On the day of his inauguration for a second term, Donald Trump issued a flurry of Executive Orders targeting the LGBTQ community, civil rights protections, and immigrant communities. Meanwhile, Congress is echoing the new administration’s attacks on immigrant communities with a proposal to punish whole cities or states if they choose not to join in the attack.
The No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act would force cities and state governments across the country to participate in mass deportation actions or potentially risk losing money for programs such as:
Cutting funding for these programs would take away critical care for tens of thousands of people. This would disproportionately impact low-income and marginalized Black and Brown communities, further deepening poverty and widening inequality.
This overreach by the federal government would be devastating to community programs and set a dangerous precedent on how cities and states are allowed to operate autonomously. We must stop this overreach before it can be implemented.
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They Don’t Care Why You’re Out of Work edition. So far, 24 states have announced they will terminate federal pandemic unemployment benefits sometime in June, months before they will expire. They don’t seem to have tighter labor markets than the other states; rather, the early ends to UI look tied to politics, not economics. And it sure may force some people back to work in low-paying and even unsafe jobs.
In our first episode of the Voices for Human Needs Podcast, hear from three policy advocates, activists, and organizers discuss the top-line impacts of raising the federal minimum wage through the Raise the Wage Act, the disproportionate impacts of a low federal minimum wage on women workers and BIPOC workers, and what listeners can do to organize in your communities in support of One Fair Wage.
When COVID-19 struck, hunger among children increased sharply. By March of this year, up to 8.8 million children lived in households reporting that their children did not have enough to eat in the past 7 days. Before the pandemic, in December of 2019, 1.1 million children were in households in which children did not have enough to eat at some point in the previous 30 days.
Possibly the broadest impact of COVID-19 lies in its economic ramifications. From the effect of lockdowns on labor practices and employment to the loss of community supports and services that require in-person attention, the pandemic pushed apart cracks in a faltering social safety net in America. As more households fall into poverty, children have become one of the pandemic’s biggest victims. Beginning today, a new Voices for Human Needs series of blog posts will highlight how the pandemic has harmed children and families in poverty, focusing on children of all ages and how key risk factors have evolved in the age of COVID-19.
Miguel has tried twice to get the COVID-19 vaccination. So far, he’s 0 for 2. As an undocumented construction worker living in crowded conditions outside of Miami, Miguel is a prime example of someone who needs the COVID-19 vaccination – as well as representative of a population public health officials acutely want to see vaccinated. But like millions of people living in the U.S., Miguel lacks state-issued identification.
Rosalind McCallard lives in Portland, Oregon. Along with her husband, she owns Snackrilege Vegan Foods, which she cheerfully describes as the “only wholesale heavy metal-themed sandwich company in the world – at least in the U.S., but probably the world!” McCallard and her husband favor President Biden’s plan to more progressively tax corporations and the wealthiest Americans to pay for the proposed American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan.
Human needs advocates, grassroots organizers, key public officials, and tax policy and other experts came together this week to promote President Biden’s plans to bring fairness and equity to the nation’s tax code. Officially, the “Tax Fairness Day” event, which was live-streamed on Facebook, marked the May 17 deadline for Americans to file their taxes (moved back, courtesy of COVID-19). Unofficially, speakers came together to praise Biden’s proposed American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, and the means to pay for them.
The where-are-the-good-jobs edition. The economy is growing in fits and starts. More than one million combined jobs were added during the months of March and April — although the April jobs report was nothing to write home about. But evidence is emerging that many of the jobs that are returning are not good jobs; they pay low wages, have few benefits, or fall short in other measures of job quality. That contradicts the narrative of governors in 12 states terminating federal unemployment benefits. These governors claim that the extra unemployment benefits, that may exceed wages in low-paying jobs, are discouraging workers from returning to work.
On April 28, President Biden announced his latest legislative proposal, The American Families Plan (AFP). It’s a bold and transformative effort to help the country recover from the coronavirus and recession. The AFP would target resources to many of those who need them most: people with low incomes, communities of color, and children who have been disproportionately harmed by the coronavirus, recession, and years of underinvestment. The plan would directly impact people with low incomes in many ways, here’s a summary of our top-10 provisions.
We at the Coalition on Human Needs advocate for ending poverty and alleviating social and economic hardship for people with low-incomes and other vulnerable populations through federal policies, but we know we can’t do it alone. That is why we are introducing our new project: the Voices for Human Needs Podcast. This podcast will serve as a go-to resource for both new and experienced activists in their journey fighting alongside organizers, communities, and policy advocates.
On Saturday, voting rights advocates will gather, in-person or online, in more than 100 communities throughout the country to mark the “National John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Action Day.” The actions could not be more timely. Across the country, state legislatures continue to advance barriers to voting, spurred in part by what many are calling the “Big Lie” — the oft-refuted notion that the November 2020 elections were replete with error and fraud.
Fact: the U.S. birth rate is declining. If the birth rate in 2008 had held steady through today, we would have an additional 5.8 million children in our country. Fact: by 2034, for the first time in U.S. history, Americans over 65 years old will outnumber Americans under 18. This will accelerate the need for people to take care of this aging population. Fact: an acute shortage of home care workers already exists, and without aggressive intervention by federal and state governments as well as the corporate sector, it will get much worse. Fact: the average hourly wage for a home care worker is about $12 per hour, and one in six lives in poverty.