those who don’t have the money or power in our unequal society.

So this is a real fight for the kind of society we want to be, and I think that needs to be understood as we move to oppose not just the net neutrality decision. The FCC is beginning to overturn efforts to close the digital divide between wealthy and poor Americans, they’re declaring war on consumers, and in what I think is one of the most callous steps, the FCC abandoned an effort to limit the exorbitant cost of prison phone calls that sometimes force inmates’ families to pay upward of a dollar a minute to speak to their loved ones. So there is a real rollback of humanism as corporatism ascends.

This is a fire sale for humongous corporate interests, for the monopolists of the telecom world.  There are going to be protests December 7 in advance of the December 14 FCC vote targeting the offices of corporations that have opposed net neutrality such as Verizon. There are going to be protests against offices of members of Congress who have opposed net neutrality. There will be marches on the FCC both digitally and on the streets, and there are legal and legislative strategies to defend the internet and the future.

RV: The politics on this as well are somewhat baffling, because obviously this is part of a larger deregulation agenda. But it also just seems a little bit odd frankly, coming from an administration that has taken the exact opposite position on other issues related to competition. I’m thinking here specifically about the Time Warner-AT&T merger. It was literally just one day before the FCC announcement on net neutrality that the Trump justice department announced its opposition to the proposed merger.

KVH: It’s incoherent. The reality is if you’re a strong supporter of free markets, net neutrality is what allows for competition and free market in the broadband space. If you’re someone who strongly supports free speech and freedom of expression, net neutrality is what prevents companies like Comcast that own NBC from prioritizing or censoring content online. I think there is a split in the progressive community about the Trump administration’s move on the merger.

What is chilling, however, is a personal vendetta against CNN. It looks like what we’ve seen too often from this administration, a politicization of the tools of justice, privatization of justice for the sake of an administration. So there is an incoherence that is puzzling, but what is not puzzling is that the dismantling of the administrative state, the march through the institutions, the deregulatory crusade is in full throttle. And what we’re witnessing with the FCC is in sync with that. In that sense there is a coherence to this deregulation of all kinds of reforms that have brought us clean air, clean water, and a free and democratic internet.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on December 1. It was edited for length and clarity.

That’s why a bipartisan coalition in Pennsylvania has worked for more than two years to pass first-in-the-nation “clean slate” legislation that would allow minor nonviolent records to be automatically sealed once an individual remains crime-free for a set period of time. A bill was unanimously approved in the Pennsylvania Senate, 50-0, earlier this year, and it is expected to clear the House soon. Gov. Tom Wolf (D) has said he will sign the legislation into law. Even the Philadelphia Eagles are vocally supporting the bill.

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And now there is movement to bring clean slate to the halls of Congress. At the recent #UnlockingOpportunity conference in Washington, I spoke with Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D)—Delaware’s first woman and first person of color elected to Congress—about her run for office and the prospect of clean legislation at the federal level.

Rebecca Vallas: I’d love to hear from you about your background and why you’ve decided to take on criminal justice reform and re-entry.

Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester: First, I never ran for office in my life. But in 2014, my husband ruptured his Achilles tendon on a business trip and blood clots went to his heart and lungs and he passed away. It changed everything for me.

I’m typically a very joyful person. Every job I’ve ever had I brought joy to it—from working as a summer youth employment coordinator, to working in the office of then-Congressman Tom Carper as an intern, to being a case worker and working on Social Security Disability and housing and other issues, to being Delaware’s secretary of labor. But when Charles passed, it made me question why am I here. What’s my purpose? And that election year I saw so many people who looked either sad or mad, who had a feeling of loss. Whether they lost their job or home during the housing crisis, or a child to gun violence, it just felt heavy. And the people who were running for office … I was like, “I’m already sad, and y’all are bringing me down.”

So, I decided to run. And I was debating Ivy League lawyers. People would comment on blogs that I looked like a deer in the headlights—because I was a deer in the headlights, I was scared to death. But the more stories I heard from people in my state, the more compelled I felt. And I remember one day at a campaign event in the park a guy was talking about the fact that he had gotten out of prison, and no matter how hard he tried he could not find a job. It reminded me of my own family history—my uncles and cousins in Philadelphia who went in and out of the prison system. And so this whole concept of clean slate rang true because your one or two encounters with the law should not stop you from supporting yourself or your family. This issue touches people’s ability to buy a home, to rent an apartment, to just live.

When I heard about Pennsylvania’s legislation, it was a no-brainer for me that this is an issue that cuts across parties. And so we can announce here that I will be introducing federal clean slate legislation.

RV: Thank you. And I’d love to hear from you how a federal clean slate law could remove barriers not just for people with records but for their children and for their families.

LBR: We all know the impact that a parent going through a criminal justice system has on families. An article in The Atlantic magazine is a perfect example. It’s about a woman who was 57 years old, who was a grandmother. This charge had been following her for 38 years and stopping her from getting a job. But this legislation is saying it shouldn’t be hard for you to clean your record when you’ve served your time, some time has gone by, and it was a nonviolent offense. Anything that gets rid of the barriers for people to live, go to school, have a job, rent or own a home, that’s the goal of this legislation is to clean the slate so that you can live your life.

RV: What are the chances of seeing something actually move through Congress?

LBR: We can at least try to find common ground. I already have in mind a [Congressperson] who’s got a criminal justice background, who will probably seem way to the other political extreme of me, but who can also provide credibility. I believe that we can get this done—and it doesn’t even cost money. The fact that it could possibly save money and help the economy and help people’s lives I think makes it a win-win-win.

I also want to leave everyone with a message of encouragement. That no matter what you see swirling around you, stay focused. I was a dancer as a kid, and we’d do pirouettes. And people would say, “How can you spin and not fall?” It’s because you would focus on one spot, even though everything is spinning around you. We’re gonna make it through all of this swirl.

This interview also aired on Off-Kilter as part of a complete episode on October 27. It was edited for length and clarity.

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.

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Here are eight of the most horrifying provisions buried in the tax plan.

1. It raises taxes for people with student loans

Americans now owe more than $1.4 trillion in student loan debt—nearly double all credit card debt. The average monthly payment is up to $351 (or more than $4,200 a year) for borrowers between the ages of 20 and 30—a large chunk of income for young Americans.

Thankfully, under current law, borrowers can deduct up to $2,500 of the interest on these loans per year, which helped more than 12 million Americans in 2015. But the House tax plan eliminates that deduction. If the plan passes, the average borrower will see their taxes go up by $275 each year just on student loan interest. And a borrower who pays the full $2,500 in interest would see their taxes go up even more—by a whopping $625.

2. It raises taxes on people facing high medical expenses

Under current law, people are able to deduct medical expenses that exceed 10 percent of their income for the year. This benefits thousands of people facing serious illnesses or with long-term care needs—and gives them some financial relief in the face of high medical bills.

But the House Republican plan eliminates that deduction, too. This will hit people with disabilities as well as elderly nursing home residents particularly hard, as they often pay tens of thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs for long-term care. Much like their earlier plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the change is also aimed directly at states that supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, where residents are more likely to be uninsured and have higher medical costs.

3. It ends a tax credit that helps parents adopt

For thousands of adoptive parents, adoption is only possible because of the adoption tax credit, which helps parents recoup up to $13,000 of the cost of adoption. House Republicans would eliminate the adoption tax credit, making it harder for countless would-be parents to have children. There are more than 100,000 children in U.S. foster care today (not to mention millions more orphaned or abandoned), and eliminating the credit would make it significantly harder for them to find a permanent home.

4. It makes disability accessibility more expensive for small businesses

Under current law, small businesses can claim a tax credit to offset 50 percent of the cost of accessibility for people with disabilities for expenses between $250 and $10,250. But the House GOP tax bill would eliminate that tax credit, effectively raising taxes on small businesses trying to make sure their doors are open to people with disabilities. This comes as legislation currently pending in the House—misleadingly titled the “ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017”—would gut the very part of the Americans with Disabilities Act that requires public places to ensure accessibility for people with disabilities.

5. It eliminates a tax credit that spurs investment in poor communities

Trump has repeatedly promised to save and bring back jobs in communities left behind. But the House Republican tax bill would eliminate a tax credit that encourages businesses to invest in hard-hit rural and urban areas. Investors who qualify for the New Markets Tax Credit get a tax credit to partially offset their investments in distressed communities where the poverty rate is 20 percent or higher. The vast majority of the tax credit’s funding has benefited communities with unemployment rates more than 1.5 times the national average and/or poverty rates of at least 30 percent.

6. It allows churches to be manipulated for political purposes

Under current law, 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations—including churches—are prohibited from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Trump has long made known his desire to repeal this policy, known as the Johnson Amendment—as far back as the early 2000s, as well as throughout his presidential campaign—claiming it violates churches’ First Amendment rights. And hidden in the House GOP tax bill is a provision that would make good on Trump’s promise, despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of Americans say they do not support political endorsements in church. As a letter from more than 4,000 faith leaders opposing this change states: “Faith leaders are called to speak truth to power, and we cannot do so if we are merely cogs in partisan political machines.”

7. It takes away critical income from immigrant families with kids

While House Republicans are busy patting themselves on the back for including modest enhancements to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in their tax bill, they have changed the credit so that many immigrant families with citizen children will not be able to receive it. The bill would require all filers to provide a Social Security number, instead of an Individual Tax Identification Number, which immigrant workers with qualifying citizen children can currently use to claim the credit. According to the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, more than 5.1 million children of immigrant parents would lose access to the CTC under this provision.

8. It gives fetuses legal status as people

Buried in House Republicans’ tax bill is their latest effort to advance the GOP’s anti-choice agenda. Specifically, they use a provision in the bill that would allow parents to buy 529 college savings plans for unborn children as a smoke screen to, yet again, try to give fetuses legal status as people. The provision goes out of its way to define unborn child as a “child in utero … a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.” This comes on the heels of Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services’ strategic plan draft released last month, which bent over backwards to define life as beginning at conception.

To provide more context on the issue, I talked with Peter Edelman, Georgetown University law professor and former staffer for Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, about his new book Not a Crime to be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America.

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Rebecca Vallas: So, just to start off, what got you interested in writing this book?

Peter Edelman: I’d been working on poverty issues for long time, and I thought I’d kind of seen everything. But when it came out that Ferguson’s budget was based on hauling everybody into court and whacking them with these huge fines and fees, it got me interested. I realized this is really something that people need to know more about than they do.

RV: Part of what you did to research for the book was to speak with an array of lawyers who represent clients facing these problems. (In full disclosure, I’m one of those people you spoke with in my capacity as a recovering legal aid lawyer who used to represent these clients.) Would you mind sharing one of the client stories that came up in your research?

PE: Absolutely. Vera Cheeks, who’s a resident of Bainbridge, Georgia, was pulled over and ticketed for rolling through a stop sign. The judge hit her with a $135 fine—which in this business is a relatively small one—and ordered her to pay in full immediately. She told him she was unemployed and caring for her terminally ill father and had no money.

The judge said he would give her three months of “probation” to pay up, and he sent to her a room behind the courtroom where Cheeks says, “There was a real big lady, and there were cells on both sides of the room and there was a parade of people paying money to the lady. They were all black. It was like the twilight zone, totally mind-boggling.”

The woman said Cheeks now owed $267; the fine, plus $105 for the for-profit probation people, and $27 for the Georgia Victims Emergency Fund. The woman put a paper in front of Cheeks and told her to sign it. Cheeks said she would not. The woman said, “You’re refusing to sign the paper? I’m going to tell the judge and put you in jail for five days.” Cheeks still refused and finally the woman demanded $50 or else Cheeks would go to jail right then. Cheeks’ fiancé, who was at the courthouse, raised the money by pawning her engagement ring and a lawn implement.

She avoided jail, but Cheeks remained at risk of being locked up if she was late with even one payment.

RV: You mentioned that this practice first drew serious national attention after the killing of Michael Brown in 2014, which cast eyes, nationally, on Ferguson. But not only was this not a new phenomenon, it has not been restricted to Ferguson. I personally saw something very similar play out in Philadelphia when I was still working in legal aid. What’s the story behind the rise of fines and fees? You’ve put a face on the issue for us, but what’s driving what has really become a national trend?

PE: Well, you could say Grover Norquist. It’s the anti-tax rebellion that goes back quite a bit in the past, certainly a couple decades or more. Municipalities just didn’t get the money they needed to run their government, so they turned to going after people who were essentially defenseless because there aren’t anywhere near the number of lawyers that we need. And then you get added to that the broken windows.

RV: You’re referring to broken windows policing.

PE: Yes, absolutely. There was this belief that if we brought people in on junky little stuff, that would clean up the city. The big source of it that they use around the country is driver’s license suspensions. In California, for example, 4 million people just a couple years back had lost their licenses. They didn’t actually throw them in jails, like they do in many, many other places in the country. But they could take it out of their paycheck or their tax return. And so California was making billions of dollars going after these people.

And they don’t take away the driver’s license only for something you did when you’re driving. They do it for a lot of different things.

RV: People may be most familiar with traffic violations, but your book looks at a whole other range of types of fines and fees that states and localities are now leveeing on people, largely black and brown, largely low-income populations, some of which are particularly shocking. For example, you expose in your book that in 43 states people are actually charged for exercising their right to counsel if they need a public defender.

PE: That shocked me. It was a terrific study done by Joe Shapiro of NPR. It doesn’t compute, right? If you’re low-income and charged with a crime, you’re supposed to get a lawyer. And 43 states are charging money for it.

RV: Well, you’re a recovering lawyer, too. How is this not unconstitutional?

PE: Well, it is. But it’s got a combination of weasel language in the Supreme Court case, and it’s also so prevalent you would need the legislature to fix it and they want the money. And to sue in each instance is just very difficult, so there it is. The judge says, “Looks like you got a nice tattoo on your arm there, so you must have the money to pay for the lawyer or pay for the fine,” or, “You’ve got these fancy shoes and so you’re able to pay.”

RV: Wrapped up in this is effectively a vicious cycle. The people that you’re profiling in this book begin without having actually committed any crime, and it never ends just because they are poor and can’t afford to get out from under a debt.

PE: Well, this raises money bail, because it’s a major player in all of this. So, as you said, someone who’s innocent, but has allegedly done some very small-potato thing. Nonetheless, bail is set at $500 or $1,000, and they don’t have it and they can’t get it. So how do they get out of jail? They plead guilty even though they’re not. Then they get a payment plan. And then they can’t pay it.

At that point, when they haven’t paid it and they have pleaded guilty, it’s a whole new violation. They owe the criminal debt; they didn’t pay so they’re back in jail again. There’s another bail deal. There’s more money that they owe. It goes on and on and on.

RV: I think it’s helpful sometimes to put concrete examples to “small potatoes offenses.” Things like laws against public urination. There is also a different kind of subset of what I think of as the criminalization of survival, where we criminalize the types of behaviors that people need to engage in to scrape by. This is one of the stories I shared with you for your book—one of my own clients had sold blood platelets to a blood bank to supplement her family’s income from food stamps and disability benefits, because it wasn’t enough to live on. She ended up being charged with what’s known in public assistance jargon as an IPV, an intentional program violation, which can itself bring criminal penalties.

PE: Yes, it’s not just the fines and fees and the money bail. There’s issues with vagrancy Vagrancy laws make it a crime for someone to be 'without visible means of support or domicile.' In practice, these laws are used to criminalize homelessness or loitering in public spaces. and you can’t sleep in a car and you can’t sleep standing up and you can’t sleep lying down. Instead of having mental health services and housing to help people, they just tell them to get out of town. There’s a man in Sacramento who I talk about who had mental health issues. He was arrested 190 times.

RV: 190 times. So, we’ve talked about a lot, but I’m curious what shocked you the most in doing research for this book.

PE: The one that really got me are chronic nuisance ordinances. For example, say a woman calls 911 to get protection from domestic violence. If it happens two or three times, the police have been given the power to say to the landlord, “This woman is a chronic nuisance, and you have to evict her.” And it’s just totally shocking.

Now the good news is the ACLU in various parts of the country has found or been found by the person who has been hurt in this way, and won lawsuits. In Pennsylvania, both the local town and the whole state changed their laws.

RV: I mean it sounds like common sense that a domestic violence survivor shouldn’t be punished for experiencing domestic violence. It is sort of astounding to think that litigation could be necessary to make that the law of the land.

PE: It’s stunning.

RV: Your book argues powerfully that we need to be addressing these problems. But we also can’t miss the fact that addressing these problems is part of a larger anti-poverty agenda.

PE: That’s the last third of the book. It is about seven places that I visited and met the people doing the work. They’re organizers and they’re people who help families in a variety of ways, whether it’s early childhood or mental health support or the Promise Neighborhoods that President Obama started.

If we’re serious, we certainly have to have de-carceration. And Lenore Anderson in California with Prop 47, they’ve done the best job in the country and they’re the first ones to tell you that it’s not going to work if people get out but they’re homeless or they can’t find a job. They’re going to be back in. So, one way to look at it is it’s not going to work if we don’t actually attack poverty itself.

RV: There’s obviously a lot at stake under the current administration. There is a lot of real fear on the part of communities as well as advocates working on these issues who had been seeing a tremendous amount of bipartisan agreement and momentum up until the election when it came to criminal justice reform, and obviously now there’s not a lot of hope on that front at the federal level. But it sounds like you’re arguing for there being a lot to be done at the state and local level in the meantime.

PE: The action is heavily, mostly at the state and local level. Some of the things are suing in federal court and when you get up to the Supreme Court if you don’t have the five votes then that way of doing it doesn’t work. But that’s going and meanwhile all of these things that are happening at the local and state level and that’s now for example the chief justices and chief judges of all of the state systems as a group are strongly speaking about the fines and fees and not that long ago, ten years or so, they were talking about how “what a nice thing it is that we were getting money.” And then somebody said, “Wait a minute, that’s not right.”

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on October 13. It was edited for length and clarity.

While all eyes were focused on the latest effort by conservatives to take away your health care, Congress quietly advanced a bill that would roll back the civil rights of people with disabilities by exactly 27 years—to a time before the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017 would create onerous red tape for people with disabilities attempting to enforce their rights under Title III the ADA (the part of the statute that applies to places of public accommodation). It would not only shift the burden of compliance from business owners to people with disabilities, but would allow businesses to delay compliance with a decades-old civil rights law for months—if not years.

I spoke with Rebecca Cokley, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the former Executive Director of the National Council on Disability, about the stakes of this fight for people with disabilities and allies.

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Rebecca  Vallas: So the bill is misleadingly titled “The ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017”. It should probably be called the “Let’s throw the ADA in the sewer and stomp on it with really high sharp heels bill of 2017”. Is that a fair characterization and what would the bill do?

Rebecca Cokley: I think that’s more than fair—and after we step on it with some high heels we’re going to stick it in a paper shredder and then use that to line a bird cage. The bill itself would actually push back requirements around accessibility and accommodations. [The Americans with Disabilities Act] has been the law for 27 years. We’ve had whole generations grow up that have never understood life before it. And what this would do is: a) it would put the onus much more on people with disabilities to prove discrimination in very tedious ways, and b) it would then allow business even more time, a minimum of an additional six months after a complaint is filed, not even to remedy the barrier but to “make substantial progress.” So that could mean instead of having an actual ramp so people could access a place,  somebody could come out and tell them what the ramp would cost.

RV: So say you are a person who uses a power wheelchair, and you get to a building and you find you can’t get inside. And you want to enforce your rights under the ADA.  What new hoops would you have to jump through under this proposal?

RC: The way the complaint process will actually shift is it will require such technical language that the average person with a disability is not going to feel qualified or empowered enough to even understand where in the law their particular situation might fit.

RV: So is what we expect to happen basically the lack of enforcement of a law that’s been the law of the land for 27 years? Is that eventually where this heads?

RC: I think there’s no other destination for it to head than that.

RV: You are a member of what’s often called the ADA generation and I would love for you to paint a picture of what life looked like before 1990—and before the ADA was in place.

RC: I’m part of the 20 percent of people with disabilities that grew up with parents with the same disability that they had. My dad became paralyzed when I was a year and a half and both my parents were little people. I remember my mom being denied tenure because she could only use the bottom six inches of a chalkboard. That was actually used to deny her tenure at the college that she had worked for decades. I remember wanting to go places with my dad who used a wheelchair and not being able to enter buildings. I remember my dad wanting to go vote and them having to bring the ballot out to his car and him getting really upset. He had been very active in voting rights issues in the south and was upset that in 1988 he couldn’t vote for the presidential election the same way that everybody in his family could.

RV: So how did the ADA change things?

RC: I think for so many people with disabilities you don’t even think about it anymore. And people without disabilities don’t even think about it anymore. You’re walking down the street managing your luggage and you take it down a curb cut, which is typically the example people tend to use. Or trying to get suitcases up a flight of stairs and there’s a ramp. The ADA really did a number of different things that were historic, the first of which was laying out a definition of disability that was not based on an inability to work or a requirement for health care. It was really talking about having a condition that affected the activities of daily living.

So let’s say you are a burn victim, and it doesn’t impact your ability to do your job but you are still discriminated against because you’re perceived as a person with a disability. Or you have a history of impairment—if you’re an individual who had a substance abuse addiction and were in rehab and had come through recovery, you still have that past history that qualifies you as a person with a disability. So it really cast a net that included millions of individuals with similar experiences tied to being historically discriminated against.

RV: Attacks on the ADA are nothing new, but this latest wave is actually gaining steam in Congress. This comes on the heels of a 60 Minutes piece that alleges widespread so-called frivolous lawsuits—people with disabilities who didn’t actually face discrimination but are just trying to milk the system and maybe even get money out of it.   Don’t we need to rein in frivolous lawsuits?

RC: Even in the original statute, there is means for dealing with frivolous lawsuits. State courts and state bar associations can punish attorneys who are filing lawsuits that are proved to be frivolous.

RV: So who is behind this bill and what’s really going on here?

RC: It’s important to note that both Democrats and Republicans are behind this bill. We continue to talk about disability rights being a bipartisan issue, but we’re also under bipartisan attack. You know we continue to hear that business feels attacked because they’ve been asked to comply with the ADA every year for the last 27 years. But the idea that after 27 years they should have even more time and then still refuse to be accessible—at what point are they going to have to comply with the law? Or are we just going to keep creating a slippery and slipperier and slipperiest slope—but actually not a slope because we’re not about accessibility, so a staircase.

RV: The 60 Minutes piece is part of a pattern of media coverage of pretty much only knowing, with very few exceptions, how to paint people with disabilities as takers or abusers of a system that they see a way to take advantage of. Am I off base here?

RC: Not at all.  I think there really is a myth that people with disabilities are collecting monetary damages off of this. It is not like you have a bunch of disabled veterans swimming in Scrooge McDuck’s money bin based on ADA lawsuits. People cannot collect monetary damages on these claims. All you can do—the only remedy that’s available—is having that place made accessible.

RV: Attorney’s fees and some [compensation] for their time, but that was intentionally done to enable people to find lawyers who are willing to take those cases.

RC: Exactly. The disability community is a poor community— 50 percent of people with disabilities live at or below the poverty level.

RV: So is the fight that people with disabilities are facing in 2017 categorically different from what other groups that face discrimination are [fighting] at this point in time?

RC: In some ways yes, in some ways no. I think I can connect it most easily with how several of our allies in communities of color felt about the rollback of affirmative action programs. You want your children to have a better future than you. You want your children to have better access to services, to programs, to school, to the world. And if this passes, my children are going to have a tougher life than I had, and that just doesn’t seem right.

RV: And it doesn’t seem very American.

RC: No, not at all.

But while all this is cause for celebration, today’s data also serve as a stark reminder of how much is at stake in the current political climate. That’s because they reflect continued progress made in 2016 thanks to policies such as the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion and investments in programs that help families afford the basics, from Social Security to nutrition assistance, to tax credits for working families—all of which are at risk under President Trump’s and congressional Republicans’ budgets.

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Ironically, as he’s been known to do on more than a few occasions, President Trump may try to claim credit for this continued progress, even though it predates the start of his term. But whether or not he pretends they’re his gains, the data make clear the difference policy choices make—and how much worse off struggling families would be under Trump’s Robin Hood in Reverse agenda.

New analysis by my Center for American Progress colleagues Rachel West and Kate Gallagher Robbins shines a light on just how much worse off poverty would be if Trump’s budget became law. If just three of Trump’s proposed cuts had been in place in 2015—the latest year for which data are available—a staggering 2.3 million more Americans would have been poor that year. This analysis takes into account Trump’s proposed deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (formerly food stamps); his call to eliminate the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which helps 6.7 million Americans afford their energy bills; and the increased out-of-pocket medical costs millions of Americans would face due to Trump’s proposed rollback of Medicaid expansion.

Of course, these three cuts only scratch the surface of Trump’s agenda. His budget also calls for deep cuts to Social Security, critical disability programs, education and job training, school nutrition, job-creating infrastructure investments, and nearly every program or policy that helps working families make ends meet and get ahead. The House Republican budget released this summer shares much of the same DNA. But even just the three budget cuts my colleagues looked at risk erasing all the gains we saw last year.

Meanwhile, Trump and congressional Republicans are pursuing massive tax giveaways for the ultra-rich and corporations, in an effort to bring about a historic upward redistribution of wealth under the guise of “tax reform.” Indeed, Trump’s proposed elimination of the estate tax alone—a tax that affects just the richest 0.2 percent of estates—would cost the same as feeding more than 6 million seniors through Meals on Wheels, yet another critical program he’s targeting for deep cuts.

Trump talked a good game during his campaign, pledging to fight for the “forgotten man and woman” and restore prosperity to communities that have been left behind. Meanwhile, Speaker Ryan has spent years styling himself as a supposed poverty crusader, famously taking a “poverty tour,” hosting a poverty summit featuring Republican presidential candidates, and releasing a big plan to overhaul key antipoverty programs. But today’s data serve as Exhibit A of the gargantuan gap between their rhetoric and the reality of their policies.

If Trump and Ryan were serious about cutting poverty and fighting for communities left behind, they’d embrace the policies that brought about declines in poverty and rising incomes in 2015 and 2016—like raising the minimum wage. State and local minimum wage increases were likely a major driver of the declines in poverty and rising incomes we saw over the past two years—and, tellingly, in states that had enacted minimum wage increases, low-wage workers saw faster wage growth in 2015 than workers in states whose minimum wages remained flat. They’d close the book on repealing the ACA and slashing Medicaid, programs that together have brought the nation’s uninsurance rate to historic lows. And they’d abandon their proposals to slash nutrition assistance and other programs that help families afford the basics, which cut poverty nearly in half in recent years while also boosting mobility in the long-term.

But instead, they seem hell-bent on snatching any gains working families have seen in recent years and funneling them upward so millionaires and billionaires can buy a second yacht.

So as we digest this year’s Census data, let’s not get out the balloons just yet. Instead, we should let them be a lesson to us about how much is at stake—and the policy agenda we need to build an economy that works for everyone instead of just the wealthy few.

This article originally appeared on Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. 

Their latest article, titled “Generations, disabled,” doubles down on seriously flawed reporting that The Post began in March. This time the author, Terrence McCoy, profiles a family in Missouri struggling with poverty and health-related challenges. McCoy takes aim at many aspects of their lives, but the one he reserves the most scorn for—the fact that more than one person in the family receives disability benefits—mirrors the same disability cuts Trump called for in last week’s budget proposal.

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The piece immediately drew deserved criticism on social media from a range of respected journalists and experts including The Atlantic’s Annie Lowry, Vox’s Matt Yglesias and Dylan Matthews, and former National Economic Council Chairman Gene Sperling.

Would love it if this Post story showed any data demonstrating that the growth in SSDI is due to cultural factors. https://t.co/6JWwNIiYuH

— Annie Lowrey (@AnnieLowrey) June 2, 2017

This whole article is incredibly mean-spirited and smacks of the worst kind of moral panic. https://t.co/B3Zbt7sVpE

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 2, 2017

SSDI is one program that mainstream and even liberal media outlets have done a lot to demonize and weaken https://t.co/ylzur7kpCM

— Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) June 2, 2017

Sad that some of finest media (@washingtonpost @60Minutes) chosen to stigmatize millions of most vulnerable thru selective, mean anecdote. https://t.co/SG5JrRqOcx

— Gene Sperling (@genebsperling) June 2, 2017

Like the first article in The Post’s series, the latest story willfully ignores the reality of Social Security disability benefits, instead relying on flawed data and flowery writing and anecdotes to paint a cartoonish picture of rural America overtaken by a “culture of disability.” As my colleague Kate Gallagher Robbins pointed out on Twitter, the piece reads like a work of fiction. It even opens with a stage-setting mini-story practically ripped from Of Mice and Men, in which a child accidentally drops and nearly kills his new puppy.

Notably, where the piece does introduce evidence beyond richly woven anecdote, what evidence it includes contradicts The Post’s narrative.

Case in point: The article makes much of the fact that multiple family members, such as a parent and a child, might receive disability benefits. Yet the article’s text makes no mention of the data featured in a sidebar, which tell the real story here: that disability often runs in families. But The Post would rather blame the lifeboat for the flood.

You wouldn’t know it from The Post’s reporting, but as my colleagues and I have pointed out time and again—including in our multiple responses to The Post’s previous go-round on disability—Social Security disability benefits are incredibly hard to get. The vast majority of applicants are denied, and fewer than 4 in 10 Social Security Disability Insurance applicants are approved, even after all stages of appeal. For those who do receive benefits, they are modest—barely enough to bring many disability beneficiaries far above the federal poverty line.

A set of personal testimonials tacked on as an addendum to the article tells the real story of disability benefits. These reader stories offer a more accurate description of what these benefits mean to people who rely on them to make ends meet—and the immense challenges that living with a disability or chronic illness can bring. Kudos to The Post for including them—but disappointingly, they appear to be an afterthought that failed to penetrate the paper’s reporting on these programs.

This kind of reporting isn’t just stigmatizing and misleading—it’s dangerous. A flurry of anecdote-based media accounts in the late 1980s and early 1990s—which created the original “welfare queen” myth—paved the way for politicians to dismantle cash assistance for poor families with children in the name of “welfare reform.” In the 25 years since, the share of poor families with kids helped by the shell of a program that remains—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—has dropped from 8 in 10 to fewer than 1 in 4.

The current political climate, paired with The Washington Post’s reporting, is setting disability benefits to meet the same fate as cash assistance. Just last week, President Trump proposed a whopping $72 billion in cuts to these disability programs in his budget. Before this series, I would have expected better from The Post than to give cover to such cruel and heartless cuts.

For starters, The Post continues to over-count “working-age” beneficiaries by including more than half a million people over 65—even adding in some people who are more than 80 years old. Moreover, instead of using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS)—what the Census calls “the premier source for detailed information about the American people”—The Post uses a far less common data setThe CDC’s “Bridged-Race Population Estimates” data set was developed for the purpose of permitting “estimation and comparison of race-specific statistics.” It is used by researchers whose main goal is to calculate consistent birth and death rates for small-sized racial and ethnic groups—not at all what The Post’s analysis attempts to do. Researchers commonly adjust data for special purposes—but with the understanding that in doing so, they sacrifice the data’s accuracy in other ways. from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Compared to ACS data, these data undercount the number of working-age people in rural counties, which in turn jacks up The Post’s findings on the percentages of working-age people who are receiving disability benefits in these counties.

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But let’s not lose the forest for the trees here. Even using The Post’s flawed methods, they were only able to find one county—out of more than 3,100 counties nationwide—where the story’s central claim that “as many as one-third of working-age adults are receiving monthly disability checks” holds up. Not a single other county even comes close. In fact, The Post’s own analysis—which it has now made available in a public data file next to the story, yields an average rate of about 9.1 percent of working-age adults receiving benefits across rural counties—just three percentage points higher than the national average.*

And yet the article is framed as follows: “Across large swaths of the country,” the article still reads, “disability has become a force that has reshaped scores of mostly white, almost exclusively rural communities, where as many as one-third of working-age adults are receiving monthly disability checks.”

If by “large swaths” and “scores of… rural communities” The Post means McDowell County, West Virginia, population less than 21,000 residents—and nowhere else in America—then sure.

But the fact is there’s a word for using data this way: cherry-picking.

Moreover, if you swap out the unusual data set The Post chose for the aforementioned Census Bureau’s ACS data, you actually won’t find a single county in the U.S. where The Post’s central claim is true—and the dramatic percentages The Post’s map and other graphics depict start to look a lot less, well, dramatic.

Media should take great care in its coverage of critical programs like Social Security Disability Insurance. Reporting based on outliers—not to mention flawed data analysis—risks misleading the public and policymakers in ways that could jeopardize the economic wellbeing and even survival of millions of Americans with serious disabilities and severe illnesses who are already living on the financial brink.

Here’s hoping the rest of The Post’s disability series meets the highest bar for accuracy, even if that means less click-bait.

*The figure is the population-weighted average based on the working age population per The Post’s public data file. Researchers customarily use population-weighted averages to account for variations in county size.

Reality looks quite a bit different. As Shawn Fremstad and I have pointed out time and again, Social Security disability benefits are incredibly hard to get—fewer than 4 in 10 applicants are approved, even after all stages of appeal. To qualify for benefits, you must have one or more medically determinable physical or mental impairments expected to last at least 12 months, or to result in death. And many recipients do, in fact, die: 1 in 5 male and 1 in 6 female Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) beneficiaries die within 5 years of receiving benefits.

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But having a disability alone is not enough to qualify for benefits. You also have to prove that your impairment, or combination of impairments, leave you unable to do any job that exists in significant numbers in the national economy at a level where you could earn even $11,070 per year.

According to the Organisation for Economic Development, the United States has the most restrictive—and least generous—disability benefit system of all OECD member countries, apart from Korea. While some unemployed workers—like Desmond Spencer, whom the article profiles—may apply for disability benefits out of desperation as the article’s headline suggests, they’ll be left empty-handed if they don’t meet Social Security’s strict eligibility criteria. Consider the recent economic downturn. Application rates increased as unemployment rose, but approval rates dropped significantly as people who didn’t qualify were denied benefits. It’s also worth noting that the Post focuses on Spencer’s decision to apply for disability benefits—but ends there. What we’re not shown is him being denied, if and when he’s found not disabled enough to qualify.

The Post sidesteps the eligibility requirements for SSDI, and focuses on the recent increase in the number of people receiving benefits. But as the agency’s chief actuary has explained—and in fact predicted decades ago—the growth is mostly due to baby boomers aging into their high-disability years, women entering the workforce in greater numbers in the 1970s and 1980s (so now we are insured under Social Security in case of disability at nearly the same rates as men), and population growth. In fact, these three factors alone explain more than 90 percent of the increase in beneficiaries between 1970 and 2008.

Notably, the program’s growth has leveled off, slowing to its lowest rate in a quarter-century. It is projected to decline further in the coming years, as the baby boomers retire (a fact left out entirely by the Post).

Make no mistake, the Post’s article highlights a very real set of problems that call out for policymakers’ attention. For starters, the high rates of unemployment and pervasive economic hardship that plague rural communities, many of whose residents voted for Donald Trump in hopes that he would save or bring back their jobs. Then there is widespread lack of health insurance in rural areas. Spencer reports seeing his health decline following an injury he suffered on the job because “he’d never had health insurance.” It’s not a coincidence that he lives in Beaverton, Alabama—one of the states still refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

And third, there are the employment barriers many people with disabilities continue to face more than 25 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law. They range from outright discrimination; to lack of affordable, accessible housing and transportation; to policies that allow disabled workers to be paid less than minimum wage. These inequities scream out for policies that would give workers with disabilities a fair shot, rather than blaming the lifeboat for the flood.

Unfortunately, the Washington Post’s storyline—long pushed by conservative critics of Social Security—has been a favorite of many in the media going back several years. Notably, NPR ran similar reporting back in 2012, which was widely debunked—including by a bipartisan group of eight former Social Security commissioners who teamed up to write an open letter correcting the record.  But in large part because of misleading media coverage, many people are more familiar with myths about Social Security disability benefits—and beneficiaries—than they are with the facts.

This puts the people who rely on SSDI’s modest benefits at serious risk. While Trump has pledged not to cut Social Security, his budget director Mick Mulvaney has hardly been quiet about his intention to target Social Security Disability Insurance for cuts, portraying disability beneficiaries as less deserving than retirees.

Misleading media accounts that have made the disability beneficiary into the modern day “welfare queen” risk giving him cover to do just that.

Correction: The article originally stated that Lamar county is tied for the highest rate of disability benefit receipt. It is in the top 5% of the rural counties that the Washington Post analyzed. 

Inequality remains at historic heights, with the 20 richest Americans now holding more of the nation’s wealth than the bottom half of the population. Meanwhile, two branches of the nation’s government are now run by people who are committed to fighting for the wealthiest among us—instead of the 1 in 3 Americans struggling to make ends meet.

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A white nationalist president is sitting in the White House, hell-bent on further marginalizing anyone who doesn’t look or pray or love like him, and proclaiming a “mandate” to advance hateful policies despite having won just one-quarter of Americans’ votes.

Nearly every day we wake up, there’s a new assault on our civil rights. The president has declared war on the media, in favor of “alternative facts.” And the Supreme Court may soon hold five votes to overturn Roe v. Wade.

But momentum is growing every day to resist the new administration’s dangerous and divisive agenda.

Women’s marches across the globe the day after his inauguration drew crowds that dwarfed Trump’s own the day before. “Indivisible” groups modeling the Tea Party’s tactics in service of progressive resistance have sprung up in all 50 states and all 435 Congressional districts, descending upon town halls and demanding meetings with their members of Congress to ensure their voices are heard.

People of all colors and faiths have taken to the streets to stand with immigrants and Muslims, in opposition to hateful and xenophobic policies telling them they’re not welcome here. And earlier this week, protests broke out in cities across the U.S. just minutes after the administration announced that it would be reversing protections to enable transgender students to use the correct bathroom for their gender, as Americans called to #protecttranskids.

For those of us who believe in a level playing field; in protection from discrimination on the basis of color, creed, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity; in a safe and healthy environment; in a free press; in high-quality education for all students, whether rich or poor; in women’s rights to control our own bodies; and in health care as a right—for the next four years, resistance is our only option.

That’s why, starting today, TalkPoverty Radio—which launched two years ago as the only weekly radio show dedicated to covering poverty and inequality—will become Off-Kilter, a radio show and podcast by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Devoted TalkPoverty Radio listeners: Don’t worry, the show will be more of what you already know and love—just with an extra dose of resistance (and snark). You’ll still be able to find us in all the same places—We Act Radio, the Progressive Voices Network, and as a podcast on iTunes—plus a few new outlets as well. And I’ll still be hosting each week.

To kick off our first episode right, we’re joined by Sarah Jaffe, Nation Institute Fellow and author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (a history of American resistance movements, and required reading for the moment we’re living in); Ezra Levin, Executive Director of Indivisible and one of the authors of the Indivisible Guide; and Dorian Warren, President of Center for Community Change Action.

Thank you for listening so far. We hope you’ll join us moving forward.

Editor’s Note: Listen to the first show here, and find new episodes of Off-Kilter on Soundcloud, and follow the show on Facebook and Twitter. 

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.

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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.

For months, Trump has been all over the map: One day he’s pledging to provide “insurance for everybody,” the next he’s considering a so-called “replacement” plan that would pull the rug out from under some 21 million seniors, people with disabilities, children, and workers.

But on Wednesday, he took his cluelessness and unpredictability to a new low when he declared, “Whether it’s Medicaid block grants or whatever it may be, we have to make sure that people are taken care of.”

As fans of the 1980s cult classic The Princess Bride, there is only one appropriate response:

There are few surer ways to guarantee that people will NOT be “taken care of” than converting Medicaid into a block grant—a technical term that in reality means massive cuts.

Converting Medicaid into a block grant would end the program’s promise of health insurance for all eligible individuals. It would also slash the federal funding that states receive to run their Medicaid programs, forcing them either to make up the difference with money from their own coffers, or (much more likely) to make huge cuts in the coverage they provide to their residents. Faced with inadequate resources, states could have little choice but to institute waiting lists for coverage or cap enrollment—leaving millions of Americans without the care they need.

In fact, an Urban Institute analysis of a past GOP proposal to block grant Medicaid estimates that an additional 14 million to 20 million Americans would lose coverage under a Medicaid block grant—that’s on top of the 30 million who would lose coverage under ACA repeal and elimination of Medicaid expansion.

This isn’t a new idea. Congressional Republicans—including Representative Tom Price, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—have long had Medicaid block grants on their wish list. But what’s still unclear, as Trump swings recklessly from promising universal coverage to considering slashing health care for people who can’t afford insurance, is whether the President-elect is actually changing his opinion or if he is just so ignorant on health care policy that he doesn’t understand what he’s saying.

In either case, we can be sure of one thing: Trump’s willingness to embrace life-threatening policies without even making an effort to understand them is:

But you wouldn’t know that from reading the New York Times’ front-page story last Friday. The headline announced “In the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household: Lots of Soda,” and the article was flanked by photos of a grocery cart overflowing with 2-liter bottles of soft drinks and a store aisle that is nothing but a wall of soda.

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The actual conclusion of USDA’s study—“both food stamp recipients and other households generally made similar purchases”—is buried 15 paragraphs down from the sensationalized headline. The article did not initially link to or even name the study.

Soon after publication, several experts took to social media to highlight the study’s actual findings.

Joe Soss, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, pointed out that the article’s main argument—that households receiving nutrition assistance spend vastly greater shares of their grocery budgets on soda compared with other households—is directly contradicted by the report’s actual finding. The difference was incredibly slight: 5 percent versus 4 percent of a household’s grocery spending. The Times also reported that a misleadingly high 9 percent of budgets were dedicated to soda, because the article conflated soda with “sweetened drinks” (which includes many juices).

Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist, noted that the article failed to mention the food item where USDA found the biggest difference in spending: baby food. (Shame on those struggling households for feeding their children.)

Beyond the article’s inaccuracies, there is a broader problem with this kind of reporting. It reinforces an “us versus them” narrative—as though “the poor” are a stagnant class of Americans permanently dependent on aid programs. The New York Times’ own past reporting has shown that this simply isn’t the case. Research by Mark Rank, which the paper featured in 2013, shows that four in five Americans will face at least a year of significant economic insecurity during their working years. And analysis by the White House Council on Economic Advisers finds that 70 percent of Americans will turn to a means-tested safety net program such as nutrition assistance at some point during their lives.

Most families who turn to income supports like SNAP do so only temporarily, and often during periods of crisis (such as loss of a job or a medical emergency). Since today’s low wages make it nearly impossible for families to save for these emergencies, which all of us inevitably face, benefits like SNAP provide critical support. These programs help put them back on their feet—and once they are, they stop their participation.

Americans’ high level of sugar consumption, and the related health consequences, is an important discussion to have. But using a false and divisive narrative that suggests that such consumption is chiefly the purview of people who need to turn to nutrition assistance plays directly into harmful stereotypes, and risks undermining a critical program that protects nearly 5 million Americans from poverty each year. These kinds of narratives have long served as the backbone of efforts to cut safety net benefits, like SNAP, which not only help struggling families in the short-term but also boost economic mobility in the long-term, while stabilizing the overall economy.

The current political climate makes this article particularly damaging and irresponsible. It provides cover for House Republicans, led by Speaker Ryan (R-WI) and President-elect Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), who are poised to move forward with long-held plans to make deep cuts to nutrition assistance and other vital supports. It also enables misguided Republican governors who have long tried to limit what households receiving assistance can spend their SNAP benefits on. These so-called “junk food bans” may sound well-intentioned, but can end up ensnaring healthy, inexpensive staples like canned tuna, dried beans, and potato salad.

If the goal is to create a nutrition assistance program that will encourage healthier eating, cuts to SNAP are exactly the wrong approach. Research shows that increasing SNAP’s modest benefits leads to healthier eating. This comes as little surprise, given that healthy food is generally more expensive. But since SNAP’s modest benefits already run out before the end of the month for most households, it is a luxury that many families cannot afford.

Maybe the New York Times could look into that.

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Rebecca Vallas: You’re probably best known for your career as a TV writer and producer from popular shows like All in the Family and The Jeffersons to Sanford and Sons. But you later branched out to advocacy work, founding People for the American Way in 1981. What drove you to enter the advocacy world in that kind of a formal way?

Norman Lear: Well in 1980, there was a proliferation of TV evangelicals, the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Jimmy Swaggarts and so forth. They were mixing politics and religion, and I’ve been scared of the mix of politics and religion since I was nine years old. That’s when I took civics in school, and I was so in love with the founding fathers. I loved those guarantees of freedom and equal justice. I loved what we read about who we were and the promises we made.

RV: I’m struck by the People for the American Way’s organizational founding mission statement. You describe the organization’s goal as in part, “to promote a sense of community and tolerance and compassion for others.” What lessons might we draw from that, as we look back on one of the ugliest and most polarizing campaigns in recent memory?

NL: Well, in a sense, isn’t that mission statement representing organizations—left and right, as a matter of fact—that all cling to the wish of equality for all? As a matter of fact, I often think the right has taken those ideas and those words. If one asked oneself “who does the flag belong to, left or right,” I think the answer would have to be right. Who does God belong to? Right, if you had to make a choice.

I don’t believe that the right has been behaving in an American fashion or a Godly fashion, certainly not any more than the left. But I fault us on the left, for letting God go, for letting the flag go, for letting patriotism go. We’re not as at good at bumper sticker stuff as the right is. Our hearts and souls are there, but I wish our asses were too.

RV: During this election cycle I think many have actually pointed to Archie Bunker, the character that you wrote for All in the Family. He was a staunch conservative, a blue-collar worker, who wasn’t exactly shy about his views when it came to minorities and women and LGBT individuals and on and on. The show was set some 40 years ago, but people have been seeing Archie Bunker all over the 2016 presidential election.

NL: The Archie Bunker you just described, he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He just came out of fear. A fear of progress, a fear of forward movement—the idea of a black family moving in next door scared the hell out of him. That’s not what’s happening right now. We don’t have an Archie Bunker, ‘cause that would suggest heart and soul.

I don’t think the country knows Donald Trump really well yet, despite the celebrity. Or maybe better said, we know him the way we know all our celebrities, which is to say we know about them from the tube, from lights, from the glare, from the glisten. But do we really know them? Not the way the media plays it.

RV: Well even if it isn’t fair to make a comparison between Donald Trump, our next president, and Archie Bunker, do you see glimmers among his supporters, or some of them at least?

NL: Well, yes, I think there’s a lot of the kind of sounds Archie Bunker made coming from the supporters. They don’t know the issues and they have reason to be afraid. This is where I thought of Archie, and of Donald Trump from the very beginning, as the middle finger of the American right hand. They were feeling desperate for leadership.

You know, this is a republic that depends on an informed citizenry. And we don’t have national conversations that really inform people. We’ve got media, and in the case of 17 people running for the Republican candidacy, just people bumper stickering each other. By “bumper stickering” I mean using these short phrases that wrap the other guy. We haven’t had an honest discussion of what’s at stake here.

RV: For people who do want to have that honest discussion of what’s at stake, and for people who care about addressing poverty and tackling inequality, there are a whole range of related issues that you explore in the America Divided series. Where do we go from here and what can we take away from this election?

NL: More of America Divided, more of what you’re doing exactly at this moment, more conversation, and more honesty.

You’re talking to a man who is well known for his views and everything else, but I was thinking, when I was with Dolores Huerta, who comes out of the farm worker’s movement, very close to Chavez, and she’s been active, gloriously active to this moment. And she’s been arrested like twenty times, for people’s protest.

So you’re talking to a man now, and this man is listening to himself, who’s never been arrested. So I want to dust myself off. For all my spouting, for everything I’ve done, why have I never been arrested? I’ve cared enough, I’ve wished to protest enough, so maybe in my 94th year I’ll get to do that too.

RV: Well, I’d be happy to join you if you let me know where to go and when.

A lot of people have been describing this particular election and the election result as really categorically different from any other presidential election we’ve had. You’ve seen a lot of elections in your lifetime. Is it fair to categorize this election, and the outcome and the next president, as truly unique?

NL: Well it is truly unique, but it isn’t alone. When Al Gore lost, it was the Supreme Court who decided that he would not be the next president. That was truly unique. When Nixon came into the presidency and when he left the presidency, my God wasn’t that truly unique! So we’ve been here before. And we’ll get through it, we’ll get past unique.

RV: A lot of the discussion throughout the entire election season and also going back into the primary, has been about deep economic anger. Anger about inequality, anger about kitchen table issues, not being able to make ends meet, and the rising income instability across this country. What is your read about what progressives should take away from the final outcome here?

NL: Progressives should take away that we have been an utter failure. And that we talk our game, but we’re not sufficiently active or dynamic or truly honest. We have a lot to learn.

If we see Trump making mistakes like who he might appoint to the Supreme Court, we can stand up as one. I’ll get arrested protesting someplace. And everybody does his or her part in the same fashion. We’ve got to be heard from. We’ve got to remember eternal vigilance, eternal and daily vigilance. This is the price of liberty.

RV: You purchased, some number of years ago, one of the first published copies of the Declaration of Independence, for many millions of dollars. And you did that because you said that you “wanted to help re-acquaint America with its birth certificate.” Why did you do that, and do you think there is anything to take away from that at this particular moment in our nation’s history?

NL: Because it was like a moving civics class. I’d like to join a fight, if there is anyone listening to me, to get the civics back in the classroom. To teach American kids what America is all about. Who we are as Americans. Because we lost all that.

We were in love with our country when we understood what it was to be all about. What its founders declared it wished it be. We’re not taught that in school anymore. I wish to God we could get a movement that gets civics back in the classroom, so we learn who we’re supposed to be and we start taking care of ourselves and each other that way.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Listen to the most recent episode of TalkPoverty Radio for the full interview.

As antipoverty advocates, we’ve become so accustomed to poverty staying stagnant—or getting worse—since the turn of this century that we barely know how to celebrate this kind of progress properly.  So, let’s take a minute to appreciate it.

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The U.S. poverty rate saw one of the largest single-year declines in almost 50 years. After years of stagnant incomes the typical American household got a raise for the first time in nearly a decade, with median household income rising more in one year than ever recorded. Meanwhile, the share of Americans without health insurance dropped to a record low, making 2015 the first time we’ve seen simultaneous improvements on all three fronts—poverty, median household income, and health insurance coverage—since 1999.

The improvements we’re marking this week didn’t happen by accident—they’re the result of policies that work. And with the wrong policy choices, we could see these important gains erased.

Take the minimum wage. State and local minimum wage increases likely played a big role in the decline in poverty and increase in income that we saw in 2015—as well as the faster wage growth among African American and Hispanic workers, and women (all of whom are disproportionately likely to be low-wage workers). They also likely helped the gender wage gap hit 80 cents for the first time ever, and led to even stronger progress on the wage gap for African American women. And in states that enacted minimum wage increases, low-wage workers saw faster wage growth than workers in states where minimum wages stayed flat.

On the health insurance front, the Affordable Care Act remains the gift that keeps on giving. The tremendous gains in coverage that we saw in 2014 and 2015 brought the nation to a record low uninsured rate of 9.1%. But here too, variation across states demonstrates the difference that policy choices make. The average share of uninsured individuals in states that hadn’t expanded Medicaid by January 2015 was 12.3%, compared to just 7.2% in states that had adopted Medicaid expansion. It is clear that the national gains would have been even stronger if 19 states weren’t still refusing to expand their Medicaid programs.

And let’s not forget the safety net. Census data released yesterday using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), an alternative measure that takes into account critical poverty-reducing investments such as nutrition assistance and tax credits for working families, reminds us how important these and other programs are to cutting poverty and mitigating hardship. According to the SPM, without Social Security nearly 27 million more Americans would have been poor in 2015—that would be an increase of more than 58% in the share of poor Americans. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program protected 4.6 million Americans from poverty. And the Earned Income Tax Credit and low-income portion of the Child Tax Credit together accounted for 9.2 million fewer individuals living in poverty last year.

We’ve got to keep moving the needle in the right direction, particularly as we have yet to return to pre-recession levels of poverty and incomes. And despite strong progress on the national poverty rate, poverty among children, female-headed families, African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and people with disabilities remains dramatically higher than the overall national rate.

But the big takeaway from yesterday’s data that we should all be shouting about is that we know we can make great progress in cutting poverty—if we make the right choices. Now is the time to double down on the policies we know make a difference, such as making job-creating investments in infrastructure, research, and education; raising the minimum wage and further strengthening tax credits for working families; ensuring paid leave, childcare, and fair schedules, as well as closing the gender wage gap; protecting and strengthening vital safety net programs; and removing barriers to employment for people with criminal records and their families, and workers with disabilities.

Today we should all celebrate the progress we are finally making. But tomorrow, we must use this news to inform the work we do together in the months and years ahead. Now is the time to recommit to making the right choices so that we don’t turn back.

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?

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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.

But this is just one aspect of a broadly shared recognition that America’s four-decade-long experiment with mass incarceration has been a failure. We lock up a greater share of our citizens than any other developed nation, at an annual cost of more than $80 billion. We do little to prepare individuals behind bars for their eventual release, yet are surprised when two-thirds return to jail or prison.

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Certain populations—including communities of color, residents of high-poverty neighborhoods, and LGBT individuals—have been particularly hard-hit. But all too rarely discussed is the impact the criminal justice system has on Americans with disabilities.

Over the past six decades, there has been a widespread closure of state mental hospitals and other facilities that serve people with disabilities—a shift often referred to as deinstitutionalization. Between 1955 and 1994 the number of Americans residing in such institutions dropped sharply, from nearly 560,000 to about 70,000. Deinstitutionalization is widely regarded as a positive and necessary development, but it wasn’t accompanied by the public investment needed to ensure the availability of community-based alternatives. As a result, the United States has traded one form of mass institutionalization for another, with jails and prisons now serving as social service providers of last resort.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, state and federal prison inmates are nearly three times as likely—and jail inmates are more than four times as likely—to report having a disability as the nonincarcerated population. One in five prison inmates have a serious mental illness. In fact, there are now three times as many people with mental health conditions in federal and state prisons and jails as there are in state mental hospitals.

Mass incarceration of people with disabilities is not only unjust, unethical, and cruel—it’s also expensive. Community-based treatment and prevention services cost far less than housing an individual behind bars. In Los Angeles County, the average cost of jailing an individual with serious mental illness exceeds $48,500 per year. By comparison, the yearly price tag for providing assertive community treatment and supportive housing—one of the most intensive, comprehensive, and successful intervention models in use today—amounts to less than $20,500, just two-fifths the cost of jail.

In addition to facing disproportionate rates of incarceration, people with disabilities are also especially likely to be the victims of police violence. Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Kristiana Coignard, and Robert Ethan Saylor—all individuals with disabilities whose tragic stories of being killed at the hands of police officers garnered significant recent national media attention—are but four high-profile examples of a sadly commonplace occurrence. While data on police-involved killings are limited, one study estimates that people with disabilities comprise between one-third and one-half of all individuals killed by law enforcement. And according to an investigation by The Washington Post, one-quarter of the individuals shot to death by police officers in 2015 were people with mental health conditions.

What’s more, once people with disabilities are incarcerated, they are often illegally deprived of necessary medical care, supports, services, and accommodations. A recent report by the Amplifying Voices of Inmates with Disabilities (AVID) Prison Project highlights numerous examples of inmates denied access to needed medications, prosthetic limbs, and hearing aids; individuals with cognitive impairments unable to access medical treatment because they were unable to fill out request forms; inmates who are deaf missing medication delivery because of lack of accommodations; inmates who have sustained injuries due to lack of accessible toilets and showers; and more.

Prison and jail inmates with disabilities are also at particular risk of mistreatment at the hands of guards and other correctional employees. A 2015 report by Human Rights Watch documents an epidemic of “unnecessary, excessive, and even malicious use of force” in U.S. prisons and jails that targets inmates with mental health conditions, through harsh tactics such as chemical sprays and electric stun devices; strapping of inmates to beds and chairs for days at a time; and physical violence resulting in broken jaws, noses, and ribs, as well as “lacerations, second degree burns, deep bruises, and damaged internal organs,” and even death.

Moreover, many inmates with disabilities are held in solitary confinement as a substitute for appropriate accommodations. This practice continues despite a large and growing body of research documenting that even short stays in solitary can have severe and long-lasting consequences for people with disabilities, and particularly those with mental health conditions. Even individuals who had not previously lived with mental health conditions experience significant psychological distress following solitary confinement, as the tragic but all-too-common case of Kalief Browder brought to light last year. Browder died by suicide after being held for nearly two years in solitary confinement in Rikers Island on charges, later dismissed, that he had stolen a backpack.

Seventeen years after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Olmstead v. L.C.—which held that unjustified segregation of people with disabilities in institutional settings is unlawful discrimination in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act—it is long past time that we brought the mass incarceration of people with disabilities to an end.

First and foremost, reversing this shameful trend will require meaningful investment in our nation’s social service and mental health treatment infrastructure to ensure availability of community-based alternatives. That way, jails and prisons will no longer be forced to serve as social service providers of last resort. But it will also require including disability as a key part of the criminal justice reform conversation taking place in Congress, and in states and cities across the United States.

Editor’s Note: A new report by the Center for American Progress, Disabled Behind Bars: The Mass Incarceration of People With Disabilities in America’s Jails and Prisons, will be released at a White House Forum on Monday, July 18. A livestream of the event is available here.

My conservative counterpart on the show—Robert Rector of the right-wing Heritage Foundation—made his views on poverty clear early on in the conversation when he lamented that our aid programs are “too generous.” Believe it or not, he went on, poor people in America have basic household appliances such as refrigerators, stoves, ovens, microwaves, and—gasp! —air conditioning. He accused folks on the left—and the nonpartisan Census Bureau—of “exaggerating” the state of poverty in the U.S.

These are hardly new talking points for Rector. He’s been putting out “research” on how good poor Americans supposedly have it for years. Back in 2011, Rector’s brazenly titled report, Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an X-Box: What is Poverty in the United States Today? got the attention of Stephen Colbert, who gave it the treatment it deserves on The Colbert Report: “A refrigerator and a microwave? They can preserve and heat food?  Ooh la la!  I guess the poor are too good for mold and trichinosis.”

All joking aside, the fact that Rector is still peddling this line reflects just how out of touch right-wing views on poverty are today.

For starters, are our aid programs “too generous?”

As I noted on Washington Journal, Rector should try telling that to the more than 6 million Americans whose only income is food stamps—which provides just $1.40 per person per meal in nutrition assistance. Or the 3 in 4 low-income families who are eligible for housing assistance but don’t receive it and can spend 60, 70, or 80 percent of their income on rent and utilities each month, while they remain on decades-long waiting lists for aid. Rector should see how his line goes over with the 3 in 4 families with children in poverty who are not helped by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), because it was converted to a flat-funded block grant that’s lost one-third of its purchasing power since 1996. Or even with the small fraction of families lucky enough to receive TANF—because in no state are benefits greater than half the federal poverty line.

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And are poor people in America secretly living high on the hog?

Most observers view the austere federal poverty line as an inadequate measure of hardship. Experts say a family of four needs an annual income of $50,000 to achieve an adequate but basic standard of living—more than twice the poverty line for a family of four, which is a measly $24,000.

By that measure, the number of people in this country struggling to make ends meet far exceeds the 47 million Americans with incomes below the poverty line; it amounts to nearly 1 in 3 Americans—more than 105 million people—living on the economic brink today. This much larger figure is confirmed by recent survey data. In a report released last month by the Federal Reserve Board, one-third of American adults say that they struggle to make ends meet.

It is clear that after decades of growing income inequality, economic hardship can hardly be described as an “us and them” phenomenon. With working families facing flat and declining wages and gains from economic growth increasingly concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, economic instability is now a widespread experience.

Rector’s comments on Washington Journal made clear his proposed solution: just deny the existence of poverty and hardship in America. If poor families are actually doing just fine—they have refrigerators and microwaves, after all—then not only does that free up policymakers to slash aid programs, it also removes any need to boost wages or enact any other policies that would cut poverty and make it easier to get ahead.

But for the 105 million Americans struggling to get by, the fact that they are fortunate enough to be able to refrigerate—and heat!—their food offers cold comfort.

It’s not just Heritage who’s out of touch. Last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan released a long-awaited poverty plan as part of his “A Better Way” House GOP policy agenda. He unveiled the plan at a drug rehab center, offering a not-so-subtle reminder of his views on the causes of poverty.

As Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D-WI) pointed out at a Center for American Progress event last week, if Ryan truly understood poverty in America, rather than seeing struggling individuals as “broken people,” he would have given the speech at a McDonald’s, surrounded by low-wage workers struggling because of a broken economy.

Even more out of touch were the comments made by Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) at the plan’s release—he actually referred to people living in poverty as “untapped, dormant assets.”

Speaker Ryan and his colleagues’ limited understanding of poverty is also evident in the “A Better Way” plan itself, which echoes many of the themes found in their previous budgets. (This year’s House GOP budget, for example, got three-fifths of its cuts from programs that serve low- and moderate-income people, while protecting tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.)

In addition to slashing housing assistance in the midst of a national affordable housing crisis, and proposing to cut school lunches, their solutions to poverty include legalizing bad financial advice by rolling back the Obama Administration’s “fiduciary rule” and blocking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed rule to protect cash-strapped borrowers from predatory payday lenders.

Perhaps even more notable than what’s in the plan is what it leaves out: any policies to create jobs or boost wages. Indeed, Ryan made clear in the Q&A following his speech that despite his previous claims to want to “push wages up,” he and his colleagues remain steadfastly opposed to raising the minimum wage.

Bipartisan interest in tackling poverty and expanding opportunity would be a welcome development. But instead of putting our heads in the sand, policymakers on both sides of the aisle must acknowledge the very real experience of poverty in America—and the many structural barriers that stand in the way of getting ahead.

That starts by admitting that poverty exists.

Rebecca here.

A few weeks ago I signed up for one of your credit cards. Just a few weeks after the card came in the mail, I got an email alert from you about a tip I had left. Here’s what it said:

We noticed you gave an extra generous tip on March 14, 2016, for your service at Mackey’s… We hope you left this tip because your service was exceptional. So if it’s not a mistake—or if you’ve already addressed it—there’s nothing you need to do. Have concerns about the tip? Just sign in to look at the charge in more detail. You can also contact Mackey’s directly if you need to…

I looked closer at your email to see I’d left $5 on a $14 bill.

While my tip may have exceeded 20% of the bill (the percentage conventionally considered to be a “good” tip), it was just an extra two bucks—and well within the realm of what I consider reasonable.

As a former server—and as someone who spends her days working to fight poverty and boost opportunity in America—I was struck by the great irony of receiving these emails in the weeks leading up to the 25^th anniversary of the last time Congress raised the tipped minimum wage.

.@CapitalOne apparently doesn’t believe its customers could possibly care about tipping their servers well pic.twitter.com/1lrNlm2NKe

— Rebecca Vallas (@rebeccavallas) March 19, 2016

I was still reeling from your initial email alert when my “extra generous” tipping was flagged again. This time I had I left a whopping $4 tip on an $11 bill.

.@capitalone straight up trolling me now IT’S $4 ON $11 FOLKS pic.twitter.com/1OwaPYSeYP

— Rebecca Vallas (@rebeccavallas) March 20, 2016

And the emails kept coming every day for the rest of the week.

I get that somewhere in there you may have good intentions. Indeed, in response to my publicly sharing your tip-shaming email alerts, your customer service department tweeted that you “like to lean on the safe side when it comes to possible fraudulent activity.”

But with April 1st marking 25 years since Congress last raised the tipped minimum wage, now seems as good a time as any to explain why I tip how I do—and why your email alerts aren’t just meddlesome and offensive, but part of the problem.

In the U.S., the 4.3 million Americans who work for tips are subject to a much lower federal wage floor than other workers. Whereas the federal minimum wage—which is itself a poverty wage—sits at $7.25 per hour, the tipped minimum wage is an abysmal $2.13 per hour, just 30 percent of the full federal minimum. And while the federal minimum wage has been increased five times since 1991, policymakers have left the tipped minimum wage to stay stuck at $2.13.

This anemic wage floor leaves workers at restaurants, hair salons, nail salons, valet parkers, airport attendants, bellhops, and food delivery workers—anyone working for tips—economically vulnerable. In fact, 12.8% of workers in predominantly tipped occupations live below the federal poverty line, and nearly 15% of restaurant servers are poor, compared to just 6.7% of the overall workforce. And nearly half rely on public assistance to make ends meet.

These disparities aren’t inevitable. Indeed, the contrast between states that have a subminimum tipped wage and those that pay tipped workers the same as other workers shows the difference that policy can make. Just 10.2% of restaurant servers are poor in states that have no subminimum tipped wage compared with 18% in states with a $2.13 per hour tipped wage.

Importantly, it’s not just low pay that makes it hard to get by on the tipped minimum wage. As anyone who’s ever been a restaurant server knows all too well, working for tips is inherently unpredictable. While other workers are paid the same rate for every hour they work, tipped workers’ income can fluctuate day to day and week to week, subject to the vagaries of busy and slow shifts, good and bad weather, a booming economy versus hard times when potential customers are tighter with their pocketbooks, and more. It can be incredibly difficult to budget, plan ahead, and save for the future when you can’t predict your income.

Contrary to claims made by some in the restaurant industry—the main opponents of raising the tipped minimum wage—growth of restaurant jobs in states that pay tipped workers the same as other workers is on par with that of the rest of the country. In fact, three of the states with the top growth—Nevada, Washington, and Oregon—do not have a tipped wage below the minimum wage. Restaurants themselves can even benefit from raising wages for their workers. In addition to boosting productivity, one study of restaurant workers found that higher wages cut employee turnover by as much as half, shrinking training costs substantially.

Policymakers at all levels of government are working to address this. Legislation championed by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA) would gradually raise the tipped minimum wage to 70% of the federal minimum, an important step in the right direction. Meanwhile, as the Fight for $15 movement continues to gain steam in states and cities across the U.S., there is widespread support for raising or phasing out altogether the tipped minimum wage as well, with 8 states taking action in just the past two years to boost wages for tipped workers.

Yet, Capital One: While these legislative actions are positive steps, some—hopefully many—of your customers who can afford it may choose to tip more generously than 20%, in recognition of how hard it is to get by on the tipped minimum wage. As sociologist Kathy Edin and economist Jonathan Skinner noted recently, tipping well—while hardly a panacea for poverty and inequality—is one concrete step that people can take to make a difference in the lives of low-wage workers who rely on tips.

In closing, I’ll leave you with a few ideas for how you can put your algorithms that trigger email alerts to better use.

What about sending emails with facts about the tipped minimum wage to customers who are routinely cruddy tippers?

@rebeccavallas @CapitalOne Does it go the other way? “We noticed you left a sh*tty tip. Did you know that servers only earn $2.13 an hour?”

— Dan Crawford (@dpcrawf) March 21, 2016

Or alerting your customers when businesses they patronize commit wage theft?

Or letting us know when companies fail to top off workers’ pay when tips don’t get them up to the federal minimum wage, as employers are required by law to do?

@rebeccavallas @CapitalOne Don’ you wish we consumers had an automatic way of contacting companies every time they underpaid their workers?

— Joel Berg (@Joelsberg) March 22, 2016

But if nothing else, please stop hectoring customers like me for doing what we can to tackle poverty and inequality.

Sincerely,

Rebecca D. Vallas

***

The price of nice nails

by Sarah Maslin Nir, New York Times

This two-part series exposes the dark world of nail salons, from wage theft to poisonous working conditions. Soon after this reporting, Governor Cuomo (D-NY) signed legislation providing greater protections to workers in New York’s nail salons.

Why New Orleans’ black residents are still underwater after Katrina

by Gary Rivlin, New York Times

In this compelling excerpt from his book, Katrina After the Flood, Rivlin explores New Orleans 10 years after Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of Alden J. McDonald, who founded one of the Deep South’s first black-owned banks. His examination reveals how New Orleans’ African-American families continue to struggle and how many remain priced out of returning home.

The remarkably high odds you’ll be poor at some point in your life

by Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post’s Wonkblog

A little-known fact about poverty in America is that “the poor” are not some static group of people living in poverty year after year. Badger and Ingraham smartly bust that myth and explain how economic hardship is a surprisingly common experience.

How companies make millions off lead-poisoned, poor blacks

by Terrence McCoy, Washington Post

McCoy’s important reporting gives voice to one of the most disturbing revelations of the year: companies are getting rich by swindling Baltimore’s lead-poisoned, poor black residents out of structured settlements for pennies on the dollar.

Under cover of darkness, female janitors face rape and assault

by Bernice Yeung, Center for Investigative Reporting

Yeung’s reporting sheds light on the silent epidemic of sexual assault among female janitors working the night shift. Through powerful interviews with survivors, Yeung underscores how our civil rights and criminal justice systems are struggling to provide justice.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Public defenders

HBO

John Oliver spent much of 2015 uncovering the injustices permeating our nation’s criminal justice system, including this hilarious—and horrifying—look at our massively underfunded public defense system.

The deep, troubling roots of Baltimore’s decline

by Jamelle Bouie, Slate

In the wake of the unrest in Baltimore spurred by Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of police officers, Jamelle Bouie pens this thoughtful essay looking at the anger that “remains, fueled by recurring—and almost unending—deprivation.”

The myth of welfare’s corrupting influence on the poor

by Eduardo Porter, New York Times

Porter takes a critical look at the legacy of “welfare reform” and debunks the common myth—embraced by prominent conservatives such as Rep. Paul Ryan—that public assistance fuels dependency.

Michigan punishes mom for her daughter’s brain cancer

by Justin Miller, The Daily Beast

It was no accident that Martha was cut off public assistance after her 12-year-old daughter was too sick to attend school due to cancer and a stroke; Miller’s illuminating reporting underscores how Martha’s family is one of hundreds who have lost needed aid since 2012 due to Michigan’s “Parental Responsibility Act”—a misguided attempt to punish aid recipients if their children miss school.

The black family in the age of mass incarceration

by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report The Negro Family kicked off our nation’s failed experiment with mass incarceration, the peerless Ta-Nehisi Coates unpacks the role of the criminal justice system in “destroying the black family.”

An atlas of upward mobility shows path out of poverty

by David Leonhardt, Amanda Cox, and Claire Cain Miller, New York Times’ The Upshot

A child’s zip code can determine her life chances. Leonhardt, Cox, and Miller unpack a watershed study showing how neighborhoods affect children and how “moving to opportunity” can boost a child’s chances at upward mobility. (Don’t miss the interactives on how your area compares.)

Texas sends poor teens to adult jail for skipping school

by Kendall Taggart and Alex Campbell, BuzzFeed

This story follows Serena, one of more than one thousand Texas teenagers (most of whom are poor and black or Hispanic) who have been locked up in jailed in the past three years on charges stemming from missing school. Soon after this reporting, the state of Texas decriminalized truancy.

Warren Buffett’s mobile home empire preys on the poor

by Dan Wagner and Mike Baker, Center for Public Integrity

This powerful joint investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and the Seattle Times uncovered a spate of predatory and deceptive practices perfected by the latest players to profit from poverty: the mobile home industry.

Why small debts matter so much to black lives

by Paul Kiel, ProPublica

About one-quarter of African-American families have less than $5 in reserve. Kiel’s groundbreaking analysis reveals how the racial wealth gap not only renders communities of color especially vulnerable to predatory lending and aggressive debt collection practices, but also magnifies racial disparities in discriminatory policing practices and their accompanying fees and fines.

Poor women in the United States don’t have abortion rights

by Maya Dusenbery, Pacific Standard

This important piece looks at how the ban on using Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions has kept many poor women from being able to end their pregnancies—and the far-reaching economic consequences of “forcing poor women into childbirth.” .

‘I put in white tenants’: The grim, racist (and likely illegal) methods of one Brooklyn landlord

by DW Gibson, New York Magazine

This harrowing article, excerpted from Gibson’s book The Edge Becomes the Center, uncovers the “racist and likely illegal” schemes of a Brooklyn landlord who paid black tenants thousands of dollars to leave his building.

What’s in a prison meal?

by Alysia Santo and Lisa Iaboni, The Marshall Project

Part of The Marshall Project’s Life Inside series, this piece reveals how inmates in some correctional facilities are literally starving—some describe licking syrup packets to curb their hunger—as legislators seek to slash food costs.

I get food stamps and I’m not ashamed—I’m angry

by Christine Gilbert, Vox

This must-read essay from a woman receiving nutrition assistance is a poignant and in-your-face missive to everyone who has ever said poor people are lazy.

Almost half of all American workers make less than $15 an hour

by Michelle Chen, The Nation

Three years after the #Fightfor15 movement was born out of the first Fast Food Forward strikes, Chen—one of the best labor reporters out there today—explores how the fight for a living wage “is not just for economic survival but for solutions to the inequality dividing communities.”

The homeless man who works in the Senate

by Catherine Rampell, Washington Post

In an eye-opening call for raising wages, Catherine Rampell introduces us to 63-year-old Charles Gladden, who has been homeless for decades despite working in the cafeteria of the U.S. Senate.

Authors’ note: To keep things fair, articles in which Center for American Progress was quoted were excluded from consideration for this list.

While Ryan pushed many of his favorite myths about the safety net, he also inadvertently made one of the strongest cases to date for raising the minimum wage and investing in policies to help people balance work and caregiving.

Indeed, in his grand finale, Ryan called on Congress to:

“Push wages up. Push the cost of living down. Get people off the sidelines. I could think of no better way to restore confidence in the American economy.”

Bravo, Speaker Ryan. We couldn’t agree more. Now, if only we knew how to do these things…

Oh, wait. We do!

How can we “push wages up”?

It’s called raising the minimum wage. And luckily for Speaker Ryan, over 75 percent of Americans support raising the federal minimum wage to $12.50 by 2020.

But wait, there’s more.

As Speaker Ryan so eloquently points out, our minimum wage is a poverty wage and not nearly enough for working parents to support their families, leaving many with no choice but to turn to public assistance to make ends meet.

“So say you’re a single mom with one kid. You’re making minimum wage. You’re on food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and other assistance.”

So, by raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 as the Murray-Scott bill would do, not only would 35 million Americans get a raise, but we would also save nearly $53 billion over the next 10 years in SNAP alone.  

Unfortunately Ryan has voted against raising the minimum wage at least 10 times since he’s been in office.

So, how can we “push the cost of living down”?

Paul Ryan is correct when he says that the cost of living is rising. But families with young kids often face the tightest squeeze of all. Childcare expenses have skyrocketed; the average annual cost for center-based childcare is now more than tuition and fees for a public 4-year college in 31 states and DC. And low-income families spend an average of nearly 14% of their annual income on diapers alone.

What these families need is affordable, high-quality childcare—which also helps parents work—and a stronger Child Tax Credit to help alleviate the squeeze of stagnant wages and rising costs.

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And, finally, how can we “get people off the sidelines”?

While there’s obviously a lot that policymakers can and should do on this one—including investing in job creation and removing barriers to employment for people with criminal records and people with disabilities, a major piece of the puzzle is ensuring access to paid family and medical leave.

Speaker Ryan has led by example on this important issue—well, for himself anyway. But, in opposing legislation that would help families access up to 12 weeks of paid family leave, he’s left other working parents high and dry.

The U.S. stands alone among developed nations in failing to guarantee access to any form of paid family leave. But research has shown that when women are able to take paid leave, they are more likely to be working; to have higher wages 9-12 months after their child is born; and to avoid turning to public assistance.

***

Interestingly, a major theme of Speaker Ryan’s speech was about how conservatives need to push new ideas to cut poverty and boost opportunity. “Our number-one goal for the next year,” he said, “is to put together a complete alternative to the Left’s agenda.”

Unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell him that his speech didn’t actually contain any new ideas on tackling poverty and boosting opportunity – only the same old stuff conservatives have been pushing for years such as block grants and cuts to effective programs.

Instead, at his poverty summit on January 9th, Speaker Ryan should endorse raising the minimum wage and adopting work-family policies. To borrow his hashtag of choice, that would make us a #ConfidentAmerica.

For most returning citizens, release from a correctional facility doesn’t mark the end of their punishment. Individuals are commonly sent back into a community with only a few dollars, a bus ticket, and a few days’ worth of any needed medications. Many have no housing to return to—and living with relatives could put their families at risk of eviction due to draconian “one strike and you’re out” public housing policies. Finding a job is unlikely to happen overnight—or even within the first year of release—because of the great challenge of securing employment if one has a criminal record. And in many states, people convicted of felony drug offenses too often go hungry as they are barred for life from accessing the meager assistance that income and nutrition aid programs provide.

To make matters worse, many returning citizens face debts in the tens of thousands of dollars due to child support arrears. In many states, these payments accumulate while individuals are behind bars, even though they have little or no way to earn income. And in a growing nationwide trend, states and localities are closing budget shortfalls through tactics such as charging inmates “pay-to-stay” fees for incarceration, collection fees, and even fees for entering a payment plan to pay off their debts. With funding for public defenders falling drastically short, some courts are even charging public defender fees for exercising one’s constitutional right to counsel.

In addition to trapping returning citizens in poverty, these financial debts can be a path to re-incarceration for those who are unable to pay. These and other obstacles to successful reentry are a big reason why more than two-thirds of formerly incarcerated individuals are rearrested within three years of release, many for crimes of survival. For example, M.H.—homeless, pregnant, and hungry—was rearrested for stealing two plums and three candy bars while on probation for another low-level retail theft offense.

So, what does all of this have to do with civil legal aid? Even though civil legal aid attorneys do not represent defendants in criminal proceedings, they play a critical role in dismantling a system that fuels a vicious cycle of re-incarceration by continuing to punish people long after they have served their time.

For example, civil legal aid attorneys help formerly incarcerated individuals secure affordable child support orders and fight other unjust fines and fees, so that they are able to avoid modern-day debtor’s prison. They help people obtain the necessary documentation to replace lost identification—which is key to getting reestablished in society. Civil legal aid attorneys also assist in getting driver’s licenses restored, which can be crucial to getting and keeping a job.

When employers illegally exclude jobseekers with criminal records, civil legal aid can help individuals challenge hiring discrimination. And many civil legal aid attorneys also help people clear their criminal records which improves their chances of finding employment.

Unfortunately, funding for civil legal aid has long fallen far short of what is needed to meet demand. As a result, for every client served by legal aid, a second person in need of services is turned away. Overall, less than 20 percent of low-income Americans’ civil legal needs are being met—a phenomenon known as the “justice gap.”

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While sentencing and prison reforms are key aspects of building a fair and equitable criminal justice system, these reforms are not enough. Reversing the nation’s decades-long trend of mass incarceration will also require removing unnecessary barriers to employment, housing, education, and more. This means we must ensure access to the critical re-entry services that civil legal aid provides.

Earlier this year, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed an appropriations bill that—while far from sufficient to meet demand—would boost legal services funding for FY 2016 by $10 million. Meanwhile, House appropriators have called for slashing legal services funding by $75 million—a staggering 20 percent below the current funding levels. While Congress has passed a stopgap measure to keep the government funded until mid-December, as it continues to debate the budget it should ensure that any proposal includes adequate funding for civil legal aid.  Additionally, Congress should take swift action to reauthorize and boost funding for the bipartisan Second Chance Act. This legislation allows the Department of Justice to award federal grants to government agencies and nonprofit organizations—including civil legal aid programs—that provide services to support re-entry.

If the criminal justice reform legislation introduced this fall is enacted, many currently incarcerated individuals will have an opportunity to petition for reduced sentences or early release. Civil legal aid lawyers will be important partners in helping these individuals transition back into our communities and get back on their feet. Neglecting the back end of mass incarceration—including by failing to adequately invest in civil legal aid—is a recipe for ensuring that most people will end up behind bars again, and that many of the gains we see from criminal justice reform will be short-lived.

My conservative counterpart on the show—Seton Motley, a one-man political operation he calls Less Government (hey, at least he gets points for being straightforward)—defended “shaming the people who are sitting on welfare” as a tactic to get them off of assistance, and to crack down on what he termed “widespread welfare abuse.”

As I pointed out when my turn came to speak, the real shame is that our nation’s minimum wage is a poverty wage. In the late 1960s, the minimum wage was enough to keep a family of three out of poverty. Had it kept pace with inflation since then, it would be nearly $11 today, instead of the current $7.25 per hour.

Video provided by Media Matters for America

And it’s not just workers earning the minimum wage who are struggling: Working families have seen decades of flat and declining wages, while those at the top of the income ladder capture an ever-rising share of the gains from economic growth.

As a result, millions of Americans are working harder than ever while falling further and further behind. And many are juggling two and three jobs in an effort to make enough to live on: 7 million Americans are working multiple jobs. (Remember Maria Fernandes, the New Jersey woman who died in her car after trying to get a few hours of sleep in between her four jobs?)

Many low-wage workers need to turn to public assistance to make ends meet. In fact, researchers at Berkeley found that the public cost of low wages is more than $152 billion annually, in the form of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Medicaid, and other work and income supports that workers must rely on when wages are not enough to live on. The researchers also find that more than half—56 percent—of combined federal and state spending on public assistance goes to working families.

Contrary to conservatives’ claims that a bump-up in the minimum wage would “kill jobs,” a large body of research shows that past minimum wage increases at the federal, state, and local levels have boosted earnings and cut poverty among working families, without leading to job loss.

And it’s not just teenagers earning extra spending money who stand to benefit from raising the minimum wage. The average age of workers who would get a raise is 35—and more than 1 in 4 have kids. (Then again, Motley went so far as to say that people earning the minimum wage shouldn’t have children… Oy.)

If Mayor MacDonald, Motley, and their cheerleaders in the right-wing media really want to shrink spending on public assistance, then instead of wasting their time shaming people who are struggling to make ends meet—which, of course, is the sole purpose of Fox News’s recurring segment “Entitlement Nation”—they’d be wise to embrace raising the minimum wage. Indeed, my colleague Rachel West has found that raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour, as Senator Patty Murray and Congressman Bobby Scott have proposed, would save a whopping $53 billion in SNAP in the coming decade—more savings than the $40 billion in cuts proposed by House Republicans during the last round of Farm Bill negotiations. In Maine, the single-year savings in SNAP from a minimum wage hike would top $31 million.

Whether or not Mayor MacDonald’s widely criticized—and likely illegal—proposal for a public assistance shaming database gains traction—even in a state that’s been leading the nation when it comes to policies that punish its citizens for being poor—we should see his and Fox News’ poor-shaming for what it is: an attempt to divert attention away from the real causes of poverty, as well as the solutions that would dramatically reduce it.

For pushing harmful policies and bullying people who are struggling to provide for their families in an off-kilter economy, Mayor MacDonald and his friends in the right-wing media are the ones who should be ashamed.

Tracey: And I’m Tracey Ross.

Rebecca: So, Tracey, before we dive into what today’s episode is gonna be about, I thought we should do the number of the week.

Tracey: All right, let’s do it.

Rebecca: Ready?

Tracey: I’m ready. I’m burning up.

Rebecca: She’s ready! She’s so ready! You are so ready! All right.

Tracey: Give it to me.

Rebecca: The number of the week is… 25.

Tracey: Okay. So, since I was involved in the planning of this episode-

Rebecca: I didn’t really hide the ball there, did I?

Tracey: No. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it’s the number of years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed.

Rebecca: Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. Yes, indeed. It is the 25^th anniversary of the ADA. It happened just this past weekend. And actually we’ve been celebrating all week long over at TalkPoverty.org with what we’ve been calling talkpoverty and disability week, because the intersection of poverty and disability is all too rarely discussed.

Tracey: We’ve got some great pieces, some personal testimonies, some work by advocates in the field that are working closely on this issue, so please check out the pieces they’re fantastic. They’re on TalkPoverty.org.

Rebecca: Greg will really appreciate what a solid plug we’ve just put in.

Tracey: You’re welcome, Greg.

Rebecca: But we also have a fabulous lineup on today’s show – and, in fact, many of the folks who have been contributors to TalkPoverty and Disability Week are actually gonna be guests on our show today. So we-

Tracey: I’m excited. I know! I was like, “wow!”

Rebecca: I’m excited too. I should have paused for excitement there.

Tracey: So who do we have?

Rebecca: We have Alice Wong, she’s the founder of the Disability Visibility Project, which is a partnership with StoryCorps.

Tracey: We also have Michael Morris, executive director of the National Disability Institute.

Rebecca: Courtesy of the Vera Institute, we will also be featuring some remarks from attorney and civil rights activist T.L. Lewis. Also the founder of HEARD, an important organization that does advocacy on behalf of deaf individuals. But first we’re joined by Talley Wells, Director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.

Tracey: You’re listening to TalkPoverty radio. I’m Tracey Ross. I’m joined by Talley Wells, Director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. Thank you for joining the program.

Talley: Thank you for having me. It’s very exciting to be here. And happy anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Tracey: Yes, and happy 25^th anniversary back to you. And we’re excited to be commemorating this anniversary on today’s show. So I want to start out by asking, what is the significance of the ADA in the work that you do?

Talley: The ADA is at the heart of the work that I do. My work is based on the United States Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision. Olmstead was decided in 1989; it is the most important civil rights decision for people with disabilities. It’s often called the Brown v. Board of Education decision for people with disabilities, because it is a decision that is transforming our country’s infrastructure for people with disabilities from a system that was all about institutionalizing people – separating them from society – especially here in Georgia, where we had thousands and thousands of people in institutions – and instead, providing them the accommodations and supports so they can live full and meaningful lives in the community, so they can work and live in their own homes, and be as much a part of the community as every other person. So the ADA is at the heart of the work I do, and the reality is just because the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision eight years after the ADA was passed and told the country that it needed to provide supports and services for the community, that’s still not happening. And so my work is about really realizing the promise of this extraordinary Supreme Court decision, and this extraordinary Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Tracey: And you wrote this week for TalkPoverty.org about these very issues – the ADA and the Olmstead case. And you say that people are still segregated into institutions and excluded from participating in society. In what ways have you seen this occurring?

Talley: Well, just think about it. And, I’m sure, in the neighborhood that you are in – and every community across this nation – we have nursing facilities. And nursing facilities are basically institutions that have a lot of people who have disabilities who could be living in the community if we had a much more robust system of homecare and support, so that people don’t actually have to go into a nursing facility – and that’s just one example. In Georgia, we have institutions that were created in 1842, and still exist today – where people with developmental disabilities and people with mental illness are confined, many times for years and years. Now that’s changing in Georgia because we’ve been at sort of the forefront of Olmstead because of the Supreme Court case, and because the Justice Department came back in 2007 through to the present, and has really sort of enforced Olmstead here. But we’ve had a long way to go, and it’s systems that exist not only here but throughout the country. I was recently in New Jersey, where there are thousands of people who are still in institutions.

Tracey: And we’re using, you know, ADA and Olmstead back and forth. Can you actually just explain for our listeners who might not be familiar with the law and with the case, how these relate to one another?

Talley: I would love to. So the ADA – what most people are familiar with – the Americans with Disabilities Act – are – is the fact that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires either a reasonable accommodation or a reasonable modification. And basically what the ADA says is that if someone wants to work in a job, then the employers should provide some sort of modification or accommodation so they can get equal rights to that job as other people. It’s also thought of with respect to architecture and infrastructure so that if a wheelchair ramp would enable someone to get inside a courthouse, or get inside a school, or get inside their home or workforce. And that’s sort of what people think of with the ADA and the reasonable accommodation is at the heart of the Olmstead case. If we step back, and look at when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, Congress issued a number of findings. And in those historical findings, which Congress made at the very beginning of the Act, Congress said in this country, people with disabilities had historically enough to that time of the Act, in 1990, been discriminated against and segregated. And one of the ways that they had been discriminated against and segregated was by institutionalizing them. Essentially, if you institutionalize someone, you are separating them from everyone else. You are also making it very difficult for them to go to the store, for them to have a job, for them to be part of the day to day life that everyone else is a part of. And so, when Congress made those findings, they then said that people with disabilities must be included as long there is a reasonable accommodation. And “reasonable” is a word that’s used throughout the law, and most people think of it with respect to “reasonable doubt,” but pretty much – most of the law has some sort of reasonableness component and that is, essentially: “what would an objective person think is reasonable?” And so, whatever that is, then you apply it with the combination, so: how can you accommodate someone to include them? And when the Olmstead case was brought on behalf of two women, Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson, who were here – just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And they had repeatedly been held in Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta, which is our psychiatric hospital locally. And their doctors said they were perfectly capable of living in the community, but they needed support. And the problem was Georgia only provided those supports in the institutions. So if they were gonna get the supports they needed, they had to essentially be segregated from society. So the argument that happened in the Olmstead case was a simple “reasonable accommodation” argument – that it would be a reasonable accommodation for the state of Georgia to enable them to live in the community, and provide the supports they’re providing to them – just not in the institution, but in the community. And with that simple statement by the United States Supreme Court, the walls of segregation that have separated so many people with disabilities not only here in Atlanta – but in every city, every state in this country – have begun to come down.

Tracey: And yet, without enforcement the ADA and what Olmstead provided would be a theoretical framework. So, what is the role of an organization such as yours in ensuring that these rights and protections are actually experienced by people with disabilities?

Talley: That’s been one of the great learning experiences for me in this work. I – go to law school, and you see these Supreme Court decisions, and you learn all about them, and you sort of think that that – that will change things. But if you really spend your time looking at it, and remember what happened with Brown v. Board of Education, just because you have the Supreme Court say something, doesn’t mean that a state’s actually gonna do what the Court said. Going back to Brown v. Board of Education, and Olmstead is very much the same thing. You had the states fighting all the way up to the Supreme Court, and then the Supreme Court turns around and says “State, you have to do it.” And so the state that has fought it all the way up to the highest court in the land, now has the obligation to carry it out – and so are they actually going to do what the Court has said when they’ve been fighting it all along? What we saw, of course, with school integration was “no,” that the states simply were not going to carry it out, and that the courts had to get more and more involved. And with disabilities we had sort of the same experience. In 1999, we had the decision; the state of Georgia decided to do a lot of committees. They basically created a blue ribbon commission, they created a Governor’s commission, to look at Olmstead. They had the legislature do some findings. They did a lot of planning, but very little implementation, of how the state was gonna actually provide the reasonable accommodation – not just to Lois and Elanie, who were the two plaintiffs, but to all people with disabilities who were confined in institutions. And then what really became the impetus for change in this state was that we were involved in the last month of cases and got The Atlanta Journal Constitution involved, which is our newspaper here, and they did a huge expose on all of the problems inside of the hospital. They found over 100 people who, as they put it, “would have lived but for the fact that they were in the hospital,” and who died in the hospital. And there were all sorts of incidences of abuse and neglect. So while we were finding these cases – and the role of our organization as a legal services organization and the role also of protection advocacy organization is to represent individuals. But we needed additional help, and the newspaper article brought the United States Justice Department, and ultimately resulted in a settlement in 2010 where Georgia now not only had to serve Lois and Elaine but this settlement was a statewide settlement that Georgia was finally gonna close these hospitals that have been around since 1842 – not only close them, but provide the supports and services to the community for individuals throughout our state. And this settlement that happened here in Georgia – similar settlements are happening across the country, because the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has now made Olmstead one of its number one priorities. And if you go on the Justice Department’s Olmstead website, you can see cases are happening in pretty much every state in the land to ensure that everyone with a disability doesn’t have to live in an institution, but can live full and meaningful lives in the community.

Tracey: And I really appreciate you drawing some of the comparisons between the Olmstead case and Brown v Board and something we’ve talked about a few times on the show is the need for other social justice movements to include a disability lens. So whether it’s, um, you know a racial justice cause or LGBT rights there are obviously in all of these social movements people who experience disability. How do think that other movements can do a better job of incorporating the disability lens?

Talley Wells: There’s a woman named Kate Gainer who lives here in Atlanta and she was part of the civil rights movement for African Americans and people of color. She says that when the laws changed, and society changed, she was able – she had the right to get in the front of the bus but it wasn’t until much later, and the push from the disability rights movement that she was able to actually get on the bus because she uses a wheelchair. Every single group- socio-economic, ethnic, racial, age- has people with disabilities, and they are vibrant parts of that community. Yet many times they’re still excluded. I had a friend come and meet with us for, um, a gathering who is a disability rights advocate and uses a wheelchair. And we realized that in this group of fairly progressive people, twenty people, she could not go to a single one of those peoples house because she could not get into their house. That’s what it means to be excluded, to not go over to your friends’ houses, to not be able to get into the workforce. So, and another favorite example I have is there is a museum called the Disability Right Museum Right Museum on Wheels that has been part of this extraordinary celebration of the American’s with Disabilities Act that is traveling across this country to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary. And in that museum there is a letter from President George H.W. Bush who signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and he said that he was extremely proud, that is one of the most important things he did in his administration but it really came to his understanding of how important this was, and what it meant to have simple things like curb cut when he became someone who uses a wheelchair. And so that’s something he wrote in March of this year and it shows that President Bush, I’m sure, never thought that he would be a person with a disability. But it can happen to any of us. There are people with disabilities that have been President, that are part of every movement and it is so integral to include the disability rights movement. I enjoyed watching the celebration of the civil rights movement, at the LBJ, the Lyndon Baines Johnson, anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and the disability rights community did a great job of talking to the LBJ library about making sure that they included people with disability. And that wasn’t necessarily the way the program was going to be at first, but they changed it because the disability rights community stood up and made it clear that that’s absolutely a part of the civil rights movement.

Tracey: And one way that you’re disseminating more information about disability rights and getting resources to advocates is through your new website, Olmsteadrights.org. Can you tell me what prompted the creation of this site and what resources does it provide?

Talley: I’m so proud that you have brought this up, because we are so proud of Olmsteadrights.org. OlmsteadRights the impetus for the creation of this was that we have this amazing transformation that’s happening throughout the country, changing from a a nineteenth century system of segregation and institutionalization to a twenty-first century system that is not even a system – it’s an understanding that people with disabilities don’t have to be in institutions they can live full and meaningful lives in the community. Of course most people with disabilities don’t live in institutions, but there are so many of them that do and that even though this whole transformation is happening, so few people know about it. So we decided to do three things: We wanted to tell the story of people with disabilities who had been in nursing homes, who had been in institutions for developmental disabilities, who are now living full and meaningful lives in the community. We also wanted to tell the stories of people who were able to avoid going into the institutions. So we have lots and lots of stories, one of my favorite stories is my former client, Harold Anderson, who is now my boss because he’s on the board here at, at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. We advocated for him, we had a mediation set up in the nursing home where he had been living, he had lived for I think seven years in various nursing homes, and we got him out, he’s now not doing all sorts of things in Atlanta including being on the executive committee of our board. So we wanted to tell stories like Harold’s- of real people- and we also wanted to ensure that self-advocates, people with disabilities, families of people with disabilities could advocates for themselves based on Olmstead. And third we wanted to provide legal tools and so we have a lot of legal tools, legal pleadings, legal outline, for lawyers so they can do Olmstead cases, and our focus is legal services organizations, protection and advocacy organizations, that do this work every single day. But it’s also for lawyers across the country to make sure that anyone who is either at risk of going into an institution or who is in an institution can live in the community. So I hope everyone will come to Olmsteadrights.org, the other thing we have in it is a history videos, we have the oral argument from the Supreme Court case, we’ve got a lot of resources so people can really come to understand the Olmstead case and how it’s transforming the country but how much further we have to go.

Tracey: Our guest is Talley Wells, director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, thank you for joining us.

Talley: Thank you.

Rebecca: Next up, we’re gonna play some remarks for a recent event hosted by the Vera Institute, on the intersection of criminal justice and disability. And specifically, we’re gonna play some remarks from TL Lewis, the founder of an organization called HEARD, Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of the Deaf.

TL: I begin every discussion that I give, that I present, by centering the space, and that means uplifting the names of people who are no longer with us, making sure that we all recognize that we’re not talking about numbers, we’re not talking about statistics, but what we’re talking about are human lives. So I will begin today, like I begin every other day, not with scanning the building upon which we all sit, or stand. Tanesha Anderson, Freddie Gray, Anthony Hill, Ezell Ford – these are African American people with disabilities whose lives were cut short by law enforcement. News media and advocates alike erase parts of their identities; they often mention that they are black people who have been murdered by police officers, but what they don’t often mention is that these are people with multiple marginalized identities, and those marginalized identities all together are what led to their untimely murders. Their lives mattered. Their black lives mattered. Their disabled black lives mattered. And that’s important for us to be able to state in this space. Today, I want to propose to you all something that some people might call lofty, others might call revolutionary- others might say it’s impossible. But before I begin, I want to remind you that those same words were used with advocates like the Honorable Senator Harkin as related to the ADA 25, 30 years ago when it was conceived of. So I want you all to dream with me for a while. Let’s explore what’s possible, and not worry about what exists now. Let’s think outside of the box, outside of the realm. So that’s what I’m challenging us to do today. So stay with me. So here’s what I propose: I’m proposing an end to police brutality and mass incarceration by engaging in intersectional disability justice advocacy that – because of its historic and present work related to deinstitutionalization and creative community-based solutions – is already steeped in creative – creative and innovative, transformative deinstitutionalization policies and practices. And at its core, that’s what mass incarceration is – it is institutionalization, and it’s important to name that as well. So here are the statistics and information that provide a framework for my proposal. I’m just gonna run down some brief statistics that are available online. Children with disabilities are three times more likely to be placed in foster care than those without disabilities. Children with disabilities are four times more likely to be living in poverty than those without disabilities. 65% of boys and 75% of girls in juvenile detention have mental illnesses. Children with disabilities are 50% more likely to drop out of school than those without disabilities. Black children represent 18% of the preschool enrollment population but 48% of those preschoolers – preschoolers, yes – were receiving more than one out of school suspension. The larger question, of course, is why are we suspending preschoolers, but the second is, okay let’s talk about racial disparity and disability disparity in those – in those numbers. Children with disabilities enter the juvenile system at 5 to 6 times the rate of youth who do not have disabilities. Up to 85% of children in juvenile detention have at least one disability – and of that 85%, only 30-some-odd percent of them are receiving access to services in their schools pursuant to IDDA which Dara mentioned earlier. 60% unemployment rate which was mentioned by the Honorable retired Senator, and disproportionately underemployed or not employed within the deaf and disabled communities. So, those are the kind of key statistics that should paint the- the- the broad strokes and these last three are super critical, so stay with me. The largest mental health providers in the nation are jails – Cook County in Chicago; Riker’s Island in New York; and LA county jails. Blacks and Latinos make up 30% of the US population, 60% of the incarcerated population, and now 20% of our population here in the United States, of course, has disabilities. We represent 20% of the population that is in the United States. We represent – studies have shown – 60-80% of those who are incarcerated in jails and prisons across the nation. So at the end of the day what that means is people with disabilities are the largest minority population in jails and prisons. Period. If ever there was a crisis of institutionalization with people with disabilities, that crisis is now. It’s impossible to address the issues of mass incarceration without addressing it with a disability and deaf justice lens.

While many have begun the important discussions surrounding the harms visited upon so many communities of color and different communities, religious affilitations and so on and so forth – our native nations. There’s been, you know, a very – a vast chasm of discussion about disability. And there is absolutely right – those discussions that do center on disability and criminal justice tend to focus on very specific portion of people with disabilities to the detriment of other disability communities which is highly problematic. (26:13) For example, I’m gonna skip some stuff because I can come back to it later for example people who are deaf, diabetic, epileptic, you mentioned these things, have actually been murdered by police officers, because people don’t have intellectual disabilities, don’t have mental health conditions, are not experiencing crises, but have physical conditions that render them, because the police officers are not utilizing the ADA, mitigating, or taking time to stop before they resort to lethal violence against our community members, literally are being murdered because they have a disability, so we have to state in this space, and our jails and prisons are literally overflowing with people with disabilities, out in California and many other states. We’ve had judges actually ruling we need to de-incarcerate specific prisons because they are literally overflowing with folks, so that’s kind of the large lay of the land and despite this long standing federal disability rights laws that we all know of and love and cherish- the ADA, the rehabilitation act- which so many people before us spent so much of their lives invested- their hearts, invested- in creating these laws, what we have to acknowledge is that laws alone do not create, we cannot legislate social, cultural, and organizational and agency change. We have to take further action, and that’s kind of where we are today, and I’ll give you some “for instances” right? So, for instance, although it’s rarely discussed deaf people and people with disabilities are often wrongfully convicted because of lack of access to police officers, attorneys in the courts, then once they’re institutionalized they’re physically and sexually assaulted and subjected to depressing isolation and other forms of exploitation. I’ve worked for a decade on more than fifteen death wrongful conviction cases. The majority of these cases have uncanny similarities, in at least two respects- there are many others but I’ll name two- private police departments fail to provide reasonable accommodations in terms of communication. Detectives, attorneys, and judges alike- the entire system is guilty. Let’s be clear. We’re not blaming police, we’re not blaming just- the entire system is ableist and audist and we need to name that in this case. Ableism is discrimination based on your ability; audism is discrimination based on your ability to speak or hear, um, as opposed to sign and listen with your eyes or listen with your hands if you’re a tactile sign language user. We can’t prioritize certain kinds of abilities over other abilities and that’s really important also to name. Similarly, deaf, deaf blind, deaf disabled, and hard of hearing prisoners customarily experience discrimination and terrible abuse in our prisons, punished for failure to obey commands that they can’t hear, using sign language to communicate, for failure to follow rules that were never conveyed, for missing counts that they were never aware of, for filing grievances about these persistent inequities, they’re denied interpreter services, deprived of access to medical and mental health care services in the prisons, denied access to education and reentry programs, cut off from access to the most basic human interaction, all of this coupled with inaccessible telephone systems in the prisons, which I will get to momentarily. I recently submitted, testimony to the Senate, they had us- their second ever hearing on solitary confinement and I shared with the Senate and the world- hopefully folks are actually reading our testimony- that the solitary- the use of solitary confinement against people who are deaf and people with physically disabilities is- let’s be clear- solitary confinement is torture for anyone, period. It should not be used against anyone in any elongated way and I would argue it shouldn’t be used at all but that’s a whole other revolutionary idea that’s not the point of discussion today. But what we do know is that we have deaf people who within weeks, sometimes hours and often in months, literally try to kill themselves as a result of the deprivation that happens, while they are experiencing solitary confinement at the hands of our government. That is in our name. We are responsible for that. There’s a large discussion about solitary and people with mental health. Where’s the discussion about solitary and people with other disabilities? And our children, we- the ACLU did a wonderful job of recently bringing, shedding light on the issue of putting our babies in boxes in solitary confinement and what that does to them mentally and otherwise but there is not a discussion about physical disabilities and solitary confinement. We should be fighting for all of us at once, not one thing at a time, not only mental health but not deaf. There is no reason a deaf person or any person with any other disability, which is the vast majority of our prison population, should be in solitary confinement. And that’s what we need to be saying as advocates, not “let’s not put people with mental illness in pri-, in solitary.” So, I’m gonna hold on that because I’ve got more I wanna share, alright. Finally, despite the existence of these wonderful laws which we all support and uphold, will soon we, my organization -an all-volunteer non-profit organization- will soon be on our fourth year of advocacy just to get telephones for people who have communication disabilities in prisons across the nation. As of last month, eight prisons across this nation had videophones. Eight. That means for decades countless deaf people, deaf, deaf blind, deaf disabled, hard of hearing, have had no access to their loved ones, their babies, their families, their attorneys. And we know that people who are deaf actually experience the least access to the justice system in the first instance, so why don’t we make sure that they can at least communicate effectively once they’re in the jails or prisons across the nation? This is the kind of advocacy we need to see from folks. So right now we’ve got criminal justice reform and prison advocates who are really finding ways to drastically decrease mass incarceration. They’re proposing things like capping sentences, legalizing certain drugs, etc., etc., alternative courts, what I’m proposing, is that this, the situation of mass incarceration is, has grown way too large and that those things are not going to work; we will still end up, even if we were to release all of those people in these proposals, with mass incarceration levels above what we had in the 1980s. So what I would like us to do is to think about a justice system that- what would it look if we applied disability justice principles, right? And so here’s my alliteration of the day, and this is what you should take home with you. Our justice system could decriminalize disability, deescalate law enforcement situations for people in crisis, divert all people with disabilities away from jails and prisons, demand disaggregated data collection on disability in jails and prisons, deinstitutionalize those of us who are presently trapped in the clutch of the system because society has failed for so many decades to provide meaningful support and accommodations for people with disabilities in the first place. Many people who are presently incarcerated, um, are incarcerated now for behaviors that forty years ago would have landed them in a psychiatric facility. That’s important to state. We have to start re-envisioning and reimagining criminal justice. Criminal, what is criminal? Right, because criminality is a social construct, and what is justice? And what could that look like if we actually applied a racial justice, a trans justice, a disability justice lens? I think that that is the way we can advance the rights of all of us and we really need to recommit ourselves to the long and bitter struggle for justice as the honorable Senator mentioned, so thank you.

Rebecca: This is TalkPoverty Radio on the WeAct Radio network. I’m Rebecca Vallas, and for a very special episode commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the ADA, I have with me Alice Wong. She is the founder and the coordinator of the Disability Visibility Project, which was done in partnership with StoryCorps. Alice, thank you so much for joining TalkPoverty Radio.

Alice: Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca: So I understand that you and I were both at the White House event commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the ADA. I didn’t see you, but I understand now that you were there in a special way.

Alice: There’s a really awesome device, called BeamPro, and it’s basically a teleconferencing device that allows a person to use their left hand at home and they can operate a robot. So it’s kind of like people can see me through the monitor, and I’m moving around in the Red Room and the Blue Room and the East Room. I couldn’t believe it. It was thrilling to be in the White House, and to actually say hello the President.

Rebecca: So, you – you were the first person to ever use this BeamPro technology in the White House. Is that right?

Alice: I believe so. That’s what they told me at the White House. So it was a huge honor, and really – you know- an adventure to try to use it and to make sure it all worked. Kind of sort of similar of the President and me side by side, virtually.

Rebecca: It’s pretty amazing.

Alice: Well, this is life in 2015, now. I think there’s a lot of amazing interest in technology and things that are available online now that really give people with disabilities a way to participate in ways that they haven’t before, and one thing that I maybe should I mention: so many amazing people with disabilities using Twitter and Facebook, makes me think about when I was younger – in the pre-Internet days – and, wow, if I had that as an option, the world would be so different.

Rebecca: Well, in full disclosure to our audience: that’s how you and I know each other is through Twitter.

Alice: Yeah, it’s pretty funny.

Rebecca: So, tell us a little bit about the Disability Visibility Project you coordinate in partnership with StoryCorps? What is that project about and how did it come into being?

Alice: The Disability Visibility Project is kind of like a grassroots campaign that I launched last year, and it’s kind of a one year project, kind of encouraging people with disabilities to stand a part of this lead up to the really landmark 25^th anniversary of this Americans with Disabilities Act. There aren’t enough stories – people with disabilities telling their stories on their own terms, and it’s kind of an easy way to really get the community involved. And Storycorps is a wonderful national nonprofit located in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco, and they have a mobile tour that goes throughout the country. And we’re just trying to encourage people from all over the country to try to participate and just tell the stories of their lives and what they care about. And now with the StoryCorps app, people don’t have to travel. They can just use their smartphone and record their story. There are a lot of different ways.

Rebecca: And tell us about a few of those stories that you received through the Disability Visibility Project. I think you have some actually for us on tape that we’ll be able to play for our listeners.

Alice: A lot of people talked about education in their career lives. And one thing that has been clear that – in some of the interviews, is the notion of economic self-sufficiency. People who grow up having a disability – how they need to take care of themselves. And what they need to do in order to take care of themselves. In many ways, they need education, earning money, working hard, and sometimes, there are a lot of policy areas that come along with that, so that’s been in some interviews so far.

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Rebecca: And let’s play a clip of one of those interviews.

Speaker: If you don’t have a disability, you know, you basically are encouraged to always present yourself in terms of what you can do, that’s your identity- hopefully, if you have a healthy sense of self. The things that you can’t do are simply the things you haven’t learned how to do yet, or that you didn’t really care about in the first place. I feel like the message that a person with a disability gets is: your identity is based on what you’re unable to do. It’s how well you can argue for not being able to do something.

Rebecca: Alice, now I understand that several of the interviews you did for this project were on the subject of people with disabilities fighting for economic justice. Let’s hear a clip from one of them.

Speaker2: Well, and I think the next frontier – and I know there are people working on this, and talking about it, so it’s like some nuanced idea – it’s really economic justice for people with disabilities. I mean, we are among the poorest of the poor in this country, the most unemployed or underemployed demographic. And you know I think economic justice is really the next fight – and it’s the fight now, right, and it’s the fight in the future.

Rebecca: Something we talk a lot about on TalkPoverty radio is how disability is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. What are some of the ways in which we need to see policy change building on the successes of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other pieces of critical legislation to really move forward and realize the goals of those pieces of legislation?

Alice: One of the easiest things in my mind – and easy in my mind, but really difficult, I think, politically is really the asset and income limitation for people with disabilities to receive either SSDI or Medicaid. For so many people with disabilities, these are major disincentives towards working. Whether or not they have the drive, the talent, and the opportunity to work, these kind of barriers really keep people with disabilities who want to work, who want to pay taxes, earn income, and actually create access and wealth and contribute to society and it’s punitive for many of us, in modern community-based services, because there are linked with Medicaid, and all of these aspects, income limitations, are really hampering a lot of disabilities – younger people, who want to work, are wanting to enter the workforce, but cannot.

Rebecca: And where can our listeners find more about the Disability Visibility Project?

Alice: We have a website called disabilityvisability.com. We also have a Twitter, at D-i-s-v-i-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y.

Rebecca: It’s a doozy to spell. Well, thank you so much Alice Wong for being on TalkPoverty radio today. This has been – this is a really special episode for me in a lot of ways and I’m really glad you were able to join us for it. Alice Wong is the project coordinator for the Disability Visibility Project, a community partnership with StoryCorps.

Alice: Thank you so much Rebecca.

Rebecca: You’re listening to TalkPoverty radio. I’m Rebecca Vallas. And to continue this special ADA-at-25 episode of TalkPoverty Radio, I have a very special guest with me – Michael Morris. He is the executive director of the National Disability Institute. Michael, thank you so much for joining the program.

Michael: Thank you for bringing me on and I look forward to the conversation.

Rebecca: Well this is obviously a wonderful and celebratory week, but a point that you and other people have made is that we really still have a lot of our work cut out for us. For example, one tragic sentence that I write and say routinely is that “disability and poverty go hand in hand.” And this is something you and I have discussed at length over the years- that 25 years after the ADA, this is still the case. Why is this still the case?

Michael: I think there’s no single reason. I think attitudes change slowly. I think that there’s discrimination in this country still that prevents many people with disabilities from being employed. The estimates vary of anywhere from 50-80% of the disability population is not in the labor force. We know people with disabilities are two times more likely to be living in poverty than their non-disabled peers. But I think the real issues that confront us is a combination of policy and practice.

Rebecca: And, going back to the poverty rates of people with disabilities even who are working, something that is perhaps less well known but really is quite staggering is that poverty rates are disproportionate for people with disabilities even when you compare part-time workers and full-time workers with and without disabilities. Maybe part of this is about the disability pay gap – we’ve got new research finding that for workers without disabilities who are paid a dollar, workers with disabilities are paid just .68c on that dollar. Do you think that maybe these – how do you explain these disparities?

Michael: Well, it’s so interesting. That’s really some new research which compounds the challenges people with disabilities face. So those who have been fortunate enough to get into the workforce find their pay gap than women, racial and ethnic minorities. So, what does all that mean? It means that, culturally, we have a long way to go for people with disabilities to truly be accepted for their talent, for their value, for their contributions to communities, to the workplace, and to our economy.

Rebecca: Now, switching gears a little bit, it’s not just a story all about income poverty disparities. The National Disability Institute, which you lead, has also looked at how people with disabilities are doing when it comes to having savings – even just a little bit of savings. What have you found there?

Michael: Yes. We’ve been able to analyze data from several major studies- one by Finra, one from FDIC- surveying households. And here again we see some stark contrasts. When people with disabilities were asked do they have enough funds for any kind of financial emergency – car breaks down, could be a healthcare emergency – people with disabilities were 2 to 3 times more likely not to have any rainy day fund, any emergency fund. So, it’s more than the income gap. It’s this lack of savings. And, we investigated further and see that 80% of people with disabilities have no retirement account, have not ever seen a person to talk about any financial planning. So, we really are at a point in time, that I would have expected when – frankly, I was there at the White House, back on the lawn, with about a thousand others, when President Bush signed the ADA, and I don’t know if I could have seen the future 25 years later, but my expectations- and I think so many people in the disability community, their expectations as well – that promise of the ADA, in addition to promoting independent living and community participation, was also about advancing economic self-sufficiency. We’ve got a long way to go.

Rebecca: And it isn’t just retirement accounts, right? Some of the work you guys have done has also found that almost half of households headed by working-age people with disabilities are either unbanked – have no bank at all, no mainstream financial inclusion – or underbanked. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Michael: Yes, that information came from the new study we did with FDIC that almost 1 in 2 individuals with disabilities heading households were either unbanked or underbanked – and if that isn’t a serious problem enough by itself, the secondary problem was people with disabilities as compared to people without disabilities were more likely to use alternative financial services- kind of a fancy name for pawn shops, and check cashing places, predatory lending operations, that – on top of – let’s kind of add up the pieces here. If you’re working, you’re probably earning less on the dollar from new research. You’re also not in the financial mainstream. You’re also using alternative financial services. And you’re less likely to be planning for the future in terms of retirement, or down the road – even to have emergency funds. So if there’s anything that I would stress to people thinking about “well, we’re at 25 years, where do we go?” I think the compass couldn’t be pointed more directly than on this issue of poverty and disability. It’s unacceptable and we know we can do better.

Rebecca: So what can we do to increase the numbers of people with disabilities who are included in that financial mainstream?

Michael: Well, we’re working with 19 community partners in 6 cities in a project called “Roads to Financial Independence,” where we’re providing on a 1-to-1 basis opportunities for financial education and financial coaching to individuals with disabilities who want to return to the workplace, or get into the workplace for the first time, are already working- is help them assess their financial capability and status, set financial goals, and look at – if they have no credit, how do you establish credit; if they’re heavily in debt, how do we help them reduce debt; how do we help them establish a savings account? We do expect, over the next several years, to be working with several thousand individuals with disabilities, and learn – really, for the first time – how can the financial world and the disability world and all kinds of community partners, work really well together and what kind of results can we then achieve?

Rebecca: And in your TalkPoverty column this week, you mention that there are a number of recent policy developments that offer concrete opportunities to help bring people with disabilities into the financial mainstream. And specifically, you mention the ABLE Act, legislation that was passed last year. Can you tell us a little bit about the ABLE Act – what it does, and maybe if there are ways in which you don’t think it goes far enough?

Michael: Sure. ABLE Act is, to me, a historic piece of legislation. Took 8 years to get through Congress, and basically it sets up for a certain number of people, who will be eligible – people with disabilities – to establish tax-advantaged savings accounts. It’s somewhat modeled after the 529 college savings accounts, but with several important differences. Number one: the use of the money in the account is not limited just to paying college tuition, and housing, and books. It covers the range of needs that people with disabilities face, often as an extra cost of just living a better quality of life, that’s related to transportation, employment, education, purchase of technology, extra healthcare costs. So it really covers a lot of ground to change a person’s outlook on what they can do. But it even does more than that. It allows, for the first time, for people on SSI to get past the asset limit we talked about a few minutes ago – of $2000 for an individual, $3000 for a couple. No federal public benefit that is means or resource-tested will be able to count the ABLE account that would disqualify someone from being any longer eligible for that public benefit. So in those several ways, this is really a historic change in thinking. Now, unfortunately, it is limited to only a segment of the disability community. It will only help people whose age of onset of disability was age 26 or younger- that leaves out millions of people – and it also restricts the amount of money you could put aside in a savings account annually to $14,000. Now, over time one is going to accumulate more money, but this is so important because, to me, it also is the first time in public policy where Congress is recognizing, “wait a minute. People with disabilities have extra costs other people don’t have.” Sometimes just to get out of bed with personal assistance services. Sometimes it’s technology which will help them speak, or read. Sometimes it’s other assistance related to employment, or transportation. These are costs that could be covered as part of the money set aside in ABLE account. So it’s pretty significant, and I think – I hope – we’ll continue to be able to build on it, expand the population who’s eligible. But, more than that, I really see over the next 5 years, a potential 5 million ABLE accounts opened across the country. What’s exciting about that to me is it sets up a culture of savings, which we didn’t have. It takes away the fear of losing public benefits because those asset limits related to an ABLE account, an ABLE account will be excluded. It really allows a person to dream, and I consider an ABLE account as almost a down payment of really – a first step toward freedom, and independence.

Rebecca: And another policy you mention in your TalkPoverty column relates to the Earned Income Tax Credit, or the EITC. What is it that you think should be done with the EITC, and why is important for people with disabilities?

Michael: Well, EITC -I know, Rebecca, you know- is for people with and without disabilities. It has lifted millions of people out of poverty. For people with disabilities, many of them are unaware they may even be eligible. There’s a lot of myths and misinformation about Earned Income Tax Credit. During the past ten years, National Disability Institute has worked collaboratively with the IRS to do outreach and education to the disability community that: you do not have to be a family, you do not have to have a family with children, to be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit. We have helped, over the past 10 years, 10 million low-income taxpayers with disabilities actually be helped with their tax return, and have recouped over $2 billion in tax refunds. But what we do know is the Earned Income Tax Credit could be even better. Right now, you have to be age 25 or older to be eligible. And it really – this is something, unusually, both at the Republican and Democratic sides – or spectrum – of ideology, there is agreement to bring down the Earned Income Tax Credit to a much lower age – 18, 19, 20. We also know the benefit is skewed towards families with children, and so an individual, which represents lots of folks with disabilities who are not part of a family – they’re getting a much lower credit or benefit. We had one of the key people of the IRS at our summit last week, who shared a very interesting statistic: despite our work with helping people with disabilities access the Earned Income Tax Credit, there are still 1.5 million individuals with disabilities who are eligible for the credit but have not realized that what they have to do is file a tax return. So we’ve got a way to go, but the EITC is an important tool. I think we’ve proven it to be, that is helping thousands of people in the disability community, and millions of low-income Americans really finally escape poverty.

Rebecca: Michael Morris, executive director of the National Disability Institute. Where can our listeners find more about the reports that you guys have done, and the other resources that you have?

Michael: Thank you for asking. We have a website that we hope will be easy to remember. “www.realeconomicimpact.org” And we urge people as well to join our Real Economic Impact Network.

Rebecca: Michael Morris, thank you so much for joining TalkPoverty radio.

Michael: Thank you, Rebecca.

Rebecca: And that’s our show. Thanks for listening to TalkPoverty radio on the WeAct radio network. We’ll be back next week, Thursday at 4. Also available on iTunes as a podcast or you can listen online at weactradio.com. Special thanks to our executive producers Alyssa Peterson and the one and only Greg Kaufmann, CAP’s amazing poverty and press teams-

Tracey: -and, as always, DC’s own Christlyez Bacon gets the last word. Thanks for listening.

Christlyez: [raps] I work and get paid like minimum wage, sites to hit the clock by the end of the day, hot from downtown until the hood where I stay, the only place I can afford cuz my block ain’t safe. I spend most of my time working trying to bring in the dough, and none of those could come at me with a HMO, and nowadays it’s common for grandparents to outlive their grandkids, and those the type of odds that we handlin’. I’m not a slave to a man with a whip, I’m a slave to the U.S. mint, and it got me doing things in my life that never made any sense, but it paid me in dollars and cents. I need the money for the food and healthcare, the schools and bus fare, you can’t pay the rent without the U.S. right there, with shackles on my hands and toes – they got a brotha moving slow but my soul is determined to go. I want freedom. Freedom. Now I don’t know where it’s at, but it’s calling me back. I feel my spirit is revealing amount. We just tryna get freedom. Freedom.

– President George H.W. Bush, at the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act

 The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) turns 25 on Sunday, and it has done a tremendous amount to break down barriers and open doors for people with disabilities. Many of my closest friends and colleagues count themselves members of the “ADA generation” and proclaim with confidence that they would not be where they are today if not for the passage of this watershed legislation. But as we celebrate this important landmark, it would be a grave mistake to declare that the struggle for inclusion is over as a great deal of work remains.

As I’ve written here before, disability is both a cause and consequence of poverty, and twenty-five years after the signing of the ADA, the two still go hand in hand. The poverty rate for working-age people with disabilities remains more than double that for people without disabilities.

People with disabilities are also significantly more likely to experience material hardships—things like food insecurity; not being able to pay rent, mortgage, or utilities; or inability to access needed medical care—than people without disabilities, even at the same income levels. The same is true for families caring for a child with a disability.

People with disabilities are also nearly twice as likely to lack even modest savings to help them weather job loss, an unexpected bill, or other financial shock, according to the National Disability Institute.

As we look ahead to the next 25 years of breaking down barriers, it’s time to examine our own work as advocates for change. The next wall that needs to come down is the one that keeps disability advocacy in its own bucket, separate and apart from the broader fight for a fair economy and equal opportunity. Until disability inclusion—both social and economic—is a core part of the economic justice movement, we’ll continue to miss a huge piece of the puzzle.

Much of the economic agenda to break the link between disability and poverty is already mainstream. Raising the minimum wage. Boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without dependent children. Expanding Medicaid. Paid leave and paid sick days. Strengthening Social Security (including updating the woefully outdated Supplemental Security Income asset limits). Add in affordable, accessible housing; accessible transportation; and ensuring access to long-term services and supports and we’ve got a to-do list that would go a long way toward reducing poverty and expanding opportunity for people with disabilities.

As President George H.W. Bush’s signed the ADA into law, he closed his remarks with this: “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”  Let’s take that to heart not only as we fight for inclusionary social and economic policies, but as we shape our work and tactics as change-makers.

It is in that spirit that throughout next week, TalkPoverty.org will feature posts from disability leaders, all exploring the link between disability and poverty and solutions that would increase economic opportunity for people with disabilities. This week is not intended to be a comprehensive examination of the topic. But we hope it will help advance this important conversation, and we look forward to working with our readers, contributors, and partners to break down the silos that have kept disability separate from the broader fight for economic justice for far too long.

Et tu, Orange is the New Black?

The Netflix drama is back with a third season, and if you’re like me, it monopolized the better part of the last two weekends. The show deserves credit for sparking dialogue and increasing awareness about mass incarceration in the U.S., particularly among people who hadn’t previously considered criminal justice reform to be their thing.

The show’s typically smart writing and masterful treatment of a serious and complex topic made the first episode all the more disappointing.

One of the very first scenes of the third season is a flashback to the character Pennsatucky’s childhood. We watch as her mother forces her to chug an entire two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. Pan right to the sign showing us that they’re at the Social Security Administration office. Then we hear Mom say, with a young Pennsatucky now bouncing off the walls behind her, “So I understand, Supplemental Security Income benefits for kids like mine are $314 a month, is that right?”

The implication is clear: Mom is attempting to simulate the symptoms of ADHD in her child in order to fraudulently obtain SSI benefits.

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This scene caused me to have several flashbacks of my own. First, to the mid-1990s, when a flurry of media reports accused parents of “coaching” their children to “act disabled” in order to feign eligibility for SSI benefits. The “crazy checks” media frenzy, as it came to be known, spurred Congress to narrow the program’s eligibility rules, causing more than 100,000 children with disabilities to lose critically needed benefits. The media claims were later shown to be baseless, but the damage had already been done, and Congress had already legislated by anecdote.

I also flashed back to 2010, when media allegations accused parents of seeking psychotropic medications for their children in hopes of SSI eligibility. These claims were similarly debunked after multiple investigations. But again, the media allegations rang loudly in the halls of Congress, leading to hearings and yet more proposals to cut SSI.

My head swirling, I was next transported to 2012, when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof sparked yet another kids’ SSI media hubbub by accusing parents of pulling their kids out of literacy programs in order to obtain SSI benefits. Mr. Kristof’s claims that the program incents parents to keep their kids from learning to read were similarly unsupported by the facts—but that didn’t stop NPR from doubling down on his claims with their own (widely discredited) “reporting” just a few months later. Legislation that would kick young people with disabilities off of SSI if they miss school is now pending in Congress.

Each set of media allegations—as well as the disappointing OITNB scene—reflects a continued lack of understanding of mental impairments. They perpetuate the stereotype that if you have a visible physical impairment, you’re ‘truly disabled,’ but if you have an invisible mental disorder, your impairment is somehow less real, or less legitimate.

What’s more, each set of media attacks—as well as the OITNB scene—reflects vast ignorance about the SSI program, perpetuating the myth that it’s easy to get benefits. Getting hyped up on a caffeinated drink before you walk into the Social Security office may make for entertaining TV, but it won’t get you anything in real life.

SSI serves as a vital lifeline for families caring for children with disabilities. It makes it possible for families to care for their children with disabilities at home and in their communities, instead of in costly and isolating institutions. Only children with the most severe impairments and illnesses qualify for SSI. The majority of children who apply are denied, and fewer than 1 in 4 U.S. children with disabilities receive benefits.

Raising a child with a disability is extraordinarily expensive. Families caring for children with disabilities are more than twice as likely as other families with children to face material hardships such as homelessness, food insecurity, and utility shutoff. The financial support that SSI provides helps to offset some of the commonly incurred costs, including special therapies, diapers for older children, adaptive equipment, and transportation to doctors and specialists, many of which are not covered by insurance or have high copays. SSI benefits also replace a portion of lost income when a parent must stay home or reduce her hours to care for a child.ADHD is a neurobiological disorder that affects 5 to 8 percent of school-age children.

But only the most severely impaired children are eligible for SSI. More than 75 percent of children with ADHD who apply for benefits are denied, and just 4 percent of U.S. children with ADHD receive SSI.

Moreover, qualifying for SSI on the basis of ADHD—or any other mental or physical impairment—requires extensive medical evidence from approved medical sources (including physicians and specialists) documenting the severe impairment as well as its resulting symptoms. A child’s impairment must result in marked and severe functional limitations and must be expected to last at least 12 months or to result in death.

In fairness to Orange is the New Black, the show is fiction. Unlike the media frenzies over the years, it didn’t claim to be reporting the facts. But, as with the latest season of House of Cards, which was infused with “real-world lies” about Social Security—it’s “sucking us dry”… “entitlements are bankrupting us”—the silver screen’s treatment of important public policy issues has a very real, and potentially destructive, impact. (Coincidentally or not, House of Cards is also produced by Netflix.)

Media portrayals that reinforce myths about mental disorders do us a significant disservice and contribute to the harmful denial of mental illness that persists even in the 21st century. Media portrayals that reinforce negative stereotypes about vital programs and the individuals helped by them are similarly dangerous, sowing the seeds for cuts that will make vulnerable people’s lives all the more difficult.

Thanks for reading and sharing.

Jared Bernstein’s Top 10 to Address Economic Inequality

Melissa Boteach and Rebecca Vallas: Top 10 Policy Solutions for Tackling Income Inequality and Reducing Poverty in America

Olivia Golden: Policies to Reduce Income Inequality

Kali Grant and Indivar Dutta-Gupta: Ten Ways to Fight Income Inequality

Erica Williams: What States Can Do to Address Inequality

Valerie Wilson: Top 10 Ways to Address Income Inequality

Jared Bernstein’s Top 10 to Address Economic Inequality

(Author’s note: many of these ideas fall under the heading of achieving full-employment in the job market, such that the matchup between the number of jobs and job-seekers is very tight. This is an essential intervention for both real wage stagnation and inequality.)

1. If the private market fails to provide enough jobs to achieve full employment, the government must become the employer of last resort.
2. When growth is below capacity and the job market is slack, apply fiscal and monetary policies aggressively to achieve full employment. Right now, this means not raising interest rates pre-emptively at the Fed and investing in public infrastructure.
3. Take actions against countries that manage their currencies to subsidize their exports to us and tax our exports to them. Such actions can include revoking trade privileges, allowing for reciprocal currency interventions, and levying duties on subsidized goods.
4. Support sectoral training, apprenticeships, and earn-while-you-learn programs.
5. Implement universal pre-K, with subsidies that phase out as incomes rise.
6. Raise the minimum wage to $12/hour by 2020 and raise the overtime salary threshold (beneath which all workers get overtime pay) from $455/week to $970/week and index it to inflation.
7. Provide better oversight of financial markets: mandate adequate capital buffers, enforce a strong Volcker Rule against proprietary trading in FDIC-insured banks, strengthen the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and encourage vigilant oversight of systemic risk in the banking system by the Federal Reserve.
8. Level the playing field for union elections to bolster collective bargaining while avoiding, at the state-level, anti-union, so-called “right-to-work” laws.
9. Maintain and strengthen safety net programs like the EITC and CTC, SNAP, and Medicaid.
10. In order to generate needed revenue and boost tax fairness: reduce the rate at which high-income taxpayers can take tax deductions, impose a small tax of financial market transactions, increase IRS funding to close the “tax gap” (the difference between what’s owed and what’s paid), and repeal “step-up basis” (a tax break for wealthy inheritors).

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Melissa Boteach and Rebecca Vallas: Top 10 Policy Solutions for Tackling Income Inequality and Reducing Poverty in America

1. Create jobs by investing in infrastructure, developing renewable energy sources, renovating abandoned housing and significantly increasing affordable housing investments, and making other commonsense investments to revitalize neighborhoods.
2. Improve job quality and strengthen families by raising the minimum wage to $12/hour by 2020; ensuring pay equity by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act; strengthening collective bargaining; and enacting basic labor standards such as fairer overtime rules, paid sick and family leave, and right to request flexible and predictable schedules.
3. Make the tax code work better for low-wage working families by making permanent the 2009 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit improvements and expanding the EITC for childless workers and noncustodial parents.
4. Invest in human capital by expanding access to high-quality and affordable childcare and early education; creating pathways to good jobs such as apprenticeships, national service opportunities, and a national subsidized jobs program; and implementing College for All to ensure that any student attending public college or university does not need to pay any tuition and fees during enrollment.
5. Ensure that workers with disabilities have a fair shot at employment and economic security.
6. Reform the criminal justice system to end mass incarceration and remove barriers to economic security and mobility for the one in three Americans with criminal records.
7. Enact comprehensive immigration reform that provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
8. Expand Medicaid and ensure that all Americans can access high-quality, affordable health coverage.
9. Close tax loopholes that benefit the wealthy and special interests and raise taxes on capital income.
10. Protect and strengthen investments in basic living standards such as nutrition, health, and income insurance. This includes reforming counterproductive asset limits, and ensuring that programs such as unemployment insurance are there for more workers if they lose their job.

Olivia Golden: Policies to Reduce Income Inequality

1. Make work pay for all workers, including childless adults, by raising the minimum wage and strengthening the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit.
2. Ensure stability for workers and their families through access to paid leave and predictable job schedules. Pass federal bills such as the FAMILY Act, Schedules That Work Act, and Healthy Families Act that mirror strong state and local laws.
3. Identify and tear down the systemic barriers that people face because of race, ethnicity, language, and immigration status, for example by making college prep courses equally available in high schools attended mostly by students of color or by providing work authorization and a path to citizenship for immigrant parents.
4. Ensure that every working family can afford high-quality child care through significant investments in the Child Care and Development Block Grant, Head Start and Early Head Start, and preschool for all three- and four-year-olds.
5. Give children and their parents a simultaneous boost through two-generational policies and investments, including home visiting, support for parental mental health, and support for parents’ career development coupled with high-quality early care and education for children.
6. Help low-income youth and adults access employment and training opportunities that lead to economic success by fully funding the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) as well as subsidized and summer jobs programs.
7. Fully fund Pell Grants to help low-income students access higher education and develop the skills needed to compete in a competitive job market.
8. Ensure that everyone, including low-wage working families and single adults, has access to basic health and nutrition by expanding Medicaid in every state and increasing SNAP benefits.
9. Strengthen capacity of states to employ more streamlined and integrated approaches to delivering key public work supports (such as health coverage, nutrition benefits, and child care subsidies) so low-income working families can stabilize their lives and advance their career
10. Rebuild unemployment insurance and cash assistance to ensure a strong safety net that supports poor and low-income children, families, and individuals when they need it.

Kali Grant and Indivar Dutta-Gupta: Ten Ways to Fight Income Inequality

1. Correct political imbalances—strengthen and protect the Voting Rights Act, level the playing field for political contributions, and limit the influence of corporate lobbyists.
2. Ensure that the wealthiest people and profitable corporations that benefit the most from our political and economic system contribute their fair share: reform “upside-down” tax expenditures (spending through the tax code that disproportionately benefits those with higher incomes), limit corporate welfare, and enact a robust inheritance tax.
3. Amplify workers’ bargaining power by increasing fines for illegal anti-union behavior, encouraging minority unions, and reversing state laws that undermine unions and prevent them from collecting dues for benefits they provide workers at unionized workplaces.
4. Update labor standards—raise the national minimum wage to $12 and index it to wage growth, require fair scheduling for workers, target employee-contractor misclassification and wage theft, and enact the Paycheck Fairness Act.
5. Modernize the safety net—update Unemployment Insurance to reflect the changing nature of work; increase Social Security benefits and raise the cap on income subject to taxes; expand Medicaid in every state; and address flaws in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to refocus it on employment and child well-being outcomes.
6. Provide families tools to manage their many responsibilities—provide at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, universal early learning and care, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a child allowance, and comprehensive family planning services.
7. Expand opportunities for current and future workers—invest in infrastructure and other nationally needed jobs; enact income-based loan repayment to increase higher education accessibility and affordability; and pursue full employment.
8. Increase affordable housing and bolster consumer financial protection rules—promote fair and accessible banking, savings, and other financial vehicles and services for those excluded or abused by the current system.
9. Attack racial and other discrimination across the board and enact comprehensive immigration reform, normalizing the status of more children and workers to increase their educational and work opportunities.
10. Reduce the over-incarceration and over-criminalization by every level of government that restricts millions of Americans’ ability to support themselves and their families—especially among communities of color and high poverty areas.

Erica Williams: What States Can Do to Address Inequality

1. Make state tax systems less regressive. State tax systems tend to ask the most from those with the least because they rely heavily on sales taxes and user fees, which hit low-income households especially hard. States can move their tax systems in a more progressive direction by strengthening their income taxes, adopting state earned income tax credits (or other low-income tax credits) to boost after-tax incomes at the bottom, and rejecting tax cuts that disproportionately benefit higher-income families and profitable corporations.
2. Expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
3. Raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation. States can raise wages for workers at the bottom of the pay scale by enacting a higher state minimum wage and indexing it so that it keeps up with rising living costs.
4. Protect workers’ rights. States can raise wages by protecting workers’ right to bargain collectively and by strengthening and enforcing laws and regulations to prevent abusive employer practices that deprive workers of wages they are legally owed.
5. Improve unemployment insurance.Unemployment Insurance helps workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own to avoid falling into poverty and to stay connected to the labor market. States that have cut benefits should restore those cuts; others should build on recent efforts to fix outmoded rules that bar many workers from accessing benefits.
6. Establish subsidized employment programs for low-income parents and youth that provide temporary jobs of last resort (mostly in the private sector), such as those many states created in 2009 and 2010 through the TANF block grant.  These programs proved popular with participating businesses, families, and state officials of both parties.
7. Improve the safety net. States can streamline the process for enrolling in child care assistance and other work supports. They also can boost the prospects of poor children by raising the amount of temporary cash assistance available to the neediest families, improving access to food stamps, and helping low-income families afford to rent a home in neighborhoods near good jobs.
8. Spend less on prisons, more on schools.In recent decades, states imposed extremely harsh corrections policies that greatly increased both the number of prisoners and their average sentence, at great cost to state budgets.  By making these policies more rational, states could shift funding from prison to more productive investments, without harming public safety.
9. Improve school funding formulas.  K-12 schools in low-income neighborhoods are often poorly funded because the local property tax base is so weak.  As a result, children from these neighborhoods begin their education without the resources and supports they need to succeed.  States can help by adopting funding formulas that give extra support to low-income districts.  Many state funding formulas don’t push back very much against these inequities; some even worsen them.
10. Expand early education.States can help families work and kids learn by investing in quality, affordable early care and education programs, as well as after-school programs.

Valerie Wilson: Top 10 Ways to Address Income Inequality

(Author’s note: Given that the primary source of income for most Americans is the pay they receive from their jobs, wages seem like a logical place to start addressing inequality. These ideas are drawn from EPI’s Agenda to Raise America’s Pay.)

1. Raise the minimum wage: Raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would benefit about a third of the workforce directly and indirectly.
2. Update overtime rules: Moving the overtime threshold to the value it held in 1975—roughly $51,000 today—would provide overtime protections to 6.1 million workers and provide those workers with higher pay.
3. Strengthen and protect workers: Strengthen collective bargaining rights to help give workers the leverage they need to bargain for better wages and benefits and to set high labor standards for all workers, and support strong enforcement of labor standards to protect workers.
4. Regularize undocumented workers to lift not only their wages but also the wages of all workers in the same fields of work.
5. Provide earned sick leave and paid family leave, which would not only raise workers’ pay but also give them more economic security.
6. End discriminatory practices that contribute to race and gender inequalities through consistently strong enforcement of antidiscrimination laws in the hiring, promotion, and pay of women and minority workers.
7. Prioritize very low rates of unemployment when making monetary policy: Policymakers should not seek to slow the economy until growth of nominal wages is running comfortably above 3.5 percent.
8. Create jobs through targeted employment programs and public investments in infrastructure.
9. Reduce our trade deficit by stopping destructive currency manipulation.
10. Use the tax code to restrain top 1 percent incomes.

Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) famously took a “poverty tour,” earning himself no shortage of praise as a supposed anti-poverty crusader. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has waxed eloquent about what he calls “opportunity inequality.” And former Governor Jeb Bush devoted his first major policy speech as a presidential candidate to the so-called “opportunity gap.”

This sudden concern for struggling families has reached the highest levels of Congressional Republican leadership. In January, in a joint interview on 60 Minutes, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) worried aloud about the growing gap between rich and poor. Senator McConnell even characterized the economic recovery following the Great Recession as a “top of the income recovery,” expressing dismay that “middle- and lower-income Americans are about $3,000 a year worse off than they were when [President Obama] came to office.”

Conservatives’ about-face on inequality, wage stagnation, and how hard it is to get ahead is no doubt newsworthy—particularly following Mitt Romney’s fatally tone-deaf remarks about “the 47 percent.” (Romney himself even performed a dramatic U-turn on the subject earlier this year.) So it’s hardly surprising that it’s garnered a great deal of media coverage of late.

But in marveling at how conservatives seem to have found religion on poverty, inequality, and the plight of the working and middle class, we must not lose sight of the other half of the story—their policies.

It’s not like we don’t have plenty of evidence as to what they really stand for. In addition to their voting records (check out the Shriver Center’s poverty scorecard to see how Members of Congress voted last year on minimum wage, paid leave, and other key policies that support working families), we have their budgets—the clearest statement of their priorities for the country.

As my colleagues Melissa Boteach, Anna Chu, and I wrote earlier this month, if the House and Senate majorities were serious about expanding opportunity and tackling poverty and inequality, their budgets would include job-creating investments in research and infrastructure, as well as policies such as raising the minimum wage, paid family leave, and universal pre-K—not to mention protecting and strengthening key safety net programs such as nutrition assistance and Medicaid.

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Yet while Rep. Ryan may spend a lot of time talking about poverty and opportunity, year after year as Chair of the House Budget Committee, his budgets got two-thirds of their cuts from vital programs that help keep struggling families afloat—such as nutrition assistance, housing assistance, and Medicaid—all to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

And despite their newfound talking points on economic opportunity, the House and Senate majorities last week released Fiscal Year 2016 budgets that were just more of the same: deep cuts to nutrition assistance and Medicaid; repeal of the Affordable Care Act; cuts to job training, Pell Grants, Head Start, and more—all to once again protect tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

Remarkably, these policies are printed within the budget proposals alongside grand statements of concern for working and middle class families—e.g. “The economy is not working for many Americans. A lot of people are struggling to keep up or are being left behind altogether.” It makes for a glaring if inadvertent juxtaposition even within the budget documents themselves.

In another recent head-on collision between rhetoric and reality, Jeb Bush last week publicly stated his opposition to the federal minimum wage, barely a month after his speech on the “opportunity gap.” (You read that right: he didn’t just oppose raising the federal minimum wage, he said he opposes having one at all. Sen. Marco Rubio has made similar statements.)

With both parties talking about poverty and inequality these days—and a presidential campaign that is likely to focus on these issues just around the corner—it’s more important than ever to remind our political leaders that actions speak louder than words. Citizens and the media need to look past rhetoric—no matter how pretty it sounds—and focus on voting records, budgets, and policy positions.

That’s where we will find the truth.

Much of the bipartisan focus in Washington has centered on the need for sentencing reform, through proposals like tackling overly harsh mandatory minimums. Sentencing reform is urgently needed, and bipartisan efforts such as Senator Lee’s (R-UT) and Senator Durbin’s (D-IL) Smarter Sentencing Act provide cause for optimism.

But the problems with our broken criminal justice system don’t end when an individual is released from jail or prison. Every year, more than 600,000 Americans are released into their communities after serving their time. Moreover, millions more end up with criminal records without doing any time–through arrests that don’t lead to conviction or through probation-only sentences.

All in all, between 70 million and 100 million Americans—or as many as one in three of us—now have some type of criminal record. And due to the rise of technology and the internet—as well as federal and state policy decisions—having even a minor criminal record can stand in the way of employment, housing, education and training, building good credit, and even meager public assistance. For example, nearly 9 in 10 employers use background checks in hiring, and 4 in 5 landlords conduct background checks on potential tenants. Even a minor criminal record can mean every door is closed to you as you seek to get back on your feet.

The result? Punishment has been transformed from a temporary to a lifelong experience for many justice-involved individuals. In addition, mass incarceration and the barriers associated with a criminal record have come to serve as major drivers of poverty in the US. This has broad implications—not just for the tens of millions of affected individuals, but also for their families, their communities, and our national economy. For example, the cost of shutting people with criminal records out of the labor market runs as high as $65 billion per year in GDP terms. Thus, as the criminal justice reform train continues to move forward full speed ahead, it’s imperative that efforts include reforms to give people a second chance.

Senator Rand Paul’s and Senator Cory Booker’s REDEEM Act, introduced yesterday, is a good first step. Take a look at this summary if you want to see everything it does. Here are three key provisions, which, if enacted, would go a long way toward putting second chances within reach for Americans with criminal records.

1. Creates a mechanism for cleaning up a federal criminal record. As my colleague Sharon Dietrich and I explained in a recent Center for American Progress report, cleaning up a criminal record is one of the most powerful tools for overcoming the barriers associated with a criminal record. While state laws vary a great deal, the vast majority of states have “expungement” or “sealing” mechanisms to allow people to put their criminal records behind them. In fact, as the Vera Institute documented in a recent report, 23 states broadened these laws between 2009-2014 through efforts such as expanding the categories of offenses that can be expunged or shortening wait times.

Yet despite the exponential increase in federal criminal prosecutions that resulted from the War on Drugs, there is no such mechanism to expunge federal records, even those resulting from arrests that did not lead to a conviction. Federal law thus lags far behind the states. By creating a judicial mechanism for sealing federal nonviolent records, the REDEEM Act thus fills an important void. (We have called for including all federal arrests that did not result in conviction, given that the presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of our criminal justice system—but the REDEEM Act is a good first step.)

 2. Improves the accuracy of FBI background checks. Understandably, employers and other users of background checks believe the information presented there is reliable. However, that information is often incorrect or not up to date. FBI background checks in particular are notoriously inaccurate – some 600,000 jobseekers received an inaccurate FBI check in 2012. One of the most common problems with FBI background checks is that they fail to provide the outcome of a criminal case. Given that many cases don’t result in convictions or are resolved on lesser charges, having a criminal record that has not been updated to reflect the outcome of criminal charges can be highly prejudicial.

In recognition of this widespread problem, the REDEEM Act would require the FBI to review each record for accuracy and completeness before it can be provided to a requesting party. It would also prohibit the FBI from distributing criminal record information pertaining to arrests that are more than two years old if they don’t contain a final outcome of the case.

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3. Reforms the harsh and outdated lifetime ban on public assistance for people with felony drug convictions. In many states, even meager public assistance is out of reach for people with certain types of criminal records. The 1996 welfare law included a lifetime ban on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) for people convicted of a felony drug offense. The law gives states the option to modify or waive the bans, and many have. Yet most states continue to enforce the ban in whole or in part for TANF, SNAP, or both. This outdated and harsh policy deprives struggling families of nutrition assistance and pushes them even deeper into poverty at precisely the moment when they are seeking to regain their footing. According to The Sentencing Project, in the 12 states with the most punitive policies, an estimated 180,000 women were subject to the TANF ban in 2013. The REDEEM Act would lift this ban for people who were convicted for drug use or possession. (The ban would remain in effect for people convicted of drug distribution crimes.)

As bipartisan members of Congress take up criminal justice reform, we must not lose sight of the need to include reforms to give people a second chance. Passing the REDEEM Act would be a great start.

Good Jobs
Strong Families
21st Century Social Insurance
Removing Barriers to Opportunity

Good Jobs

The President calls for a new investments in infrastructure projects such as ports, bridges, and roads, which would create millions of new jobs that pay a living wage.

The budget also includes significant investments to prepare American workers for medium- and high-skills jobs, including $60 billion for the president’s historic proposal to make community college free for students who keep up their grades, as well as funding to ensure that Pell grants don’t erode with inflation. Other funding would allow a doubling of apprenticeships over 5 years, and a significant expansion of re-employment services, and other workforce development programs that serve low- and middle-income workers.

Importantly, the president’s proposal includes significant new funding to help some of the most disadvantaged workers in the labor market. The budget includes $3 billion for a “Connecting for Opportunity Initiative,” which would make summer and year-round job opportunities more widely available and offer competitive grants to create educational and workforce opportunities for at-risk youth. Recognizing that subsidized jobs are an important tool for helping disadvantaged workers, the president’s budget also redirects over half a billion dollars to a “Pathways to Jobs” initiative to help states partner with employers to create these positions. The budget provides additional funding for subsidized jobs under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.

Finally, the “First in the World” program would fund evidence-based and promising practices to improve the likelihood that low-income students could complete degrees and have a better shot at medium- to high-skill jobs in today’s economy.

Strong Families

CAP’s recent report on family policy underscores that policies that strengthen the economic foundation of families are an important part of ensuring that all families are stable, healthy, and strong. To that end, the president’s budget includes several key initiatives to ensure that families don’t need to make choices between a needed paycheck and bonding with a new baby, or going to work without affordable and quality child care.

Specifically, the President’s budget includes a proposal that provides incentives for up to five states to adopt earned paid leave legislation so that the birth of a child or illness of a family member doesn’t send a family into an economic tailspin.

The President reiterates his commitment to providing preschool for all by providing matching funds to states that set up preschool programs, but also offers up a historic expansion of childcare assistance, tripling the maximum child and dependent care tax credit to $3,000 and enabling more families to claim it.

The proposal also includes substantial investments of $82 billion over 10 years in the Child Care and Development Fund to help states offer subsidized child care to low-wage working parents. This could boost the number of slots available by more than 1 million. The budget also increases investments in quality infant and toddler care by expanding access to the Early Head Start program and ensures that children in Head Start can access full-day, full-year programs, which helps parents to work and improves outcomes for kids. The president’s budget continues his commitment to evidence-based home visiting programs that provide professionals like social workers and nurses to pregnant women and new moms in order to help parents support their child’s healthy development. The funded programs have shown a range of positive outcomes including lower rates of depressive symptoms and stress for parents and higher grade point averages and graduation rates for the children in the long-term.

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21^st Century Social Insurance

Given that four out of five Americans will face at least a year of significant economic insecurity at some point during their working years—and half will experience three years or more—we must ensure that our social contract provides sufficient protection amid the ups and downs of life.

To that end, the President’s budget includes important investments to strengthen several key elements of our social insurance system. He proposes bold reforms to Unemployment Insurance to make it respond more effectively as a stabilizer during recessions; ensure that long-term unemployed workers get the assistance they need without Congress needing to extend benefits; and help individuals secure comparable jobs as quickly as possible through investments in vital re-employment services.

Additionally, while the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of our nation’s most effective antipoverty programs, it largely misses childless workers and noncustodial parents, who remain the only group the federal government taxes into poverty. The President’s budget would expand the EITC for these workers, while also making permanent the 2009 improvements to the EITC and the Child Tax Credit, currently set to expire in 2017.

Finally, the President’s budget includes a commitment to keeping our Social Security system strong for current and future generations. To that end, the President would rebalance the old-age and survivors’ fund and the disability insurance fund to put both on sound footing for the next 20 years and to prevent a shortfall in the disability fund. (Rebalancing is a routine step that has been taken 11 times in the past when either fund has faced a shortfall—and it is the only option available to avoid needless, across-the-board benefit cuts for millions of disability insurance beneficiaries—which is what would happen if Congress fails to act before the disability fund’s reserves are depleted in 2016). With his budget, the President is sending a clear message to Congress that it would be irresponsible to threaten the benefits of nearly 9 million disabled workers and 2 million spouses and children for the sake of Congressional politicking. The budget also proposes much-needed increases in administrative funding for the Social Security Administration to reduce the backlog in disability hearings, and mandatory funding to ensure that the agency can do critical program integrity work.

Removing barriers to opportunity 

As a recent CAP report highlights, one group that faces significant barriers to opportunity is the approximately 1 in 3 Americans who have some type of criminal record. To ensure meaningful access to second chances, the President proposes increased investment in programs that support successful reentry. For instance, the budget includes a doubling of the Second Chance Act Grant program, which provides funds to state and local agencies and nonprofit organizations that provide services to support reentry and reduce recidivism; significant increases in resources for Bureau of Prisons programs that support mental health treatment and residential reentry centers, and the establishment of a new program to maintain and strengthen familial bonds for incarcerated individuals with minor children.

Moreover, recognizing that an individual’s zip code should not determine his or her life chances, the President proposes important investments to tackle place-based and concentrated poverty, including an expansion of the Promise Zones initiative, which aims to revitalize high-poverty communities through comprehensive, evidence-based strategies while helping local leaders access federal funding. The President designated five Promise Zones in 2014, and will name another 15 by the end of 2016.

Additionally, the President’s budget includes several policies to ensure that workers with disabilities have a fair shot at employment and economic security. For instance, it provides demonstration authority and funding for key federal agencies to explore early intervention strategies to support workers with disabilities in remaining in the workforce, as well as incentives for states to better coordinate services.

**

Budgets are about choices. One important choice that cuts across all of the above themes is the president’s choice to reject the spending caps imposed by sequestration in his budget. These caps are due to re-emerge in the next fiscal year absent congressional action, which would have disastrous consequences for our economy and for families. Sequestration costs jobs and erodes funding for skills training; sequestration undermines family economic security by kicking children out of Head Start and child care slots; it hurts the most vulnerable by slashing programs such as affordable housing and nutrition aid for babies and toddlers; and it means fewer resources for investments in community development in distressed neighborhoods, second chances for ex-offenders, and other opportunity-boosting programs.

But the president’s budget isn’t just about damage control. It makes real investments in cutting poverty and boosting economic mobility. In fact, the study that launched the Half in Ten campaign several years ago showed that raising the minimum wage, expanding the EITC and Child Tax Credit, and making childcare more broadly available to low-income families could cut poverty by 26% over 10 years. Those types of investments are all in this budget.

While a Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to adopt the president’s budget, there are opportunities for bipartisan movement—including on the EITC, subsidized jobs, and common-sense reforms to our criminal justice system. But even if Congress were to ignore the vast majority of the president’s budget blueprint, it is important for advocates to pay attention. Budgets are about choices, and the President’s budget underscores that we can achieve deficit reduction while making investments in key aspects of economic opportunity: good jobs, strong families, a 21^st century social contract, and removing barriers to opportunity. The question is this: can we build the political will to make these choices happen?

Congress hasn’t been back even two weeks, and the conservative attacks on Social Security are already in full swing. As ThinkProgress reported last week, House conservatives kicked off the 114^th Congress—literally on Day One—with a midnight rule change that prohibits a routine rebalancing of the Social Security trust funds, effectively manufacturing a crisis and putting millions of Social Security beneficiaries at risk of needless benefit cuts.

The plot thickened further yesterday when Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) took aim at beneficiaries of Social Security Disability Insurance with a series of incredibly offensive remarks at a private meeting with legislative leaders in Manchester, NH. In a situation resembling Mitt Romney’s famous remarks about the “47 percent,” Senator Paul’s comments were caught on tape by American Bridge, a left-leaning PAC that conducts opposition research to aid progressive candidates:

If you look like me and you hop out of your truck, you shouldn’t be getting a disability check. Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everyone over 40 has a back pain.

Senator Paul is just the latest conservative member of Congress to mock disabled workers for whom Social Security is a vital lifeline. But particularly coming on the heels of the dangerous rule change, the Senator’s remarks serve as a worrisome harbinger of what we can expect from conservatives in Congress in the coming weeks and months. So let’s get a few things straight. As Shawn Fremstad and I have written for the Center for American Progress, and in numerous outlets such as ThinkProgress, National Journal, and others:

The Social Security disability standard is among the strictest in the developed world—and most applications are denied. According to the OECD, the U.S. disability benefit system is the most restrictive and least generous of all member countries, except for Korea. Fewer than four in ten applicants are approved, even after all stages of appeal. Beneficiaries have severe impairments and illnesses like cancers, congestive heart failure, kidney failure, multiple sclerosis, emphysema, and severe mental illness. Many have multiple impairments. Medical evidence is the cornerstone of the disability determination process, and in most cases, medical evidence from multiple medical professionals is required to establish eligibility.

Social Security Disability Insurance is coverage that workers earn. To be insured for benefits, an individual must have worked and paid into the system. Both workers and employers pay for Social Security through payroll tax contributions. Workers currently pay 6.2 percent of the first $118,500 of their earnings each year, and employers pay the same amount up to the same cap. Of that 6.2 percent, 5.3 percent currently goes to the Old Age and Survivors Insurance, or OASI, trust fund, and 0.9 percent to the Disability Insurance trust fund.

Few beneficiaries are able to work. According to data from just before the onset of the recent economic downturn, some 16.9 percent of disability beneficiaries worked at some point during the year. Of those who worked, fewer than 3 percent earned more than $10,000 during the year – hardly enough to live on. This comes as no surprise given that many beneficiaries are very sick, or even terminally ill – one in five male and one in six female Disability Insurance beneficiaries die within five years of receiving benefits, and beneficiaries are three to five times more likely to die than other people their age. Further underscoring the strictness of the Social Security disability standard, even workers who have been denied Disability Insurance fare extremely poorly in the labor market. A recent study found that among people whose Disability Insurance applications were denied, the vast majority—70 percent to 80 percent—went on to earn less than $1,000 per month. But for those who are able or want to try to return to work, Social Security’s disability programs are designed to encourage work.

Disability benefits are incredibly modest, but vital. Disability Insurance benefits average $1,140 a month, just over the austere federal poverty level for a single person, or about $35 per day. Disability Insurance typically replaces less than half of an individual’s previous earnings. While the program’s benefits are modest, it keeps more than four million people with disabilities out of poverty each year. For 80 percent of beneficiaries, Disability Insurance is their main source of income. For one-third it is their only source of income.

Social Security Disability Insurance provides protection most of us could never afford on the private market. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just one in three private sector workers have access to employer-provided long-term disability insurance, and plans are often less adequate than Social Security. Access is especially limited for low-wage workers—only 7 percent of workers making under $12 an hour have employer-provided plans. In contrast, Social Security Disability Insurance protects more than 9 out of 10 American workers and their families in the event of a life-changing disability or illness that prevents substantial work. A young worker starting a career today has a one-in-three chance of either dying or needing to turn to Disability Insurance before reaching his or her full Social Security retirement age of 67.

As progressives, we don’t let people get away with denying the facts about climate change. It’s long past time to send a message to conservatives that this kind of offensive, fact-free rhetoric about Social Security disability won’t fly either.

Next up: TalkPoverty wants to hear from you!

Nominate your 2014 favorites in print, web, radio, and TV poverty journalism in the comment field below, or email info@talkpoverty.org. We will include readers’ picks in an upcoming blog and on-air as part of new TalkPoverty Radio miniseries, launching January 17 on SiriusXM’s new channel, SiriusXM Insight.

Driven into debt

by Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-Greenberg

New York Times Dealbook

This five-part investigative series explores the rise in predatory subprime auto loans and how they can trap low-income individuals in cycles of debt. (Don’t miss the accompanying videos.)

Working anything but 9 to 5

by Jodi Kantor

New York Times

This in-depth article follows Jannette Navarro—a Starbucks barista and mother struggling to make ends meet—highlighting the effects of an unpredictable job schedule, particularly on parents. Soon after this story ran, Starbucks announced it would reform its scheduling policy.

Growth has been good for years. So why hasn’t poverty declined?

by Neil Irwin

New York Times Upshot

This important piece highlights how economic growth no longer translates into less poverty and busts two prevalent myths—that hard work is all it takes to escape poverty, and that public assistance provides “perverse incentives” against working.

What happens when your pregnant sister-in-law is paralyzed in a car accident and has no insurance

by Harold Pollack

Washington Post Wonkblog

I can’t get enough of Harold Pollack’s Wonkblog interviews. This one features an interview with Andrea Campbell, whose sister-in law was paralyzed in a car accident a few years ago, throwing the whole family into crisis. In particular, this piece does a great job of illustrating how harmful and counterproductive asset limits can be.

Poverty more common than most Americans realize

by Al Lubrano

Philadelphia Inquirer

A little known fact about poverty in America is that “the poor” are not some static group of people living in poverty year after year. This story busts that myth and highlights how four out of five Americans will experience at least a year of poverty or near poverty, or receive jobless benefits or public assistance at some point during their working years.

Fighting to forget: Long after arrests, records live on

by Gary Fields and Josh Emshwiller

Wall Street Journal

Gary Fields’ continued coverage throughout 2014 of how criminal records—including arrests that never led to conviction—serve as a barrier to employment, has been some of the best work done on this issue to date.

When poverty makes you sick, a lawyer can be the cure

by Tina Rosenberg

New York Times Opinionator

This piece highlights how low-income individuals are more likely to experience poor health—often due to adverse environmental factors—and explores medical-legal partnerships, a promising model of legal services delivery that puts legal aid lawyers on site at hospitals and medical clinics to help low-income people get free legal help to prevent eviction, utility shut-off, access needed public aid, and more.

Food insecurity in the U.S. 

Now with Alex Wagner

MSNBC

Alex Wagner traveled to Owsley, Kentucky—one of the poorest counties in the U.S.—to examine hunger in America and the role of SNAP in alleviating it. She then took viewers’ questions and used the opportunity to dispel myths and stereotypes about SNAP and the people who count on the program to make ends meet.

Does the media care about labor anymore?

by Timothy Noah

Politico

This story tracks the decline in media coverage of labor issues, and makes the point that with income inequality at record highs and wages for middle-class and low-income workers continuing to stagnate, the labor beat is “more important than ever.”

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Predatory Lending

HBO

The inimitable John Oliver gives payday lending the treatment it deserves in a monologue that’s equal parts hilarious and horrific. (Stick around for a special guest appearance by Sarah Silverman at the end.)

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Guilty and charged

by Joe Shapiro

National Public Radio

This investigative series follows the rise of court fines and fees that can be in the hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars, and which hurt low-income people the most.

Welcome to Shawnee, Oklahoma, the worst city in America to be homeless

by Scott Keyes

ThinkProgress

Keyes’ continued coverage of homelessness was unparalleled while he was at ThinkProgress. This piece explores the tribal history underpinning much of homelessness in Shawnee (the homeless population there skews heavily Native American), the city’s efforts to fight homelessness—and the wealthy Vice Mayor’s opposition to them.

Living wages, rarity for U.S. fast food workers, served up in Denmark

by Liz Alderman and Steven Greenhouse

New York Times

Amid fast food strikes in the U.S. calling for $15 an hour and a union, this article takes a look at pay and benefits for fast-food workers in Denmark—which as the reporters note, “their American counterparts could only dream of.”

For Louisiana moms, Paul Ryan’s poverty plan could make a bad situation worse

By Neil DeMause and Della Hasselle

Al Jazeera America

This piece illustrates the impact of “welfare reform” legislation in 1996 which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program—a very weak tool for alleviating hardship, which today helps just 1 in 4 poor children. The piece also examines how Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed policies would make things even worse.

In Florida tomato fields, a penny buys progress

by Steven Greenhouse

New York Times

This piece highlights the Coalition of Immakolee Workers’ successful efforts to curb abusive work conditions and boost pay for 30,000 Florida farmworkers. The CIW has succeeded in getting an array of major restaurant chains and retailers—including Walmart—to agree to buy only from growers who comply with the Fair Food Program.

Locking up parents for not paying child support can be a modern-day debtor’s prison

by Tina Griego

Washington Post Storyline

This story examines how unaffordable child support orders can serve as a path to incarceration—and also a promising model in Virginia that helps noncustodial parents find employment so they can afford to make payments.

Josh Eidelson’s relentless coverage of fast food strikes, tipped and low-wage workers, labor issues & workers’ rights

Previously at The Nation and Salon, and now at Businessweek, Josh Eidelson has been a crusader, tirelessly following the stories that matter to low-wage workers. (He did so much good stuff in 2014, I couldn’t pick just one!)

Op-eds

The media’s strange approach to low-wage workers

by Sarah Jaffe

Washington Post

Jaffe calls out her fellow journalists for treating “the people in some of the nation’s most common jobs as though they are some exotic Other rather than our neighbors, our family members, and ourselves.”

Your waitress, your professor

by Brittany Bronson

New York Times

Bronson, a college professor, shares her first-hand experience of having to work “survival jobs” in order to make ends meet on her paltry university income. As she puts it, “my part-time work in the Vegas service industry has produced three times more income than my university teaching.”

Why Poor People Stay Poor

by Linda Tirado

Slate

Linda Tirado—whom many of us know by her Twitter handle @killermartinis—leaped to internet fame when her essay in the Huffington Post on what it’s like to be poor went viral. This piece, excerpted from her book Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, highlights how “saving money costs money.”

Author’s note: To keep things fair, articles in which Center for American Progress was quoted were excluded from consideration for this list.

Many have only a minor record—a misdemeanor, or even an arrest without a conviction. But even a minor criminal record carries with it lifelong barriers that can block successful reentry and access to many of the essentials for economic security and upward mobility, like employment, housing, education, and job training.

The reason? Policy choices at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as the rise of technology and the ease of accessing data via the internet. A generation ago, access to criminal record information for housing applicants and jobseekers was unusual. Today, however, background checks are ubiquitous, with 4 out of 5 landlords and nearly 9 in 10 employers using criminal background checks to screen out people with criminal records before they even get a shot.

The result is that tens of millions of individuals are prevented from becoming productive members of society, and their families, communities, and the national economy are held back as well.

It is important to note that the lifelong consequences and stigma of having a criminal record stand in stark contrast to research on “redemption.”  Studies show that once a person with a nonviolent conviction is crime-free for three to four years, his or her risk of recidivism is no different from the risk of arrest for the general population. Put differently, people are treated as criminals long after they pose any significant risk of committing further crimes—making it difficult for many to achieve basic economic security, much less upward mobility.

As detailed in a new Center for American Progress report to be released tomorrow—which I co-authored with Sharon Dietrich—mass incarceration and hyper-criminalization are now major drivers of poverty and inequality. Having a criminal record can stand in the way of employment, housing, public assistance, education and training, and more; convictions can result in significant monetary debts too. In fact, a recent study finds that our nation’s poverty rate would have dropped by 20 percent between 1980 and 2004 if not for mass incarceration and the subsequent criminal records that burden people for years after they have paid their debts to society.

Communities of color—and particularly men of color—are disproportionately affected, and high-poverty communities generate a disproportionate share of Americans behind bars. Approximately 60% of people in America’s prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.  Of those individuals serving time for drug offenses, about two-thirds are black or Latino.  Research shows that mass incarceration and its effects have been significant drivers of racial inequality in the U.S., particularly during the past three to four decades.

The barriers associated with a criminal record also hurt the nation’s bottom line. The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that the cost of people with criminal records being shut out of the labor market is a $65 billion annual hit to GDP. And that’s in addition to our nation’s skyrocketing expenditures for mass incarceration, which now total more than $80 billion annually.

It’s long past time that we create policies to ensure that Americans with criminal records have a fair shot at earning a decent living, providing for their families, and joining the middle class. Failure to address the lifelong barriers associated with a criminal record as part of a larger anti-poverty, pro-mobility agenda risks missing a major piece of the puzzle.

President Obama’s administration has been a leader on this important issue, for example by establishing the Federal Interagency Reentry Council, which has brought 20 federal agencies together to coordinate and advance effective re-entry policies. States and cities across the country are also beginning to take action: To date, 13 states and 70 municipalities have enacted fair-chance hiring policies to help level the playing field for jobseekers with criminal records. And cities such as New Orleans and New York City have taken steps to remove obstacles to public housing for people with records.

But further action is needed at all levels of government. Our new report offers a roadmap for the Obama administration and federal agencies, Congress, states and cities, employers, and colleges and universities to ensure that a criminal record no longer presents an intractable barrier to economic security and mobility.

Bipartisan momentum for criminal justice reform is growing, due in part to the enormous costs of mass incarceration, as well as an increased focus on evidence-based approaches to public safety. Policymakers and opinion leaders from across the political spectrum are calling for sentencing and prison reform, as well as policies that give people a second chance. Now is the time to find common ground and enact meaningful reforms that ensure a criminal record does not consign an individual to poverty.

We are thrilled that in conjunction with our report, TalkPoverty.org is featuring posts throughout the week from leaders in the criminal justice reform movement—including the Brennan Center, the Vera Institute of Justice, The Sentencing Project, the Center for Court Innovation, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, and more—all exploring the link between mass incarceration and poverty, and solutions that would break that link. This week is not intended to be a comprehensive examination of criminal justice reform—we know it will only scratch the surface. But we hope it will help advance this important conversation, and we look forward to TalkPoverty.org continuing its commitment to criminal justice reform throughout the year.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of our nation’s most effective anti-poverty programs, helping more than 6.5 million Americans—including 3.3 million children—avoid poverty in 2012. The EITC also has the rare distinction of being regularly showered with bipartisan support—no small feat in a historically gridlocked Congress.

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Sharron, a bus driver in Montgomery County, Maryland, volunteers at her local Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) site and knows first-hand how important the EITC is for struggling families. For low-income single parents with children, for example, the EITC can boost earnings by as much as 45 percent. For someone like Sharron, however—working full-time at minimum wage, but without dependent children—the estimated EITC next year will be just $22. If the EITC were boosted for childless workers, her credit would increase to about $542.

In what seems a reprisal of the predatory practices that led up to the subprime mortgage crisis, low-income individuals are being sold auto loans at twice the actual value of the car, with interest rates as high as 29 percent. They can end up with monthly payments of $500—more than most of the borrowers spend on food in a month, and certainly more than most can realistically afford. Many dealers appear in essence to be setting up low-income borrowers to fail.

Dealers are also making use of a new collection tool called a “starter-interrupter device” that allows them not only to track a borrower’s movements through GPS, but to shut off a car with the tap of a smartphone—which many dealers do even just one or two days after a borrower misses a payment. One Nevada woman describes the terrifying experience of having her car shut off while driving on the freeway. And repossession of their cars is far from the end of the line for many borrowers; they can be chased for months and even years afterward to pay down the remainder of the loan.

Predatory subprime auto loans are just the latest in a long line of policies and practices that make it expensive to be poor—something I saw every day representing low-income clients as a legal aid attorney.

Low-income individuals are much more likely to be hit by bank fees, such as monthly maintenance fees if their checking account falls below a required minimum balance—balances as high as $1,500 at leading banks such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo—not to mention steep overdraft fees. For the more than 10 million U.S. households who lack a bank account, check cashers charge fees as high as 5 percent. This may not sound like much, but consider a low-income worker who takes home around $1,500 per month: She’d pay $75 just to cash her paychecks. Add in the cost of money orders—which she’ll need to pay her rent and other bills—and we’re talking about $1,000 per year just for financial services.

Whether or not they have a bank account, very few low-income families have emergency savings, and more than two-thirds report that they’d be unable to come up with $2,000 in 30 days in the event of an emergency expense such as a broken water heater or unexpected medical bill. Out of options, many turn to payday loans for needed cash. Jon Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight, gave this important issue perhaps the best treatment I’ve seen in some time, detailing how families who turn to predatory payday loans can end up trapped in an inescapable cycle of debt at 400 percent annual interest.

Then there’s the rent-to-own industry.  Through weekly installments, low-income families with bad credit or no credit can end up paying as much as two and a half times the actual cost of household basics like a washer and dryer set, or a laptop for their teen to do his homework.

Grocery shopping can bring added costs too. For families who can’t afford to buy in bulk, the savings Costco offers are out of reach. And for those without a car, living in low-income neighborhoods without a convenient supermarket, it’s either cab or bus fare to haul groceries back, or swallowing the markup at the neighborhood corner store.

And then there’s the issue of time. Something I heard about frequently from my clients when I was in legal aid was how much extra time everything takes when you’re poor. Many told of taking three buses to work and back, and spending as many as five hours in transit to get to and from their jobs every day. Those who needed to turn to public assistance to make ends meet would describe waiting at the welfare office all day long simply to report a change in their income.

Also worth noting is the criminalization of poverty and the high costs that result. In a nationwide trend documented by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, a growing number of states and cities have laws on the books that may seem neutral—prohibiting activities such as sidewalk-sitting, public urination, and “aggressive panhandling”—but which really target the homeless. (The classic Anatole France quote comes to mind: “The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”)

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Arresting a homeless person for public urination when there are no public bathroom facilities is not only a poor use of law enforcement resources, it also sets in motion a vicious cycle: The arrested individual will be unable to afford bail, as well as any fees levied as punishment, and nonpayment of those fees may then land him back in jail.

In an extreme example, in the state of Arkansas, missing a rent payment is a criminal offense. If a tenant is even one day late with the rent, his landlord can legally evict him—and if the tenant isn’t out in 10 days, he can wind up in jail.

In yet another penny-wise and pound-foolish trend, states and localities are increasingly relying on enforcement of traffic violations—as well as fines and fees levied on individuals involved with the criminal justice system—as sources of revenue. In Ferguson, Missouri, the city relied on rising municipal court fines to make up a whopping 20 percent of its $12.75 million budget in 2013. Ability to pay is often ignored when it comes to these types of fines and fees, leaving individuals stuck in a cycle of debt long after they’ve paid their debt to society. While debtor’s prison was long ago declared unconstitutional, failure to pay can be a path back to jail in many states.

It’s good to see the New York Times, Melissa Harris-Perry, and others paying attention to these injustices. But that’s just the first step. If we are truly interested in building an America that is defined by opportunity, we must commit to enacting public policies that support rather than impede upward mobility.

Editor’s Note: To watch both segments of the Melissa Harris-Perry show that featured Rebecca as part of a panel discussing the high cost of being poor click here and here.

Disability is both a cause and consequence of poverty.

It’s critical to note the progress that has been made in the past several decades. The Americans with Disabilities Act, enacted nearly 25 years ago, prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and guarantees that people with disabilities have “equal opportunity” to participate in American life. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), enacted the same year, requires that students with disabilities be provided a “free, appropriate public education” just like all other students. The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act expands access for people with disabilities to education and training programs, programs for transition-age youth and young adults transitioning to adulthood, vocational rehabilitation, and more.

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With the poverty rate at an unacceptable 14.5 percent and economic inequality stuck at historically high levels, one might assume that chronic economic insecurity and an off-kilter economy are the “new normal”—that nothing can be done to fix it.

But there is nothing “normal” or inevitable about more than 45 million Americans living in poverty. It is the direct result of policy choices. With different policy choices, we will see a more equitable economy—it’s as simple as that. 

Here are 10 steps Congress can take to cut poverty, boost economic security, and expand the middle class.

1) Create jobs.  

The best pathway out of poverty is a well-paying job. To get back to prerecession employment levels, we must create 5.6 million new jobs. To kick-start job growth now, the federal government should invest in our infrastructure by rebuilding our bridges, railways, roads, ports, schools and libraries, neighborhood parks, and abandoned housing; expanding broadband; develop renewable energy sources; and make other commonsense investments that create jobs and boost our national economy. For example, extending federal unemployment insurance would have created 200,000 new jobs in 2014. But Congress failed to act, leaving 1.3 million Americans and their families without this vital economic lifeline. We should renew federal unemployment insurance, and also build on proven models of subsidized employment to help the long-term unemployed and other disadvantaged workers re-enter the labor force.

2) Raise the minimum wage.

In the late 1960s, the minimum wage was enough to lift a family of three out of poverty.  Not so anymore. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 is a poverty wage, and had it been indexed to inflation it would be $10.86 per hour today. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and indexing it to inflation would lift more than 4 million Americans out of poverty. Nearly one in five children would see their parent get a raise. Recent action by states and cities shows that boosting the minimum wage reduces poverty and increases wages.

3) Increase the EITC for childless workers.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) lifted more than 6.5 million Americans—including 3.3 million children—above the poverty line in 2012. Kids who receive the EITC are also more likely to graduate from high school and have higher earnings in adulthood. Yet childless workers largely miss out on the benefit—their maximum credit is less than one-tenth that awarded to a worker with two children. Policymakers across the political spectrum have called for boosting the EITC. Importantly, this policy change should be combined with a raise in the minimum wage—one is not a substitute for the other.

4)     Support pay equity.

With female full-time workers earning just 78 cents for every dollar earned by men, we must take action to ensure equal pay for equal work. Closing the gender pay gap would cut poverty in half for working women and their families and add nearly half a trillion dollars to the nation’s gross domestic product.  Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act to hold employers accountable for discriminatory salary practices would be a key first step.

5)     Provide paid leave and paid sick days.

The United States is the only developed country without paid family leave and paid sick days, making it exceedingly difficult for millions of American workers to care for their families without having to sacrifice needed income. Paid leave is an important antipoverty policy—having a child is one of the leading causes of economic hardship. Additionally, nearly 4 in 10 private sector workers—and 7 in 10 low-wage workers—do not have a single paid sick day, so they must forgo needed income in order to care for a sick child or loved one.  The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, or FAMILY Act, would provide paid leave protection to workers who need to take time off due to their own illness or that of a family member, or after the birth of a child. And the Healthy Families Act would enable workers to earn up to seven job-protected sick days a year.

6)     Establish work schedules that work.

Low-wage and hourly jobs increasingly come with unpredictable and constantly shifting work schedules. These erratic schedules make accessing childcare even more difficult and leave workers uncertain about their monthly income. Further, things many of us take for granted—such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment or even a parent-teacher conference at school—become herculean tasks. The Schedules That Work Act would require that workers receive two weeks advance notice of their schedules, create and protect an employee’s right to request needed schedule changes, and provide guaranteed pay for cancelled or shortened shifts—important first steps towards making work-family balance possible for all workers.

7)     Invest in affordable, high-quality childcare and early education.

The lack of affordable, high-quality childcare serves as a major barrier to reaching the middle class. Federal child care assistance reaches only 1 in 6 eligible children. One year of childcare for an infant costs more than a year of tuition at most states’ four-year public colleges. Poor families who pay out of pocket for childcare spend an average of one-third of their incomes.  Boosting investments in Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, as well as passing the Strong Start for America’s Children Act—which would invest in preschool, high-quality childcare for infants and toddlers, and home visiting services for pregnant women and mothers with infants—will help families obtain the childcare they need in order to work, and improve the future economic mobility of America’s children.

8)     Expand Medicaid.

Since it was signed into law in 2010, the Affordable Care Act has expanded access to high-quality, affordable health coverage for millions of Americans. However, 23 states refuse to expand their Medicaid programs to cover adults up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line, which makes the struggle for many families on the brink much harder. Expanding Medicaid means more than just access to healthcare—it frees up limited household income for other basic needs, like paying rent and putting food on the table. Having health coverage is also an important buffer against the economic consequences of illness or injury—unpaid medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy. Studies link Medicaid coverage not only to improved health, improved access to healthcare services, and lower mortality rates, but also to reduced financial strain. It’s time for all states to expand Medicaid.

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9)     Reform the criminal justice system and enact policies that support successful re-entry

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country in the world. Today, more than 1.5 million Americans are behind bars in state and federal prisons, a figure that has increased fivefold since 1980. The impact on communities of color is particularly staggering: One in four African American children who grew up during this time period have had a parent incarcerated.

Mass incarceration is a key driver of poverty. When a parent is incarcerated, his or her family must find a way to make ends meet without a necessary source of income. Additionally, even a minor criminal record can result in lifelong barriers to climbing out of poverty. For example, people with criminal records face substantial barriers to employment, housing, education, public assistance, and building good credit. More than 90 percent of employers now use background checks in hiring, and even an arrest without a conviction can prevent an individual from getting a job. The “one strike and you’re out” policy used by public housing authorities makes it difficult for individuals with even decades-old criminal records to obtain housing, and can obstruct family reunification. And in more than half of U.S. states, individuals with felony drug convictions are burdened with a lifetime ban on receiving certain types of public assistance.

In addition to common-sense sentencing reform to ensure that we no longer fill our nation’s prisons with non-violent, low-level offenders, policymakers should explore alternatives to incarceration, such as diversion programs for individuals with mental health and substance abuse challenges. We must also remove barriers to employment, housing, education, and public assistance. A decades-old criminal record should not consign an individual to a life of poverty.

10)  Do no harm

The across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration—which took effect in 2013—slashed funding for programs and services that provide vital support to low-income families. Sequestration also cost the American economy as many as 1.6 million jobs between mid-2013 and 2014.  As Congress considers a continuing resolution to fund the federal government past October 1 and avoid another government shutdown, it should reject further cuts to vital programs and services which would once again take us in the wrong direction. Thereafter, Congress should make permanent the improvements made to the EITC and the Child Tax Credit as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which are set to expire in 2017. And it should protect and strengthen vital programs such as Section 8 housing, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, which suffered two rounds of deep cuts in 2013 and 2014.

Conclusion

It is not only possible for America to cut poverty, it is possible for us to cut poverty dramatically.  Between 1959 and 1973, a strong economy, investments in family economic security, and new civil rights protections helped cut the U.S. poverty rate in half. Investments in nutrition assistance have improved educational attainment, earnings, health and income among our nation’s children when they reach adulthood. Expansions of public health insurance have lowered infant mortality rates. And, in more recent history, states that have raised the minimum wage have shown the important role that policy plays in reversing wage stagnation.

There is nothing inevitable about poverty, and there is nothing inevitable about the lack of political will to dramatically reduce it.  Share this article with your friends, and get involved.

Yet much has changed in the past 50 years. Demographic shifts, insufficient access to jobs that pay decent wages, and an economy that increasingly serves only the wealthy few pose a new set of challenges. Meanwhile, several components of our system of work and income supports have grown weaker and been cut back—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, is the poster child of this troubling trend—and today far too few individuals and families get the help they need and deserve in hard times.

Too bad, but this is all someone else’s problem, right?

Wrong.

As my colleague Melissa Boteach points out in her column published earlier this week, four out of five Americans will experience at least one year of significant economic insecurity—defined as living in poverty or near-poverty, or needing to turn to unemployment insurance or another form of public assistance—at some point during their working years. Yep, you read that right: four out of five.  Perhaps even more staggering: half of us will experience three years or more of significant economic insecurity.

While poverty might be a condition we associate with “other people,” just take a look at the most common precipitating factors: Job loss. Birth of a child. Illness. These are life events that could hit any of us. While some paint poverty as something that only happens to flawed people, or a condition affecting a stagnant, marginalized minority, in reality it’s something most of us will encounter at some point in our lives. As Dr. Mark Rank, whose research yielded those staggering findings, wrote in the New York Times: “Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans.”

In the coming months, the Center for American Progress poverty team will explore policies that strengthen and modernize our nation’s safety net, and promote economic mobility for families on the brink. Since we’re all in this together, shouldn’t we ensure that our social contract provides adequate protection amid the ups and downs of life?

This idea was a frequent refrain—repeated yesterday by Republicans and Democrats alike—at a hearing convened by Congressman Dave Reichert, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources.

As my colleague Rachel West put it in a column published yesterday:

“It is high time for Congress to re-examine the evidence on subsidized jobs… an effective tool for increasing economic security—and ensuring that those who have been left behind by the labor market have access to job opportunities.”

My appreciation for the power of subsidized jobs has its roots in North Philadelphia. Fresh out of law school in the Fall of 2009, I was a new attorney at Community Legal Services (CLS) and the Great Recession was in full swing. Nationally, unemployment was approaching 10 percent. In Philly, unemployment was nearly 11 percent—and fully a quarter of the city’s residents were living in poverty.

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka, the stimulus package), federal funding was made available for states to establish subsidized jobs programs. In partnership with the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, we at CLS drafted a plan for what ultimately became Way to Work Pennsylvania—a statewide, subsidized jobs program that created 20,000 jobs for adults and youth around the Commonwealth.

While short-lived—the program ran from May 2010 through the funding’s expiration in September of that same year—Way to Work was by all accounts a great success. A partnership between Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor and Industry and the Department of Public Welfare, Way to Work connected low-income Pennsylvanians with private, nonprofit and public sector jobs paying up to $13 per hour. Per federal guidelines, priority populations for jobs placement included the long-term unemployed, low-income youth, welfare recipients, and people with criminal records (even people with minor records, such as a summary offense or an arrest without a conviction, can face significant barriers accessing jobs).

From the start, Way to Work was a win for both struggling Pennsylvanians and employers. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on small businesses that were able to expand by taking on Way to Work employees, alongside profiles of people like Barbie Izquierdo, a mother of two who had been been out of work for more than a year before getting a subsidized job at the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger.  Izquierdo then obtained a permanent position with the organization when one opened up. “This job has given me stability,” she told the Inquirer. “I’m living proof that Way to Work works.”

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In all, 39 states and Washington, D.C. launched programs, using $1.3 billion in federal funding to place some 260,000 workers into subsidized jobs—which comes to $5000 per worker.  If you think the numbers are compelling, watch the personal testimonials of workers and employers who benefited from Pennsylvania’s program.

But the clock was ticking. The federal funds were set to expire at the end of September 2010. Workers and employers banded together and lobbied Congress to extend the deadline so that the programs could continue. Governors of red and blue states alike—including then-Governor of Mississippi Haley Barbour (R)—joined the chorus calling for the funding to be extended. In Pennsylvania, people felt so strongly about Way to Work, that a large group—including several employers—hopped a bus down to Washington in the July heat to tell members of Congress what Way to Work meant to them.

Despite bipartisan support, reauthorization of the federal funding failed to advance when the Senate couldn’t muster 60 votes, and the funds expired on schedule. Most states scaled down their programs as the funding dried up.

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center on Law and Social Policy point out, the legacy of these programs is a blueprint for how subsidized jobs can serve as an effective tool for boosting economic security and mobility.

As West notes, subsidized jobs do not lessen the need to raise the minimum wage and pursue job creation, but:

“…when job opportunities remain elusive for whole groups of workers—even as economic conditions improve—these workers are denied the chance to protect their families from poverty and hardship, and chart a path to the middle class. As Congress evaluates the evidence on subsidized jobs programs, our lawmakers should consider subsidized jobs as an important strategy to increase economic mobility for those workers who need to get a foot in the door.”

Let’s hope Congress takes a serious look at an idea backed by something so rare it is now considered an anomaly: strong bipartisan support.

Day in and day out, legal services attorneys fight for the rights of poor individuals and families, providing legal help to people who cannot afford an attorney. Access to representation is vitally important.  But as we commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty, it’s time to renew the vision of legal services as antipoverty work.

While American legal aid has existed since the turn of the 20^th century, the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) as part of LBJ’s War on Poverty offered a bold new vision of legal services as an antipoverty strategy, and legal services attorneys as agents of systemic change. Catherine Carr, Executive Director of Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, describes this historic shift:

No longer were legal aid programs being designed to simply respond to the problems that individual poor people brought to intake offices; instead, the programs were to work with low-income communities to identify needs and strategically set priorities that protected and advanced the rights of poor people and poor communities as a whole.

In the years that followed, legal services proved to be an enormously effective antipoverty tool. Legal services programs lobbied elected officials, engaged in local and national social justice organizing efforts, won landmark victories in courts across the nation on behalf of their clients, and thereby brought about systemic change that benefited poor people nationwide. The watershed U.S. Supreme Court case Goldberg v. Kelly, for example, established that a poor person has a constitutional right to a fair hearing before his or her welfare benefits can be terminated.

Fifty years later, legal services attorneys continue to fight on behalf of low-income Americans who cannot afford legal help. But much of the work today more closely resembles the “legal aid” vision that existed prior to the 1960s rather than the “law reform” vision brought about by the OEO as part of the War on Poverty.

This shift is in large part due to conservative backlash against legal services as an antipoverty tool. It didn’t take long for conservatives to view a strong legal services movement as a threat.  In the decades that followed the launch of the War on Poverty, they placed restrictions on legal services programs, barring those that accept federal funding from engaging in much of the work that effects systemic change.

President Nixon prohibited staff attorneys from lobbying or engaging in political activities. President Reagan—who, as Governor of California, had battled efforts to improve the working conditions of poor migrant farmworkers—prohibited legal services programs from using federal dollars for legislative and regulatory activities as well as class action lawsuits. Even after the Reagan restrictions, many legal services programs found alternative funding sources to support their law reform activities. But in 1996, the Gingrich Congress hammered the final nail into the coffin, expanding the restrictions to any legal services program that accepted even a single dollar of federal funds.

While a small number of programs found ways to continue their law reform work—for example, by creating separate programs to receive unrestricted dollars—most responded by backing away from the kinds of systemic work that had proven most effective at impacting large numbers of poor people, in favor of the “legal aid” model of one-off individual client representation.

Today an ever-shrinking number of legal services programs—and legal services attorneys—view their role and mission as that of antipoverty work.  Access to representation has supplanted the bolder vision of law reform and systemic change.

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To be sure, a handful of programs still embrace the OEO vision. As a new lawyer fresh out of law school, I had the good fortune to land in one of those programs: Community Legal Services in Philadelphia (CLS). As a staff attorney at CLS, I learned firsthand the power of the “law reform” model that CLS continues to embody, providing representation to poor Philadelphians, and using that individual representation to inform large-scale systemic work—through class action and impact litigation as well as legislative advocacy on the local, state and national level.

The cutbacks and restrictions championed by Nixon, Reagan and Gingrich have without question made it much more complicated and challenging for many legal services programs to engage in law reform. As long as the restrictions persist, unrestricted programs like CLS must take seriously their responsibility to prioritize law reform work, given that there are so few programs free to pursue it.

But even restricted programs can find ways to maximize their role as part of the antipoverty movement. Media is a powerful example, as human stories have the power to bring abstract policy debates to life. As advocates who interact with low-income individuals and families on a daily basis, legal services attorneys are uniquely positioned to tell the story of how few poor families are actually helped by TANF, for example; or how struggling families have no room for SNAP cuts; or how inadequate the official federal poverty measure is. They can paint a picture of the barriers people face in seeking to get a job—people with criminal records, for example—or what it’s like to be working full-time and still unable to rise out of poverty. They can tell the story of how and why it’s expensive to be poor. Even better, they can empower their clients to tell their own stories. Talkpoverty.org offers a unique new outlet to tell these stories, and I hope to see a steady stream of contributions from legal services advocates and their clients in the months and years ahead.

But we must also look beyond the present. As we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty and the Office of Economic Opportunity, let’s pave the way for a renewed legal services movement—one that is unhindered by restrictions and plays a leading role in bringing an end to poverty.