Free Republic

...But there is one detail in the jobs report that suggests there is still room for improvement. The labor force participation rate, which is a measure of how many people are employed or actively seeking work compared to the whole population (not just those looking for work), is 62.7 percent. According to the report, this is “unchanged over the month and over the year.” In total numbers, there are 96,230,000 Americans who are not in the labor force, which is an increase of 456,000 since President Obama’s last year in office. ... The Trump administration is likewise set to release...

The Donald Trump administration hopes to unveil a new Labor Department regulation in June requiring drug testing for unemployment benefits. Republicans used the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal an Obama-era regulation that limited states’ ability to limit drug testing for people who apply for unemployment benefits. After President Trump signed the CRA repealing the Obama-era regulation, House Ways and Means chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) said: President Trump just signed into law my bill that abolishes an Obama-era rule. After five years of battling with the Obama Department of Labor, states like Texas will now be allowed to drug test...

Is a low income or prolonged unemployment truly cause for financial stress? According to one study, not really. In some states, public assistance programs, or welfare, could pay more than full-time, minimum-wage jobs. Cato Institute’s 2013 Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off study totaled the welfare benefits offered in each state and compared that value with the wages workers would need to earn in order to have an equivalent take-home income. Cato found for long-term dependents, welfare actually pays pretty well. The study examined the package for a single mother with two children, who could use programs such as Temporary Assistance for...

Guillory calculates the average SNAP benefit of $270.22 monthly will go down $6.50 to $263.72. “But at the same time the client will be receiving about $20 more per month from their other program benefits,” Guillory said. “Overall they’re better off. Their income has to go up for their SNAP benefits to go down.”... SNAP cost the federal government $71 billion in 2016. Of that amount about $1.4 billion was spent in Louisiana. About a quarter of all Louisiana households receive food stamps.

Maine is having trouble finding enough snowplow drivers, another sign of the way low unemployment is taxing states. The state Department of Transportation has about 50 openings among about 700 positions and expects 30 snow storms in the season that stretches from mid-November to mid-April. Exacerbating the problem: some cities like Portland hire their own drivers and pay more, and private sector demand for experienced drivers is also high.

Fighting terrorism is now morphing into clamping down on human migration, as far as the European Union is concerned. France’s President Emmanuel Macron is leading the charge, claiming at a conference in Paris last week that terrorism and human trafficking are part of the same problem, requiring the deployment of a military force spread across Africa. The melding of the two concepts provokes serious legal and moral questions. But so desperate, it seems, is the EU to halt illegal migration into the bloc that it is moving to militarize the problem in Africa – under the guise of “fighting terrorism”....

On the heels of its horrific failures to repeal Obamacare, the troublesome Senate has finally gotten its act together enough to pass a $1.6 trillion tax cut. If it passes as expected, Americans can finally get the tax cut for Christmas that they elected a Republican Congress for, following years of Obama-era tax harvestings and stagnation. But it was a close call. One name stands out as a stinker here, and it still stands out as a stinker even though he's now voting yes: Senator Marco Rubio. The supposed conservative from Florida was willing to derail the whole thing for...

The $8 detail in the Globe’s Spotlight series on race in Boston is not a typo. The median net worth for non-immigrant African-American households in the Greater Boston region is $8, according to “The Color of Wealth in Boston,” a 2015 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School.

On December 11th, 2017 in New York City, 27-year-old Bangladeshi national Akayed Ullah detonated a 'low-tech' explosive attached to his body with Velcro and zip ties – injuring himself severely. The would-be Islamic State terrorist is rumored to be responding to the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital city days earlier.

Wisconsin may become the first state in America to drug test able-bodied adults applying for food stamps, if Gov. Scott Walker gets his way. Walker moved ahead Monday with his plans, a move that has been blocked by the federal government or found unconstitutional when other states have tried. Wisconsin’s plan was approved by the Republican-controlled legislature more than two years ago, but it languished because it conflicted with federal rules prohibiting states from imposing additional eligibility criteria on food stamp recipients. Florida had a drug test requirement for food stamp recipients that a federal appeals court blocked in 2014,...

The woman approached President Emmanuel Macron on the street and asked him for help acquiring French citizenship papers, according to Morocco World News. Macron acknowledged the woman’s situation, but replied that France cannot realistically help everyone who asks, nor is the nation obligated to do so. Likewise, France must put its own people first: "In France, we will protect all people who are in the asylum [system] and who are not safe in their country. But we can not accommodate everyone who comes with working or student visas and who stay after. To be completely frank, you have to go...

Overhauling welfare was one of the defining goals of Bill Clinton’s presidency, starting with a campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it," continuing with a bitter policy fight and producing change that remains hotly debated 20 years later. Now, President Donald Trump wants to put his stamp on the welfare system, apparently in favor of a more restrictive policy. He says "people are taking advantage of the system." Trump, who has been signaling interest in the issue for some time, said this past week that he wants to tackle the issue after the tax overhaul he is seeking...

One future-related proposal getting a lot of attention nowadays is the Universal Basic Income. The idea is to give everybody some money every month — typically something like $1,000 a month. That is not enough for everybody to live luxuriously, but enough for everybody to get by without needing to work. Supporters say it’s needed because the robots will take all the jobs, plus they hope it will raise entrepreneurship. While others say robots are a false alarm, that we’ll have a surplus of jobs so why pay people trillions to sit on the couch and refuse to work. It’s...

President Donald Trump said Monday his administration will start to consider reforming the welfare system in the United States, saying that some people are "taking advantage of the system." The comment comes as the Trump administration struggles to get any sweeping legislation through Congress, despite Republicans controlling both the House and Senate. Trump failed to pass health care reform earlier this year and is currently working -- without much success so far -- to pass tax reform. "People are taking advantage of the system and then other people aren't receiving what they really need to live and we think it...

Hillary Clinton gave consideration to a national basic income program in 2016. •The goal was to raise incomes using “the Alaska model.” •If the chips had fallen in the right places, it could have led to every American getting a monthly check from the government. Most Americans are sick of hearing about Hillary Clinton. Enough people didn’t trust her, didn’t like her, or couldn’t be persuaded to vote for her, which led to Donald Trump’s victory. After that, we expected her to fade away — to ride off into the sunset with Bill and enjoy retirement. She did fade away...

The policy of guaranteeing every citizen a universal basic income is gaining support around the world, as automation increasingly makes jobs obsolete. But can it be funded without raising taxes or triggering hyperinflation? In a panel I was on at the NexusEarth cryptocurrency conference in Aspen September 21-23rd, most participants said no. This is my rebuttal. In May 2017, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford published the results of a survey of the world's best artificial intelligence experts, who predicted that there was a 50 percent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks within 45 years....

Trump administration officials are mulling an executive order that would instruct federal agencies to review low-income assistance programs, part of a coming effort to make sweeping changes to the country’s welfare system. The White House began circulating a draft order to federal agencies for comment last week, according to two administration officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations. One of the officials said the draft order calls on agencies to review existing regulations and propose new rules that conform to a set of broad welfare principles, including tighter work requirements that encourage recipients to shift back into...

Congress just allowed the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provided low-cost health insurance to 9 million children, to expire. If action is not taken soon to restore the funding, the effects will become obvious in schools across the country, with many of the children in the program unable to see a doctor

The Government is being urged to pause the mass roll-out of its new benefits system next week as charities warn it is forcing people into poverty. Since 2013, Universal Credit has been introduced relatively slowly to around five selected job centres a month. The system is designed to simplify the way claimants are paid merging six existing benefits, including housing benefit and jobseeker's allowance, into one monthly payment. Sky News went to one of their centres in Oldham to find out if that was the case. In the two days I was there I met people like Debbie and Steven...

In California the poverty rate is 20.4%. In Texas it is 14.7%. California Governor Jerry Brown (D) claimed "the heads-up comparison is unfair. Our income tax rate is 13.3%. Texas has no income tax. So each person in our state has to contribute more of his or her income before they get to spend any of it on themselves." "We also have more regulations controlling where and how people can live and where and how businesses can operate," Brown added. "This makes housing less affordable and raises the prices businesses must charge in order to stay profitable. Naturally, that has...