It’s official: The Arizona Democratic Party has had enough of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-AZ) bold mavericking.
The party voted on Saturday to formally censure Sinema, following her refusal to support a filibuster carveout that would allow voting rights legislation to move through the Senate.
Continue reading “Arizona Democrats Censure Sinema Following Blow To Voting Rights Legislation”One week before Jan. 6, Fox News host Sean Hannity was trying to make the White House see reason.
Continue reading “‘No More Crazies’: Trump’s Final Days In Office, As Documented By The Jan. 6 Committee”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.It first appeared at The Conversation.
The discontinuation of the Biden administration’s monthly payments of the child tax credit could leave millions of American families without enough food on the table, according to our new study in JAMA Network Open. The first missed payment on Jan. 15, 2022, left families that had come to rely on them wondering how they would make ends meet, according to many news reports.
The American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed in March 2021, made significant changes to the existing child tax credit. It increased the size of the credit by 50% or more, depending on a child’s age, to either $3,000 or $3,600 per year. It also made more low-income families eligible and paid half of this money out as a monthly “advance” payment.
Biden’s Build Back Better plan calls for a second year of an expanded child tax credit disbursed monthly. But that package of measures stalled in the Senate after passing the House in November 2021. As a result, the monthly advance payments of the child tax credit that American families with children had been receiving since July 2021 were left hanging in the balance.
Nearly 60 million families with children received the first payment, which was sent out in July 2021. The payments were widely credited with bringing about huge declines in poverty and malnutrition. Our study found that the introduction of these advance payments was associated with a 26% drop in the share of American households with children without enough food.
We used nationally representative data from over 585,000 responses to the Census Household Pulse Survey from January through August 2021 to assess how the introduction of the child tax credit advance payments affected food insufficiency in the weeks following the first payment on July 15, 2021. Food insufficiency is a measure of whether a household has enough food to eat. It is a much narrower measure than food insecurity, which is a more comprehensive measure based on 18 questions used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Importantly, we were able to separate the effect of these payments from other types of support, like the use of food pantries, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, unemployment benefits and COVID-19 stimulus payments.
Food insufficiency spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among families with children: It rose from 3% among all households in December 2019 to 18% in December 2020. Even after many, if not most, U.S. families received pandemic stimulus checks and other benefits, food insufficiency still hovered around 14% in June 2021. But following the first advance payment, from July 23 to August 2, 2021, food insufficiency among households with children fell drastically, to 10%.
This support is ending just as the omicron variant of COVID-19 is leaving many families without work, child care and, in many places, child care via in-person instruction at school.
All these factors are leading to lower income and, where school is virtual once again, creating the need for more meals at home. Other analyses of the Census Household Pulse Survey have found that most families were using the child tax credit advance payments for food and other necessities, such as housing and utilities.
We are going to look further into how the advance payments affected low-income families through the rest of 2021, analyzing which groups of Americans saw the most benefit and what happened once the advance payments expired in 2022.
The full impact of the expansion of the child tax credit for the 2021 tax year has not yet been seen either. Eligible families will get the rest of that money, equal to all six monthly payments combined, when they file their 2021 tax returns this year.
Paul Shafer is an assistant professor of Health Law, Policy and Management at Boston University.
Katherine Gutierrez is a PhD Candidate in Economics at University of New Mexico
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A draft Trump-era executive order directed the Defense Secretary to seize voting machines and authorized the appointment of a special counsel to investigate them weeks after the 2020 elections, Politico reported Friday.
Continue reading “Jan. 6 Committee Obtains Draft Trump-Era Order Laying Out Plan To Seize Voting Machines”The Justice Department charged a man from Texas on Friday with threatening three government officials, the first criminal case brought forward by the department’s task force on combating violent threats against election workers.
Continue reading “DOJ Task Force On Election Worker Threats Makes First Arrest”Amidst all the disappointment and tribulation of recent days please join me in taking a moment to step back, in a posture of mindful gratitude, to contemplate the fact that Kyrsten Sinema’s career in electoral politics is already over. Yes, the damage she’s already done will be difficult to remedy. She still has three solid years to do yet more damage. And she probably will. But none of that damage, none of the hijinks and characteristic game-playing to come, will or can change her electoral fate. In political terms, she’s already dead senator walking. And the most perplexing but paradoxically delightful part of it is that she doesn’t even seem to realize it yet.
How can I be so sure she’s a goner in such an uncertain time and in a reelection campaign almost three years away? It’s not just the increasingly likely primary challenge, which could end her Senate career on its own. Her problem runs much deeper. She has already made herself essentially unelectable, whether her quest for reelection ends in a primary or the general election.
Continue reading “Rejoice—Kyrsten Sinema’s Political Career is Already Over”Thousands of signatures in support of expanding casino gaming in Florida are suspected of being fraudulent.
Continue reading “The Mystery Of Thousands Of Potentially Fraudulent Signatures For Florida Casino Expansion”You may recall when Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) promised on Nov. 9 that he’d challenge Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton if he raised $1 million in 10 days, then followed up on Nov. 23 and victoriously announced that he did that?
Yeah, newly released campaign finance reports reveal he didn’t do that.
Continue reading “Gohmert Didn’t Get Anywhere Near $1M Goal For Texas AG Bid. Yet He Proudly Claimed He Did Anyway”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-AZ) bold mavericking with the filibuster and voting rights legislation this week has landed her in hot water back home: Arizona Democratic Party Chair Raquel Terán announced on Thursday that the committee’s executive board will be meeting on Saturday to “address previously passed resolutions concerning” the senator.
The Washington Post and CNN have new details of how then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani spearheaded the Trump campaign’s scheme to gather fake Trump electors in seven states that Biden won in 2020. The plan was central to the bigger scheme to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to swap Biden electors in those states for Trump ones.
During the non-violent protest, which was held near the Capitol on Thursday, U.S. Capitol Police arrested Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) with at least 20 other participants, according to the lawmaker’s spokesperson.
On Nov. 9 2021, Gohmert declared that if he could raise $1 million in 10 days, he’d run for Texas attorney general. On Nov. 23, Gohmert had a happy announcement: He was able to raise that amount of money in that time frame and would therefore be throwing his hat in the race as promised. On Thursday, the Texas Tribune reported that the Republican didn’t get anywhere near $1 million in those 10 days, according to new campaign finance filings.
? Morning Memo Radio ?
“A Dam in Syria Was on a ‘No-Strike’ List. The U.S. Bombed It Anyway.” – The New York Times
Amanda Gorman: “Why I Almost Didn’t Read My Poem at the Inauguration” – The New York Times
Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) tried to make some kind of point about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sending masks to House offices and gifted us a nice lil self-own instead:
Upon seeing Capitol visitors who were wearing yarmulkes at an elevator on Thursday, far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) asked if they were doing “reconnaissance,” Buzzfeed News reported. The Colorado Republican claimed later that she was just making a joke in reference to some Democrats’ allegation that she had given a tour to a big group of people in a tunnel connected to the Capitol several days before the Jan. 6 insurrection.
(Maybe it’d be best if Boebert just stay away from the elevators.)
On Thursday, Pelosi said Democrats might have to “rename” the Build Back Better plan that’s been essentially torpedoed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Let’s see what ideas are out there:
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Days after the Jan. 6 committee began receiving records from the National Archives following the Supreme Court’s rejection of former President Trump’s effort to bar the release of documents, some details have reportedly started to emerge regarding documents from Trump’s White House that the panel has received thus far.
Continue reading “Report: A Glimpse At What Jan 6 Committee Has Gotten So Far From National Archives”
