Keyword: safetynet
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Paul Ryan has one big complaint about former President Donald Trump: He wasn't willing to pursue cuts to the safety net programs Ryan had championed for years. "He and I fought about Medicare and entitlement reform all the time," the former GOP House speaker said Wednesday at a book event at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "It became clear to me there was no way he wanted to embrace that."
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Democrats are dropping family and medical paid leave from President Joe Biden's Build Back Better spending package, multiple sources confirmed to NBC News, as the party feverishly works to narrow down the bill and secure an agreement. The move comes after Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a key centrist, raised objections to including guaranteed paid leave in the social safety net bill. Its removal deals a blow to Democrats who viewed the proposal as a key component of Biden's legislative agenda. Manchin indicated to reporters that he didn't think the spending measure, known as the reconciliation bill, should be used to...
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Mary Taboniar went 15 months without a paycheck, thanks to the COVID pandemic. A housekeeper at the Hilton Hawaiian Village resort in Honolulu, the single mother of two saw her income completely vanish as the virus devastated the hospitality industry. For more than a year, Taboniar depended entirely on boosted unemployment benefits and a network of local foodbanks to feed her family. Even this summer as the vaccine rollout took hold and tourists began to travel again, her work was slow to return, peaking at 11 days in August — about half her pre-pandemic workload. Taboniar is one of millions...
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Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown champions have perennially invoked “science and data” to sanctify any mandate politicians impose. Hard facts have recently shown that neither vaccines nor face masks provide surefire protection against the virus. But no amount of evidence has yet shaken faith in the magic of absolute power.Covid policies are increasingly degenerating to the equivalent of sacrificing virgins to appease angry viral gods. New Zealand on Tuesday imposed a nationwide lockdown in response to a single Covid case in the capital city. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered her captive citizenry: “Do not congregate, don’t talk...
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In four years, Black Lives Matter went from a hashtag about social injustice to a full-fledged global civil rights movement. Metro spoke with Patrisse Cullors, who cofounded Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi in 2013, about its evolution, fighting racism in the age of Trump, her upcoming memoir and what saying “all lives matter” really means. What is the biggest misconception you find people have about Black Lives Matter? Patrisse Cullors: That we just started a hashtag. That it isn’t a sophisticated set of ideas that would lead to a larger strategy to build out, a powerful...
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Big Government: President Trump's budget is taking its share of hits for supposedly indulging in fanciful accounting, unrealistic assumptions and proposing massive cuts to vital safety-net programs. How much of that is true? You decide. Trump's budget plan proposes to balance the federal budget in 10 years and do so entirely through spending restraint. That alone is enough to raise the hackles of the Washington, D.C., swamp creatures. But critics have other complaints. The main ones: It relies on unrealistic economic projections. Critics say Trump's budget numbers rest on a rosy scenario of future economic growth. The New York Times...
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President Trump’s “skinny budget” — which would shift $54 billion in non-defense discretionary spending over to defense — has been unfairly savaged for allegedly eviscerating the social safety net.Headlines such as “How Trump’s Budget Cuts Could Hurt Low-Income Americans” (CNN) and “If You’re a Poor Person in America, Trump’s Budget is Not For You” (Washington Post) were accompanied by a New York Times editorial describing the budget as a sadistic attempt to “impose pain for pain’s sake.”Such headlines may lead people to wonder just how deeply President Trump’s budget proposal would cut federal anti-poverty spending below current levels: Ten...
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am Johnson, a Republican from Texas and chair of the Ways and Means Committee, introduced legislation to significantly cut Social Security. The bill introduced by Johnson, who is also the chair of the Social Security subcommittee, slashes benefits, adds means testing, and would raise the retirement age from 67 to 69. ...Michael Linden, associate director...at Center for American Progress, pointed out on Twitter, a letter from Social Security’s Office of the Actuary calculated workers making around $50,000 would see checks shrink by between 11% and 35%.
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Northeast dairy farmers who have been strapped for months by low milk prices say a voluntary insurance program that was supposed to be a safety net isn’t helping. The margin protection program provides financial assistance to enrolled farmers when the gap between the price of milk and national average feed costs falls below the coverage levels picked by individual farmers. […] Farmers say the margin protection program is not based on Northeast farmers’ feed costs but on the national average feed cost, which is less. The chairman of the National Milk Producers Federation testified in Washington last month that the...
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President Obama famously accused Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) of “thinly veiled Social Darwinism” for one of his budgets. It will take a special kind of cynicism to make that claim about Ryan’s new anti-poverty proposal. Obama’s partisans will no doubt find a way, but fair-minded observers will see a creative, thoughtful approach to a topic that’s often politically neglected. Ryan proposes and endorses a range of ideas to fix the safety net and address the root causes of poverty. He would offer states the option of an “Opportunity Grant” to replace, dollar for dollar, the amount of money they...
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Ideology is as much about understanding the past as shaping the future. And conservatives tell themselves a story, a fairy tale really, about the past, about the way the world was and can be again under Republican policies. This story is about the way people were able to insure themselves against the risks inherent in modern life. Back before the Great Society, before the New Deal, and even before the Progressive Era, things were better. Before government took on the role of providing social insurance, individuals and private charity did everything needed to insure people against the hardships of life;...
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Are childrens’ car seats driving down the fertility rate in America?Jonathan V. Last sees car seats as part of a “huge constellation of factors in modern life” that “nudge” people toward having fewer children, he said during an interview about his book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.Last said car seats effectively create a small “tax on people who want to have more than two kids” by making it harder to fit three kids into a normal sedan, which encourages parents to buy a larger car. This penalty may not dissuade people who already want...
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Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad urged Arab League nations on Sunday to make good on $100 million a month in pledged "safety net" funds, warning that his government was facing a "dangerous" financial crisis. "I have nothing left to do but to urge our Arab brothers to activate this net, because until this point there has been no movement to deliver the $100 million," Fayyad told reporters at a briefing in his Ramallah office, according to AFP. "If this safety net is not activated quickly, I'll call for an emergency Arab summit to discuss financial situation because it's a...
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Well said, Santorum -- well said. At a campaign stop in Michigan on Saturday morning: Santorum On Obama 'What A Snob' "Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands... and want to work out there making things. President Obama once said, he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good decent men and women, who go out everyday to put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go...
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One of the central, driving questions in our politics is this: Why are people who are themselves reliant on government programs so prone to electing anti-government politicans who want to put them on the chopping block?Paul Krugman talks to experts about this conundrum and comes away with some important conclusions that are directly relevant to this year’s presidential race:Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent...
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Newt Gingrich on Wednesday ripped GOP front-runner Mitt Romney for comments he made about not caring about the poor. Gingrich went on to say he's "fed up with politicians in either party dividing Americans against each other." Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7397249n#ixzz1lBB3wXIy
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<p>After winning the Florida primary, GOP presidential nominee hopeful Mitt Romney explains to CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien that he is focused on a particular portion of the American population in his campaign. Romney says, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich.... I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling."</p>
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Spending on poverty programs nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010, from $350 billion to $700 billion (in 2010 dollars). In the past three years, the increase has been nearly exponential. Incredibly, spending on these entitlement programs now rivals that for Social Security and national defense. How did this happen? The rise cannot be explained by inflation, because the expenditures have been adjusted for that. Part of the increase is explained by the higher rate of inflation in health care costs, and another part by an increase in the number of people below the poverty line, but these two factors combined...
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Social Security's chief actuary reports that the social safety net will run a deficit for 2010, nine years earlier than predicted. Put down that big gavel, Madam Speaker, we're about to hit the iceberg. No sooner had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, carrying the gavel used when Medicare was enacted, taken a victory lap around the Capitol Building after passage of the health care bill than did the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration report that his part of the social safety net had a big hole in it and would run a deficit for all of 2010. Stephen C....
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Entitlements: Social Security's chief actuary reports that the social safety net will run a deficit for 2010, nine years earlier than predicted. Put down that big gavel, Madam Speaker, we're about to hit the iceberg. No sooner had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, carrying the gavel used when Medicare was enacted, taken a victory lap around the Capitol Building after passage of the health care bill than did the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration report that his part of the social safety net had a big hole in it and would run a deficit for all of 2010. Stephen...
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