The United States’ poverty rate experienced its largest one-year jump on record last year, with the rate among children more than doubling from 2021’s historic low of 5.2 percent to 12.4 percent according to new numbers from the US Census Bureau out today. They’re the latest data to reflect the devastating effects following the expiration of nearly all pandemic-era relief programs. That includes the end of Medicaid rules that protected recipients from getting kicked off because of administrative errors, an end to rental assistance policies, and the restart of student loan payments.
These policies might seem like a distant memory at this point. But they’re worth recalling with the arrival of every new report. Each demonstrates what happens when politicians long hostile to caregivers, universal health care, and the welfare state, for a brief moment, acted to create powerful, federally-backed safety net programs aimed at helping everyday Americans. One of the most effective programs to emerge was the expansion of the child tax credit, which provided families monthly checks of up to $300 per child and broadened eligibility rules for qualifying families. In turn, child poverty rates plummeted; the extra income allowed caregivers to quit grueling second and third jobs; parents were able to buy their kids decent clothes and help stop taunting at school. The Census Bureau previously reported that food insecurity dropped dramatically after just the first extended payment, from 10.7 million households reporting they didn’t have enough food to 7.4 million.
But as the pandemic receded, Republicans with the help of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who in private remarks reportedly warned that families were using the extra income to buy drugs, appeared to remember the country’s longstanding pre-pandemic hostility. Their opposition ultimately tanked President Biden’s agenda, and along with it, the brief life of the expanded child tax credit. That’s something worth remembering today as the predictable crowd is likely to cry about Democratic-engineered inflation.
you bring them into your office and say hey, you vote the way I want to or I’m going to destroy your fuckin life. direct the IRS to find any discrepancy in their taxes, direct the DOJ to find any thing they’ve ever done wrong in their life, have the NSA leak their texts, charge them with one of those bullshit charges like wire fraud. these people are absolute cowards, they don’t care about anything other than protecting their wealth - make that slightly inconvenient for them and they’ll buckle. or honestly just have the CIA kill them, who cares? the CIA is off killing civil rights leaders and foreign politicians anyway, may as well kill some of our own that are holding good things up.
You sound like you want a Mafia family, not a government…
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You asked and he answered, sometimes AuThoRiTaRiAnIsM is how you actually get things done.
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Enjoy your democratic child poverty 👍
Also the US is not a democracy
Because authoritarian governments aren’t known for poverty 👍
I guess at least when you complain about it, you can just die instead of having to live with it.
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lol, I bet you think killing Nazis is bad too and there’s some kind of rule that states you have to have reactionaries in your politics instead of just getting rid of them.
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Imagine having elected officials doing what you like. Instead they do whatever corporate donors pay them to.
Best to let capital sort it out - wouldn’t want to enforce the will of the people or anything.
why should it take force when their power allegedly comes from the people? i thought this was a democracy!
You live in the US which has the world’s largest prison population by both total numbers and percent of the population. Is this the non-authoritarian democracy you’re talking about here? We have so many people in a cycle of poverty, bad health, and prison because we all got together and decided that this is how we want to allocate resources? Billionaires, private prisons, private healthcare, unaffordable housing, and child poverty?
You live in a democracy? When is the last time you and everyone else in your workplace got together to make a decision democratically instead of that decision being made unilaterally?
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we literally have the largest per-capita incaceration rate in the history of the modern world what the fuck are you talking about ACTUAL dictatorships
What’s even worse is that the person we’re replying to is likely fully aware of how the US has been sending its military and intelligence forces all over the world for the last 70-80 years to violently crush any movement that ever so slightly opposes its hegemony, and yet they still believe that the US is somehow not “authoritarian”
These people live in a fantasy world.
Not just psr capita. US has the largest prison population period
At this point someone should probably dig up that research paper that shows that what the US public wants has no influence on what is actually carried out by the US state.
bud, you could literally rub their noses in the most solid evidence and they won’t accept it in the same way you can drag a mule to water but you can’t make the jackass drink
Oh I know this clown would never get it, but still
You’ve just described grounds for impeachment and removal of the president. The full House and Senate would turn on them at that point.
at which point I would have the military arrest all of them and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat
No thanks. You claim to speak for the people, but really you only want power for your fringe ideology.
Our “fringe ideology” has the largest political party on the planet.
Only because other parties are banned. Can’t stand real competition.
There are literally 8 parties represented in the legislature
The other ones are a joke. The largest has 58 out of 2980 seats.
Democracy is when no political party dominates, and the more power doesn’t consolidate around a very justifiably popular party the more democratic it is.
If the democrats started doing good things the last time they had concrete control over all three branches and jumped to something like 80 percent popularity and got 80 percent of the vote, that would be undemocratic. Just like how the CPC has an above 90 percent approval rate according to international observers and holds almost all political offices in China.