Trump & GOP attack the poorest among us
The Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress have embarked on a mission to reduce federal support for the poor. They are seeking to impose callous, untested work requirements on Medicaid and expand them on food stamps and related programs. The administration wants to hike rents on public housing tenants, who are among the neediest of the needy.
At the very end of last year, Trump signed an ill-considered tax cut bill that benefits corporations and the wealthy while driving the budget deficit sky high and adding a trillion dollars to the national debt over the next decade. House Republicans are now proposing to rein in those deficits by cutting safety-net and domestic programs.
In a damning report filed Friday, Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty for the United Nations, describes the U.S. as a world leader in two dissonant ways: in wealth and in poverty, when compared with other developed democracies. Some 5.3 million people in the U.S. “live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty,” wrote Alston.
The youth poverty rate and the infant mortality rate in the U.S. are among the worst among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies,” Alston said.
U.S. has the highest incarceration rate and one of the lowest voter-registration rates, again disproportionately among the poor. It also has one of the worst rates for intergenerational social mobility, meaning that our poor tend to stay poor ...
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-trump-social-safety-net-poverty-20180623-story.html
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