Send a message thanking those who stood up and voted against this monstrosity of a bill, or send a message to your members of Congress who voted for it, admonishing them for their vote.
Congress has enacted the Big Brutal Bill and Donald Trump has signed it into law.
This bill is deadly.
According to researchers from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts plus other health care cuts—the largest in history—will result in the deaths of 51,000 people per year. Those deaths include 18,200 people who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare, 20,000 people who will lose health care coverage due to the elimination of the premium tax credit for the Affordable Care Act, and 13,000 deaths due to staffing cuts at nursing homes.
At a time when so many are struggling to afford the basic costs of living including groceries, new data from the Urban Institute shows that 5.3 million families will lose $25 or more per month in SNAP benefits, with the average such family losing $146 a month in help paying for food. Sixty-two percent of the families experiencing these very large SNAP losses include children.
All of this is being done in order to pay for extending the Trump tax scam—making tax breaks for the rich permanent—and funding Trump’s mass immigration detention and removal machine.
Last week was a big week for corporate tax breaks in the House of Representatives. Between Thursday and Friday, the full House passed a series of tax breaks for businesses at a cost of more than $93 billion over 10 years. The bills would make these breaks permanent parts of…
The shame of the $2.13 tipped minimum wage in the U.S. “There’s nothing worse than working a full-time job serving people food and going hungry yourself. Servers should be able to afford to put a roof over our heads, feed ourselves and our families and live our lives without fear…
“There are a lot of people truly hurting… This isn’t just affecting individuals, but families, too…. You go from providing for yourself and your family and then, through no fault of your own, you can’t anymore. You send in application after application after application and sometimes you hear back but sometimes…
This week the Coalition on Human Needs released a special edition of the Human Needs Report analyzing the President’s FY2016 budget request. The report provides an overview of the White House budget with sections on taxes, revenues, and select departmental funding that most directly impact low-income and other disadvantaged populations. The…
Yesterday we partnered with MomsRising.org, MoveOn.org and more than 20 other organizations for a Twitterstorm telling Congress to #StopTheCuts to critical human needs programs in the 2016 budget. With your help and action we got #StopTheCuts trending in DC on Twitter! From the benefits of SNAP to the need for…
“Child poverty is too expensive to continue.” That’s what Children’s Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman said in unveiling their new report, Ending Child Poverty Now. Remarkably, a dramatic reduction in child poverty is not too expensive to undertake. An increase of just 2 percent of the federal budget put…
This coming Monday the President will present his budget request to Congress for FY2016. We look forward to reviewing the President’s proposals, and we’ve already heard about important investments he’d make in child care and community college. We’ve heard he will start to reverse damaging cuts to human needs programs….
On Sunday, the CBS news show 60 Minutes aired the first joint interview with Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell since the new Republican majority Congress convened. The interview took place only days after last week’s State of the Union address, and Scott Pelley…
As we noted in a recent Fact of the Week, the average annual cost of center-based child care for an infant is nearly half of the income of a family of three living at the poverty level. In fact, child care is one of the most significant expenses in a…
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama called out members of Congress who have failed to raise the minimum wage, saying, “If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to…
Below are my thoughts about the State of the Union address. Please share your comments on the address or the responses by scrolling down to the bottom of this page. The President is asking whether we will be satisfied with an economy that works only for a few, or works to provide opportunities…
Next Tuesday, President Obama will give the annual State of the Union (SOTU) address to Congress and the nation, followed by responses from the Republican Party and the Tea Party. We’ll share our thoughts about the addresses that evening on our Voices for Human Needs blog, and we hope you’ll join…