US child poverty doubled in 2022, thanks to Joe Manchin. We must reverse course

Legislators are fleeing Washington, DC and heading home for the holidays. They leave behind a dysfunctional Congress with a rookie Speaker, brutal wars ongoing overseas, and a country with 11 million children living in poverty.

Yes, after a brief reprieve, child poverty is once again on the rise in the United States. But Congress can put a stop to that. As members of both houses, and both parties, work together on an end-of-year tax deal, they can re-implement a simple, wildly popular measure that has already proven to dramatically reduce child poverty: the expanded Child Tax Credit.

13 States Still Have Laws Meant to Limit Poor Families’ Sizes

The first time Rachel Mulroy had to turn to Massachusetts’s cash welfare program, known in the state as Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (TAFDC), her first daughter was two-and-a-half months old and Mulroy was fleeing an abusive relationship. She had been relying on family for financial support. “At some point, people had their own bills that they had to pay and I still couldn’t find any work,” she told Truthout. So she enrolled in TAFDC. The aid money wasn’t much — just the “bare minimum” to cover her needs, she said — but it got her through until she found a job a few months later.

Cities must stop arresting homeless people for sleeping outdoors, appeals court rules

A popular method for criminalizing homelessness is unconstitutional, the federal appeals court governing the western U.S. ruled this week.

Cities cannot arrest or cite a person for sleeping outdoors unless it can prove it had a shelter bed or other indoor housing option available at the time, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found almost a decade after a group of homeless people in Idaho sued over Boise’s ban on “sleeping rough.”

The Story Of Three Men In Tents Outside Habitat Paints A Damning Portrait Of Housing In The Age Of Austerity

Outside the flagship Habitat home improvement store on London’s Tottenham Court Road, three homeless men are living in tents. It’s a striking image, one that could almost be a poster for austerity Britain, showing the winners and losers of the housing crisis.

This is reality for the rough sleepers enduring a tough existence on the streets and today, HuffPost UK tells the stories of these three men as figures show an estimated 9,100 people nationwide are now living in tents, cars, trains or buses as the homelessness crisis deepens.

Housing Crisis: The Grim Reality For Families On Short-Term Tenancies

A cancer patient served an eviction notice at Christmas, a landlord who lost his flat in a card game and a mum-of-three forced to move every time she fell pregnant - these are some of the horror stories behind the rental market in 2018.

Emma Percy and husband Rob tell their children moving is “an adventure” but the family has been turfed out of a staggering 11 properties in 16 years, once when she was nine months’ pregnant.

The couple, who are calling for the government to introduce mandatory long-term tenancies, have been heartbroken watching savings for their own home decimated as they fork out for letting fees, deposits and moving vans.

Today’s Migrant Flow Is Different

The killing of a loved one. An attempt at gang recruitment. A rape. Harassment by a police officer. A death threat over an outstanding extortion payment. Amid the justified uproar at the Trump administration’s policies on America’s southern border, often lost are the reasons many Central Americans leave their homes, and are prepared to brave the perils of the journey north, in the first place. Families arriving at the border from countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala leave behind a myriad of stories, many of them connected to their homelands’ plague of armed violence.

The Barriers Stopping Poor People From Moving to Better Jobs

MERCED, California—Seccora Jaimes knows that she is not living in the land of opportunity. Her hometown has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, at 9.1 percent. Jaimes, 34, recently got laid off from the beauty school where she taught cosmetology, and hasn’t yet found another job. Her daughter, 17, wants the family to move to Los Angeles, so that she can attend one of the nation’s top police academies. Jaimes’s husband, who works in warehousing, would make much more money in Los Angeles, she told me. But one thing is stopping them: The cost of housing. “I don’t know if we could find a place out there that’s reasonable for us, that we could start any job and be okay,” she told me. Indeed, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Merced, in California’s Central Valley, is $750. In Los Angeles, it’s $2,710.

A basic income really could end poverty forever

I first heard the term “basic income” in the socialist magazine Dissent in 2005. I was a 15-year-old leftist with a taste for weird, radical plans to restructure society: say, having the government buy up majority stakes in every company and then distribute them equally to every American; converting all companies into worker cooperatives; trying a planned economy where the planning is done by decentralized worker and consumer councils rather than a government bureaucracy. Basic income, wherein the government gives everyone enough cash to live on with no strings attached, struck me as an idea in that mold: another never-going-to-happen but fun-to-think-about alternative to the unfettered financial capitalism of the second Bush term.

The Poverty Just Over the Hills From Silicon Valley

On the drive up the coast from the southernmost part of Northern California’s San Mateo County, Highway 1’s two lanes are surrounded by wind-whipped seas on one side and redwood forests on the other. The landscape is dotted with wild yellow mustard in the spring and pumpkins in the fall. A popular place for day-trippers to picnic, go wine-tasting, and shop at roadside farm stands, the region—affectionately nicknamed “the Slowcoast” for its unhurried pace—is a balm to the busyness nearby in Silicon Valley, to the east, and San Francisco, to the north.

When Anti-Poverty Programs for Immigrants Are Used to Bolster the Surveillance State

Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric demonizing refugees and immigrants reached its apotheosis as he arrived in the state of Minnesota last November. During a rally, the then-candidate decried the presence of Somali refugees in the state, declaring that Minnesotans had “suffered enough” from admitting them. “Here in Minnesota you have seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state, without your knowledge, without your support or approval,” Trump said.

It's So Much Harder to Escape Poverty Than You Might Think—It Can Take Decades and an Incredible Streak of Good Luck

In order to get out of poverty, you have to basically be extremely lucky for almost 20 years, according to a new bookThe Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by economist Peter Temin.

So many deep-seeded factors have lead to the economic and wealth inequality in the U.S. today (from slavery through to the new Jim Crow prisons crisis of today, to technological shifts, to globalization, corporatization and so much else) that few Americans stand a realistic chance of ever changing their economic status. Writer Gillian B. White explains this in a detail in an April 27 piece in the Atlantic, which sums up Temin's new book.

Mississippi is rejecting nearly all of the poor people who apply for welfare

Last year, 11,717 low-income residents of Mississippi applied to get a meager government benefit to help them make ends meet. The state’s welfare program, part of federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), gives a maximum of just $170 a month to a family of three. These applicants had applied hoping to get at least that crumb of cash assistance.

But out of the pool—more than 11 thousand—only 167 people were actually approved and enrolled in the program, according to state data obtained by ThinkProgress. Every other applicant was denied or withdrew, resulting in an acceptance rate of just 1.42 percent. Statistically speaking, it’s more like a rounding error.

Hillbilly Sellout: The Politics of J. D. Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy' Are Already Being Used to Gut the Working Poor

When Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz took to the airwaves Tuesday to defend his party’s flailing Affordable Care Act replacement plan, he told CNN, “Americans have choices … so, maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love, and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own healthcare.” Pushback was swift as many were quick to point out the Congressman was equating a $700 phone to healthcare costs that can often spiral into six figures, but some were equally shocked by the callousness of his remarks.

Was Chaffetz insinuating that the poor would rather spend money on frivolous things than their own self-care?

Poor People Don’t Stand A Chance In Court

Your landlord has decided to evict you and your family has nowhere to go. Or you’re in an abusive relationship and need a restraining order and probably a divorce and custody order for your children. Or you’re a homeless veteran trying to get VA benefits and navigate the complicated claims process. Or you’re being hounded by a collector for a debt you can’t pay who’s threatening to take away all of your income.

Ontario's soaring poverty gap ‘starkest’ for single adults as welfare rates stagnate

After five years on welfare, Pauline Bryant figures she was probably over-qualified to help others “get by on next to nothing” as a part-time community engagement worker last year.

Although the job gave Bryant an extra $600 a month, it didn’t provide medical benefits or enough money to escape welfare. But it eased her sense of isolation.

“What I liked best about working with others on low income was the message: ‘You are not alone,’ ” says Bryant, 53. “That’s what I held onto. I realized it’s not just me.”

Republican Proposal Would Restrict Free Meal Programs At Thousands Of America’s Poorest Schools

Millions of low-income American students could lose access to free school meals under a proposal circulating among House lawmakers.

The measure would reverse years of progress on free meals in U.S. schools by setting a much higher eligibility bar for schools to start making meals free to all students. Thousands of schools have expanded their meal offerings in recent years as researchers expose the extent of child hunger — and the dividends that come from curing it inside schoolhouses.

Foodbanks Have Hit A New UK Record - And Many People Using Them Are Not ‘Work Shy’

A record number of Britons are now using foodbanks, new analysis has revealed, with many of their customers being skilled workers or disabled people unable to hold down a job.

Foodbank use in the UK rose 2% last year to a new high, according to the latest figures from The Trussell Trust, which show that it has handed out over a million three-day emergency food supplies since April 2015.

The Panama Papers Revelations Hit The World's Poor Hardest

This week the Panama Papers leak blew the lid on the murky world of industrial scale tax abuse. For over 40 years a single law firm, Mossack Fonseca, set up more than 200,000 shell companies for the rich and powerful, in places where their financial affairs could be cloaked in secrecy, out of reach from tax authorities and regulators. At the peak of its activity in 2005, Mossack Fonseca incorporated more than 13,000 companies -- that's one company every 10 minutes.

Mississippi Refuses To Use Money That Would Give Poor Families Child Care

Christi Foster grew up in Georgia. While the state doesn’t spend a lot on its safety net for the poor, she says that enrolling in benefits wasn’t too complicated. “You go and apply for something and you find out that day or within a week’s time,” she said.

But since the single mother of three children moved to Mississippi, things have been a whole lot different. “Everything down here is so hard,” she said. “Daycare assistance, with Mississippi, it’s hard to get in… it’s always a waiting list.”

Tory Benefit Cuts Will Leave 2.6 Million Children In Poverty, Institute for Fiscal Studies Forecasts

Tory benefit cuts will lead to more than 2.6 million British children living in poverty by 2020, a new study has revealed.

The research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) forecasts that another four years of David Cameron’s Government will mean the poorest households, particularly larger families and single parents, will be hardest hit.