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Social safety net

The Gap Between What’s Offered By Our Social Safety Net And What’s Received

April 20, 2022 Jim Pugh, In These Times. , , ,
How much support do people actually receive from the social safety net? That’s the question that a recently released report from the University of Southern California’s Price Center for Social Innovation aimed to answer. The report, titled “Examining the Complex Social Safety Net for Low-Income Working Families,” explored what social programs are available to Los Angeles residents and how the support they receive from those programs varies as their wages increase. One key finding from the report was promising: If a mother with two children received all the benefits her family was eligible for, she would receive a living wage of $66,982 per year — enough to meet the basic needs of her family, based on the regional cost of living. In other words, the safety net would be operating in the way it should, ensuring those who fall on hard times have the support they need.

Scheer Intelligence: What Democrats Did To Welfare Haunts Them

August 27, 2021 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. , , ,
A recent piece in the Washington Post titled “Welfare rolls decline during the pandemic despite economic upheaval” delves into one of the biggest domestic policy failures of Bill Clinton’s presidency: the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which provides financial assistance for the country’s poor. TANF, explains reporter Amy Goldstein, is the reason why when the coronavirus spread and shelter-in-place mandates were issued, causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs at rates comparable to the Great Depression, even less people were able to receive needs-based cash assistance than prior to the pandemic. Peter Edelman, a lawyer and former member of the Clinton administration, joins Robert Scheer on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” to discuss the roots of this issue.

Reckoning With Labor Law’s Racist Roots

August 22, 2020 By Marina Multhaup, On Labor. , , ,
The maintenance of the racist Southern plantation system was the driving force behind the “compromise” struck by President Roosevelt and the Southern Democrats to exclude agricultural laborers from labor protections. In congressional debates this was clearly articulated. Representative Wilcox of Florida extolled, “You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it…” and Representative Cox of Georgia agreed, saying that it would be “dangerous beyond conception” to eliminate racial and social distinctions. Bargaining away racial equality, President Roosevelt and his coalition excluded agriculture from the FLSA.  There have been legal challenges to the agricultural exemption in the past but the exclusion has never been attacked squarely as unconstitutional because it was racially motivated. The Martinez-Cuevas case will be the first to squarely present this question before a court.

Police Budgets Are Ballooning As Social Programs Crumble

July 26, 2020 Indigo Olivier, In These Times. , , ,
Faced with mass teacher layoffs, deep cuts to education and social services, and a looming eviction crisis, police budgets across the nation remain absurdly high and have been largely insulated from Covid-induced belt-tightening. Worse yet, a number cities have opted to increase police budgets, claiming the funds are needed to pay for reforms. This is despite the fact that racial justice protesters across the country are clearly calling for the defunding of police—a demand that stems from abolitionist principles. Budget cuts are seen as part of a process of dismantling prisons and policing while investing in community alternatives and social goods, in order to reimagine public safety.

What Programs A 10% Cut In Military Spending Could Buy

July 25, 2020 Gabe Murphy, East Bay Times. , , ,
For millions of Californians, times are tough, and the future looks tougher still. So far, California has seen over 325,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 7,000 deaths. In the economic fallout, over 6 million of us have applied for unemployment insurance since the start of the pandemic. Many of them have yet to see a dime from the understaffed California Employment Development Department, which has struggled to keep up with the sheer volume of claims. Meanwhile, a $600-per-week federal unemployment supplement is set to expire at the end of July, and the Republican-controlled Senate appears determined to let it expire rather than support a measure passed in the House of Representatives to extend it through January.

In Absence Of State Action, Organizers Help Homeless People During Pandemic

April 27, 2020 Ella Fassler, Truthout. , , , ,
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, collectives sharing free food with the hungry were facing a sharp uptick in state repression. In Arizona, Tucson Police Park Safety warned the public that sharing food in public parks is illegal in a statement posted to Twitter on February 7. In response, the People’s Defense Initiative in Tucson started a petition and organized a rally at the City Hall on February 19 to “remind Tucson leadership that feeding the hungry is never a crime!” Free Hot Soup, a group that serves food to over a hundred people in a Portland, Oregon, park five nights a week, sued the city in November 2019 after it introduced a new “social service” law. The law creates new bureaucratic hurdles for solidarity services including food handling permits, insurance coverage, dumpsters, security, and restricts the services to once per week per park.

Budget Proposals Highlight Priorities Of Rich And Shameless

February 3, 2019 William Rivers Pitt, Truthout. , , ,
The Trump administration’s 2018 budget proposal was a genuine masterpiece of cruelty. “President Trump’s 2018 budget contains the largest dollar cuts to programs for low- and moderate-income people proposed by any President’s budget in the modern era,” wrote The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities at the time. “The plan would cut these programs by an estimated $2.5 trillion over the next decade. About two-thirds (66 percent) of the budget’s cuts would come from these programs, which help low- and moderate-income families afford the basics or improve their upward mobility.”

Basic Income Week: A ‘Safety Net For Life’

September 13, 2015 Staff, www.basicincomeweek.org , , , ,
By Staff for Basic Income Week - We are facing multiple crises which threaten our lives as individuals as well as life as humankind as a whole. These crises - social, ecological and nancial - are being experienced in a myriad of dierent ways around the world. For this year‘s Basic Income Week we want to draw attention to Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) as a possible "Safety Net for Life" which leaves no one behind. In a world where work is characterised by increasing exibility, insecurity and precarity, UBI not only reduces the fears which make people susceptible to hate and violence against “others”. UBI also sparks economic growth where it is badly needed while paving a way towards degrowth where that is necessary. UBI enables ecological sustainability, guaranteeing life on earth in the future.

Spokes On The Anti-Austerity Wheel

October 25, 2014 Shane Burley, www.roarmag.org , ,
If we want to envision an anti-austerity movement that can genuinely empower people, we will have to create one that moves beyond austerity altogether. The contraction of capital, the latest stage in the perpetual crisis of the free market, is happening again. This time it is feeding on the oxygenated blood of the working poor. In an effort to solve the false problem of the national debt, and in response to the first-world depression that was inflicted on the people by the banking class, austerity measures are being implemented in the U.S. from the blueprint established in the European Union. Austerity, cleanly put, is how a welfare state attempts to respond to the internal debt it has accumulated.
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