Just before Thanksgiving, 13.2 million people with children in the U.S. did not have enough to eat
Deborah Weinstein,
November 17, 2023
Thanksgiving will not be a time of plenty in millions of American households with children this year. The number of people with children who reported that in the previous week their households sometimes or often did not have enough to eat rose by 2 million, from 11.2 million to 13.2 million over the past year. In survey periods covering September 20 – October 30 of 2023, close to 16 percent of people with children said they did not have enough food, up from nearly 14 percent who responded during the periods covering October 5 through November 14, 2022.
Two years in, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is making a difference
David Elliot,
November 15, 2023
After her husband passed from Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2019, Kim Guess suddenly became a single mom who needed to support her family. The Kalamazoo, Michigan resident launched a dance group fitness studio named Guess Who’s Dancing. Later, she became the part-owner of downtown Kalamazoo’s first Black-owned event venue space, the Xperience. But there is a problem. The roads surrounding her business are among the city’s top 25 most dangerous roads. They are all one-way, unsafe for pedestrians, dangerous at night due to a lack of streetlights, and difficult for her customers to navigate their way to Kim’s business.
Update: 260 Groups Tell Congress: Keep Government Running and Protect Human Needs
David Elliot,
November 13, 2023
The Coalition on Human Needs is asking local, state, and national groups to sign a letter asking Congress to pass a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the federal government open and running beyond Friday, November 17. If Congress fails to act by midnight next Friday, we will face a government shutdown. The deadline for signing is noon ET Monday, November 13.
How the expanded Child Tax Credit reduced poverty – why we need the Supplemental Poverty Measure
David Elliot,
November 9, 2023
Although children in all 50 states benefited from an expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), new data show that the effect was most felt among rural, low-cost states, some of which experienced drops in child poverty by more than 50 percent when the CTC was temporarily expanded during the pandemic. The data found that during 2021, when the expansion was in effect, child poverty dropped the most in rural, low cost-of-living states such as Alabama (down 52.5%), Maine (down 52.2%), Missouri (down 51.5%) and Wyoming (down 51.7%).
New report: Ten million Americans have lost Medicaid coverage. Many shouldn’t have.
David Elliot,
November 7, 2023
Ten million Americans have lost Medicaid coverage as states are deciding who should continue to receive benefits, and more than 70 percent of those who lost coverage did so because of bureaucratic hurdles such as missing paperwork, not because they were shown to be ineligible. It is likely that two-thirds of those who lost coverage became uninsured either briefly or for a longer period. More than half of those losing benefits are likely to be people of color.
