Send a message thanking those who stood up and voted against this monstrosity of a bill, or send a message to your members of Congress who voted for it, admonishing them for their vote.
Congress has enacted the Big Brutal Bill and Donald Trump has signed it into law.
This bill is deadly.
According to researchers from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts plus other health care cuts—the largest in history—will result in the deaths of 51,000 people per year. Those deaths include 18,200 people who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare, 20,000 people who will lose health care coverage due to the elimination of the premium tax credit for the Affordable Care Act, and 13,000 deaths due to staffing cuts at nursing homes.
At a time when so many are struggling to afford the basic costs of living including groceries, new data from the Urban Institute shows that 5.3 million families will lose $25 or more per month in SNAP benefits, with the average such family losing $146 a month in help paying for food. Sixty-two percent of the families experiencing these very large SNAP losses include children.
All of this is being done in order to pay for extending the Trump tax scam—making tax breaks for the rich permanent—and funding Trump’s mass immigration detention and removal machine.
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…
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…
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….
“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…
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…
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…
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…
This post was originally published on Oxfam America’s First Person blog on Sept. 29. For my hard-working family and friends who earn just above the U.S. minimum wage, a paycheck doesn’t go very far. My daughter struck it lucky when she landed a job for $8.25 an hour at the local…
One in seven Americans is poor. But what if poverty were far more prevalent – say, if one in four were poor. What if the concentration of poverty among children were still higher: at least one in three. At those very high levels, we would expect many things to go wrong. …
Last week, we highlighted some of the fabulous work our state partners did surrounding the reports on poverty in their states that they released in conjunction with CHN . The work continued this week, with even more organizations releasing reports based on the new Census Bureau data, and spreading the word…
This post was originally published on Oxfam America’s blog, The Politics of Poverty, on Oct. 2. U.S. businesses are in. The American public is in. So what’s next on the minimum wage, Congress? It has long been the argument from some voices in business—or at least their Washington lobbyists and…
Unemployment Insurance Reaches Historically Low Share of Jobless At the Witness Wednesday events held throughout this summer, in our emails, and here on our blog, we’ve continued to make the case for why Congress should renew unemployment insurance (UI) benefits for the long-term jobless that were allowed to expire last December….