Last year long about this time, I read a tribute by Walter Moseley to his father Leroy. His dad, Walter says, taught him “to bob and weave in life and art,” which, if understand it, means to agilely protect himself. The lessons were Leroy’s own stories about growing up poor and oppressed in harshly racist Louisiana, learning to do various sorts of paying work and to protect himself after he fled to New York City — this after his mother died, his father left and the relatives he resorted to wouldn’t care for him. Leroy wanted to write pulp fiction, but realized that it was impossible for an imp ..read more

Here in the District of Columbia, the Council has just made history by eliminating the time limit it had imposed on all Temporary Assistance for Needy Families participants. No state has done this, DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s Executive Director notes in an emailed budget wrap-up. And proudly because DCFPI played a major role in developing and then advocating for a policy that will ensure very poor families some cash assistance, activities that may get them jobs so they no longer need it and child care so they can meet those activity requirement The Council’s unanimous vote for a policy more p ..read more

I recently said I was torn between delving into Trump’s proposed budget and picking at less-reported angles because the package was DOA in the Senate. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says no such thing. Some Republicans may balk at some details, but the major thrusts replicate those in budgets the House has passed ever since Republicans gained control in 2010. These include repeal of the Affordable Care Act (natch), block granting Medicaid and SNAP (the food stamp program) and a range of cuts to non-defense programs that depend on annual appropriations. We’ve also seen, though CBPP ..read more

Our Secretary of Education seems still confused (charitable word) about our equal opportunity in education laws. She was asked again in a Congressional hearing whether her department would deny federal funds to private schools with students who have vouchers her budget would pay for if they discriminated. And she said again she thinks that’s a choice for states to make. But the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act is one of three major federal laws prohibiting discrimination in federally-funded education programs. And it’s by far and away the most specific. Schools must assess children ..read more

Well, we finally have the full version of Trump’s proposed budget for upcoming fiscal year. And we’ve all seen and/or heard news reports, op-eds, social media takes and the like. They generally have one of two focuses — new cuts, both total and by cabinet-level department or cuts to certain specific programs. These tacks are basically the same as when the administration released its skinny budget preview, except that we now have a shift prompted by a range of cuts to safety net programs that don’t depend on annual appropriations. I expect to deal with some of both, but for the time being, I’ll ..read more

Posts on single motherhood consistently rank among my weekly top-10 viewed. I’ve published nothing on the issues for quite awhile. So I’ll take a brief break — and give you one too — from the stream of reports, op-eds, forecasts and the like sparked by turbulence in the White House and fractiousness in the Congress. Here’s some of what we learn from the aptly-titled Single Mother Guide, fleshed out from other sources and what’s stashed in my own brain. What Single Mother Commonly Means and What It Should First off, a bit of clarification. Single mothers, in all the standard data sources, are o ..read more

We all, I’m sure, know how people on “welfare,” i.e. receiving virtually any safety net benefit, are often bad-mouthed. We know too that the process of gaining benefits and keeping them often subjects recipients to requirements and hassles that we’d never imposed on better-off people. The humiliations and inconveniences deter some eligible people from applying — a feature, not a bug in some state and local systems. But exclusion from the mainstream has other consequences, say the coauthors of another of the recently-published poverty reduction papers I mentioned the other day. . We obviously n ..read more

Recent mail included not only the usual junk, requests for donations and bills, but a magazine from Stanford University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality. Such a surprise, since I hadn’t ordered it. And such an informative and thought-provoking issue. It’s a series of what it terms “blueprints” for ending poverty, prefaced by two framing papers. One presents key facts that reforms should reflect, the other a litmus tests for them. They seem to me more groundbreaking than the blueprints, fine as those are. So I’ll focus on the first—and more meaty — here. Will follow up with the second soon. M ..read more

Some followers may have noticed a long silence. I’ve just rejoined the networked world after another fall — this one, unlike the first, a complication of a complication of a condition only recently diagnosed. As you might imagine, I’ve been dwelling on health care even more than I would have otherwise. So I was ready to launch a diatribe against major, widely-reported harms inflicted by the House repeal-replacement bill. I’ll instead focus on another that a columnist for TalkPoverty.org ferreted out. It’s directly relevant to people in my condition, i.e., elderly and/or disabled, at least temp ..read more

The Washington Post recently published a long article on Social Security Disability Insurance benefits in small rural communities. It set off a well-deserved backlash. But it made me wonder whether anyone had ideas for improving the program. Hence this post. Aspersions on SSDI and Beneficiaries The Post article focused on a former roofer who was suffering chronic pain because he’d fallen to the ground. He couldn’t find a different sort of job. So he was weighing whether to apply for SSDI. The thrust of the article was that SSDI, is sort of ongoing unemployment insurance benefit — and how both ..read more