Tag: social safety net

White House wants to update poverty thresholds. It could affect food stamps and Medicaid benefits

Critics say move could weaken public assistance programs and increase hardship for low-wage earners

The White House Budget Office is considering its first update to inflation adjustment guidelines for poverty thresholds since 1978, with potential consequences for benefit programs serving low-income households.

The initiative is part of a re-evaluation of six inflation indexes used to track the impact on consumers of rising or falling prices. One of the indexes is used to adjust poverty thresholds, which underlie the calculation of eligibility for a number of benefit programs including Medicaid, food stamps and school lunches and breakfasts for poor children.

The Office of Management and Budget, which has provided guidance to agencies on the current measurement that hasn’t changed in four decades, wants to consider whether updates are warranted.

View the complete May 13 article by Paul M Krawzak on The Roll Call website here.

The Trump administration has a new argument for dismantling the social safety net: It worked.

The following article by Jeff Stein and Tracy Jan was posted on the Washington Post website July 14, 2018:

Protesters display signs and listen to speakers during the Poor People’s Campaign, a rally speaking out against social injustice and poverty, on the Mall in Washington last month. Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, AFP, Getty Images

Correction: An earlier version of this story misattributed a statement to Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, that no more than 250,000 Americans are in “extreme poverty.” The statement was made by the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva

Republicans for years have proclaimed the federal government’s decades-old War on Poverty a failure.

“Americans are no better off today than they were before the War on Poverty began in 1964,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) wrote in his 2016 plan to dramatically scale back the federal safety net.

Now the Trump administration is pitching a new message on anti-poverty programs, saying efforts that Republicans had long condemned as ineffective have already worked.

View the complete article on the Washington Post website here.