This August marked the 50th anniversary of the food stamp program, known today as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. CHN is joining a number of organizations and advocates this week to talk about the importance of SNAP. We invite you to join in the conversation on October 30 from…
Archives: Voices
Will you be smacking your head on November 5?
I can’t tell you who to vote for on November 4. The Coalition on Human Needs is a nonprofit group, and we’re not allowed to weigh in on candidates. But we are allowed to encourage everyone to get out and vote. If you’re reading this, you are almost certainly well…
Death and Taxes: Inevitable for All?
Considering being very rich? It has a lot of advantages. Even those two things said to be inevitable – death and taxes – can be stalled, if not evaded altogether. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published a paper this month documenting that widening inequality is not just a matter…
Yellen Makes the Case for Reducing Inequality
“The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me. The past several decades have seen the most sustained rise in inequality since the 19th century after more than 40 years of narrowing inequality following the Great Depression. By some estimates, income and wealth inequality…
Child Care Centers and the Quality Improvement Catch-22
This post was originally published on the Half in Ten Education Fund’s TalkPoverty blog on October 22. Quality, affordable child care is not only right and necessary to prepare children to learn; it’s also needed if low-income working parents are to have a shot at working their way out of poverty….
Fact of the Week: The Most Effective Anti-Poverty Programs for Children
Children remain the age group most disproportionately poor in our country – roughly one out of five children in the U.S. is poor – and the statistics are far worse for children of color and children in cities, where the numbers are closer to one out of three. We know…
The Intersection of Poverty and Domestic Violence
We know that poverty disproportionately affects women and single moms. In 2013, nearly 16 percent of women and nearly 40 percent of families with children headed by a woman lived in poverty, higher than their male counterparts. We know that women who are poor are more likely to suffer from health…
Fact of the Week: Millions of People are Lifted Out of Poverty by Programs Like Social Security, Low-income Tax Credits, and SNAP/Food Stamps
More than 48 million people were poor in the U.S. in 2013. But if Social Security did not exist, more than 75 million people would have been poor. Most of us have elderly parents or other relatives for whom Social Security is an absolutely essential part of their monthly budget….
Head Smacker: Voter ID Laws Further Silence Those Whose Voices Need to Be Heard the Most
“There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud, if there is not actual danger of such fraud, and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burden.” – 7th Circuit Court…
Poverty in the 50 Biggest U.S. Cities
As we noted in our Head Smacker last week, poverty is rampant in cities across America. And poverty among children in cities is even higher. We did a little more digging on this subject and, using recently-released Census Bureau data for 2013, put together a table showing poverty in the…
Head Smacker: U.S. Corporate Profits at All-Time Highs; Taxes at All-Time Lows. But Key Leaders Say We Need to Cut Corporate Taxes
An interesting confluence of findings in the last couple of days. First, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected economic growth in the U.S. would exceed other major developed nations next year, predicting, as reported in the New York Times, we would “advance ahead of many large economies, not just in…
Fact of the Week: Those with Less Give More
While millions of Americans struggled through the Great Recession and in the years that followed, the need seen by charities was higher than ever. Many charities experienced a decline in donations during these years. However, those who struggled the most found a way to dig even deeper into their pockets…