Maverick Bishop says he and his mom have stayed in every homeless shelter there is in San Francisco. When there wasn’t room in the shelters, they slept in hospital lobbies, along with other, even-less-desirable locations. Today, due in large part to a mentoring program Maverick was enrolled in, and the…
Archives: Voices
Flint Update: Good…Not Good Enough
There is some “new” news out of Flint this week: Recent testing of lead in the city’s troubled water system shows things are improving six months after the city switched its water source and began adding chemicals to control corrosion of aging pipes. That’s the good news. The bad news…
Head Smacker: U.S. Corporate Taxes are Below Average, but Some Continue to Call for Lowering Them Even Further
We’ve repeatedly heard the calls from “pro-business” members of Congress and supporters: the U.S. corporate tax rate is too high. It drives businesses overseas, they say. We need to lower the corporate tax rate to bring and keep business here, allow U.S. companies to compete internationally, create jobs and grow…
The Wage Gap is Ridiculous and It’s Time for it to End
Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post on April 11, 2016. To take action on Equal Pay Day, join AAUW, the National Partnership for Women and Families, the National Women’s Law Center, 9to5 and others in the Fair Pay Coalition for a Twitter storm at 2pm using #EqualPay and #EqualPayDay….
Red Alert
This op-ed originally appeared in The Sojourner’s Truth in Toledo, Ohio. We have all seen or heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan: thousands of children and pregnant women have been exposed to lead poisoning after a series of questionable or, at best, very short-sighted decisions by various government…
Human Needs Report: Spending Bills Move, Corporate Tax Dodging, Emergency Funding and More
CHN just released our latest edition of the Human Needs Report, our regular newsletter on national policy issues affecting low-income and vulnerable populations. This edition includes articles on budget and appropriations action in Congress, the Supreme Court’s decision affecting public sector unions, the Treasury Department’s actions to crack down on corporate tax dodging, and funding…
A campaign to broaden prosperity
2017 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign. As you may recall, the campaign was conceived by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1967 at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It evolved into a movement to bring together a diverse amalgam of the poor – Whites, Blacks, Hispanics…
Pfizer Update: The Tax Coalition That Could
The good news just keeps coming. Yesterday we told you about new U.S. Treasury Department guidelines that would reduce the benefits and limit the number of companies that use the tax inversion loophole. These guidelines get at the tax-dodging strategies employed by Pfizer, which has been trying to dodge a…
Fact of the Week: Lower-Income Renters Spend Nearly Half of Income on Rent
Housing costs traditionally eat up a large portion of most Americans’ budgets. But for lower-income renters, rising housing costs mean even less money is left over to cover everything else. According to new research from the Pew Charitable Trusts, renters in the bottom third of the income spectrum spent close…
Sorry, Pfizer (not sorry!)
Back in February, we told you about a tax-dodging scheme that is all too common in this day and age: Pfizer, a U.S. pharmaceutical company and one of the world’s largest, wanted to avoid $35 billion in U.S. taxes on about $148 billion in profits the company maintains offshore. It…
A Response to the Heroin Epidemic
Editor’s Note: the following Letter to the Editor was authored by Don Mathis, a member of CHN’s board of directors and also a board member of Doctors for America. It was printed by the New York Times on March 31, 2016, in response to the Times’ front-page story on March 26,…
Tipped workers need a pay raise
How long has it been since you’ve had a raise? For some workers, it has been entirely too long. Today – Friday, April 1, 2016 – marks the 25th anniversary since the minimum wage for tipped workers has been increased. For 25 years now, the minimum wage for an estimated…