SNAP taken from 776,000 kids and counting

Trumpers are f*ckng proud of this.

As a House committee debated President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy bill last year, Republican backers repeatedly emphasized that its changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, wouldn’t affect vulnerable people…

But nearly a year after the measure was signed into law, the number of children receiving food assistance has plummeted by at least 776,000, according to a ProPublica analysis. At least 12 states break down program participation by age, and of the 1,670,011 people who are no longer receiving benefits in those states, 776,134, or 46%, were children. - ProPublica

Millions are losing SNAP benefits

But who cares if poor people, and their kids, go hungry, right? We’re exulting in the glories of Trump’s America!

Millions of low-income Americans have already lost access to federal food assistance following enactment of the Republican budget law signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025, according to new analysis examining changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Data published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows SNAP participation fell by 6 percent between July 2025 and December 2025, representing 2.5 million fewer people receiving benefits nationwide. The decline occurred shortly after Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, also identified as H.R. 1, into law.

Researchers say participation may continue to fall as states modify eligibility procedures and administrative policies in response to the law’s funding changes and program requirements. According to CBPP, “we estimate that 4 million people in a typical month will lose out” on SNAP benefits once the law’s provisions are fully implemented. - Nation of Change

The real costs, for most, of Trump tax policy

This has graphs and other more specific information.

Taking all the policies of President Trump and the Republican majority in Congress into account, all but the richest Americans are paying higher taxes on average in 2026 than they did last year. These policies include:

- Dramatically increased tariffs on goods from abroad, a tax that economists widely agree is mostly borne by American consumers.

- The termination of the Enhanced Premium Tax Credit (EPTC), which had made health care more affordable for millions of people.

- The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which overwhelmingly benefits the rich and corporations. - ITEP

The shutdown’s effects on food and ag

This explains the myriad ways in which consumers and farmers continue to be affected.

Now that the shutdown is over, SNAP is returning to its typical operations, said Katie Bergh, senior food assistance policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Most households have received their full November benefits, following delays from the Trump administration during the shutdown.

But for many households, getting full benefits will not erase the impact of the shutdown. Without assistance, SNAP recipients may have opted to buy groceries in lieu of paying an electric bill or car payment, for example, and are now potentially falling behind in their bills.

“All of that chaos and disruption is going to have long-term impacts for the households that were struggling to follow what was happening and waiting on their benefits in the interim,” Bergh said. - Civil Eats

Over half of world's people don't have clean drinking water

And it's getting worse, fast.

More than half of people on Earth — approximately 4 billion— lack access to safe drinking water, which is double the number estimated in 2020, a new study by REACH global research program has found...

“[A]n estimated 4.4 billion people lack safe drinking water across 135 low- and middle- income countries, which is more than double the global estimate made in 2020,” the study, published in the journal Science, said. “According to the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation resolution declared by the United Nations, water services must ensure sufficient quantity, safety, reliability, physical proximity, affordability, and nondiscrimination. These goals are challenging in rural areas of Africa and Asia and in sparsely populated regions where safe drinking water services on premises are costly and complicated to maintain.” - EcoWatch

Industrial ag is failing badly in Africa

This is pretty awful, and very, very underreported.

On September 5, the annual Africa Food Systems Forum, organised by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), (launched) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Government officials, experts, policymakers and business leaders will come together to discuss – in their words – “building back better food systems and food sovereignty”.

Sponsored by international philanthropic and bilateral donors and agrochemical and biotech companies such as Yara, Corteva and Bayer, the forum promotes hybrid and genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides used in the type of industrial-scale agriculture that has failed to deliver “better food systems” or “food sovereignty”.

This approach to growing food, involving problematic practices that harm soils, pollute the environment, and favour large landowners and big agribusiness, has been pushed on Africa in the past few decades. But it has not helped the continent overcome food insecurity.

AGRA’s work is a case in point. It has failed to deliver on its own promises to increase productivity and incomes for 20 million farm households while halving food insecurity by 2020. Of the 13 countries it has primarily worked with, three have reduced the number of malnourished people over the past 15 years: Zambia by 2 percent, Ethiopia by 8 percent and Ghana by 36 percent, still short of the 50 percent target.

In countries like Kenya and Nigeria, both of which have embraced industrial agriculture policies, the number of undernourished people has grown by 44 percent and 247 percent, respectively. Taken together, the population of undernourished people in the 13 states AGRA has primarily worked with has actually risen by 50 percent over the past 15 years. - IATP

Kicking people off Medicaid for big bucks

All health insurers have people whose job it is to find reasons to deny coverage. That's bad enough, but this seems even worse as most of their victims will have no other realistic options.

As more than seventeen million people stand to lose health insurance in the unfolding Medicaid eligibility review disaster, there’s one company licking its lips: Maximus, a little-known federal contractor that is one of the biggest players in privatizing essential government services previously done by civil servants — in particular, taking over states’ capacity to determine who is eligible for Medicaid and who isn’t.

In a February earnings call for shareholders and Wall Street analysts, Maximus’s CEO Bruce Caswell announced that the current nationwide eligibility review of ninety million people on Medicaid and other government health insurance programs “is unprecedented in its scope,” and will allow Maximus “to gain traction in the market.” As a result of the deluge in Medicaid “redeterminations,” Caswell said, “we expect improvement to operating margin.”

The company has accordingly boosted its earnings estimate by $100 million. Maximus’s share price is closing on its all-time high, up nearly 50 percent since October. Caswell earned $6.3 million in 2022.

Outsourcing Medicaid eligibility reviews to Maximus has major implications beyond the company’s expanding bottom line. It also removes essential government services from the realm of public accountability, while draining resources from governments. - Jacobin

Shocking food waste numbers

I've actually seen estimates over the years, from various sources, ranging from 25-40%. If you click on the link below, then on "new estimates" in the first paragraph, and start looking around, you can see that this outfit has clearly done its homework.

ReFED has released new estimates on the extent, causes, and impacts of food loss and waste in the United States, as well as an updated analysis of the solutions needed to fight it. The findings represent a stark call to action for food businesses, funders, policymakers, and other food system stakeholders to dramatically ramp up the investments, operational changes, and policy shifts that are critical to cutting the amount of food going to waste in the country. The new data comes from the ReFED Insights Engine, an online hub for data and solutions that features the most comprehensive examination of food waste in the U.S., now updated to include estimates through 2021.

According to ReFED, in 2021 the U.S. generated 91 million tons of “surplus food,” defined as all food that goes unsold or uneaten. This represents 38% of U.S. food supply and contributes nearly 6% of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions – the equivalent of driving 83 million passenger vehicles for one full year. Close to 50% of this surplus was generated by households, with another 20% generated by consumer-facing businesses. And while 80% of total surplus food was edible parts, less than 2% was donated.

Beyond emissions, producing food that goes unsold or uneaten uses 22% of U.S. freshwater and 16% of cropland. Wasted food is also a drain on the economy, since food that goes uneaten still costs money to grow, harvest, transport, cool, prepare, and then ultimately dispose of. ReFED’s analysis places the value of food that went unsold or uneaten at $444 billion in 2021, approximately 2% of U.S. GDP. What’s more, the amount of food that goes uneaten is the equivalent of 149 billion meals’ worth of food that could have gone to the 10% of Americans who struggle with food insecurity. - ReFED

Death to private equity!

The article I'm quoting from is just one in an issue of Mother Jones largely devoted to explicating p. equity's foulness.

If you were to sit down with a focus group and a whiteboard, you would have a hard time coming up with a policy with less populist appeal than the nearly three-decades-old loophole that cuts private equity billionaires’ tax rate almost in half.

The carried-interest loophole, Barack Obama said, upset “the balance between work and wealth.” Donald Trump claimed the fund managers who availed themselves of this tax break were “getting away with murder.” Joe Biden, like both of his predecessors, ran for president on a pledge to end it.

“People get this really easily—we’re giving a whole lot of rich people more money for no reason other than them being rich,” says Mandla Deskins, advo­cacy manager at Take on Wall Street, an organization pressuring members of Congress to jettison this tax break.

On paper, it’s an idea that almost nobody says they want. Polls show the public is overwhelmingly against it. Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency in part because of it. Tax experts think it’s unfair. Carried interest has no real constituency outside certain corners of Nantucket. But for a decade and a half, private equity’s favorite tax break, which delivers hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the guys in blue button-downs and matching fleeces who bought your company and laid you off, has been the most unkillable bad idea in a town with no shortage of them, a testament to the unstoppable combination of money and inertia.

Well, money mostly. - Mother Jones

States are sitting on federal funds while people practically starve

The failures of Clinton-era "welfare reform" have been well-documented. But there's always new data.

When Congress passed welfare reform in 1996, states were given more autonomy over how they could use federal funding for aid to the poor. They could demand welfare recipients find work before receiving cash assistance. They could also use their federal “block grants” to fund employment and parenting courses or to subsidize childcare.

Twenty-five years later, however, states are using this freedom to do nothing at all with large sums of the money.

According to recently released federal data, states are sitting on $5.2 billion in unspent funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. Nearly $700 million was added to the total during the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, with Hawaii, Tennessee and Maine hoarding the most cash per person living at or below the federal poverty line.

States have held on to more of this welfare money amid rising poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 16.1% of children under age 18 lived in poverty in 2020, up from 14.4% the year before. The poverty rate also ticked up for people aged 18 to 64, from 9.4% to 10.4%. As unused TANF dollars have accumulated, applications to the cash assistance program have waned, though it’s not for a lack of need, say experts and people who have applied to the program. - ProPublica

The U.S. child care system needs a lot more resources

This article has a lot of good info.

The irony, of course, is that modern child care is far from free. But that’s not because the workers are making high wages — or even living wages, in many instances. It’s because of the comparative lack of public investment.

The average European Union country spends $4,700 per child from infancy to age 5 — a number that climbs to $7,400 in France — compared with just $2,400 in the United States, according to a new US Department of the Treasury report.

“Every ‘civilized’ country has some system of early care and education regardless of [family] income,” Sykes says. “We do not have that commitment.” - The Hechinger Report

Care work needs to be treated as as important as it gets

The way things are now is not indicative of a well-functioning economy or society.

Care isn’t a burden for women and families to shoulder alone. It’s the foundation of our economy, and it deserves to be treated as such. For the tens of millions of workers with care responsibilities related to, for example, young children or elderly parents, having stable, high-quality care services available is what makes it possible for them to hold a job. Put simply, care services are needed for the functioning of our modern labor market.

Workers with care responsibilities need a strong care system in place in order to participate in the workforce. As it stands, our care infrastructure is fragmented and inadequate, which cuts off opportunities for millions of workers. The burdens of our inadequate care infrastructure disproportionately fall on women, who still perform the bulk of care work in this country. Those care burdens are a primary cause of low labor force participation among prime age women in the U.S. relative to our peer countries around the world, even before the pandemic. Poor care infrastructure comes at great economic costs.

While workers with caregiving needs rely heavily on care services, care jobs are historically underpaid and undervalued. And because of things like occupational segregation, discrimination, and other labor market disparities related to structural racism and sexism, women and people of color are concentrated in these jobs. - EPI

Big changes that ag policy needs

But unfortunately probably won't get, any time soon. Worth trying for, though.

But then came the somehow inevitable yet untenable claim: “We are convinced the science and data-based, technology-focused US model that has helped propel modern agriculture to incredible levels of sustainable productivity will be a critical piece in the broader strategy to continue feeding a growing world.”

The assertion is all too familiar. The Trump and Obama administrations differed in so many fundamental ways that finding similarities feels a bit shocking. Yet the arrogance of U.S. assumptions about the role of US agriculture in the world have not changed for decades.

The myth that US food feeds the world, for instance, and that barriers to U.S. exports must be eliminated. The insistence that US agricultural technologies (complete with monopoly-granting patents) must be adopted everywhere, even though US regulatory systems are deeply flawed, underfunded, neglected, and inadequate.

The fact that other cultures and economic ideals have led to sufficient food, far better environmental outcomes, more nutritious diets, and more prosperous rural communities is not acknowledged. Nor are the deep divisions within the US over the future of domestic food and agriculture.

The government shuts down challenges to fossil-fuelled agriculture in international negotiations. It does not discuss how US food systems are failing. Yet the country suffers from world-leading levels of obesity coupled with rising food insecurity. - Euractiv

The pandemic is costing some way more than others

It's the same deal in Minnesota, as everywhere else.

When it comes to the front lines of the pandemic, Asian women, Native American women, and Black women are disproportionately employed in high-risk essential health care, retail, and service jobs in Minnesota, according to researchers at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

At the same time, pandemic-related layoffs have disproportionately affected women, Native Americans, and Blacks, compared to other groups. And differences in demographic composition across jobs categories and industries explain only a fraction of these job losses.

New research published by the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy this week highlights the ways that different groups of workers were unequally impacted as the pandemic tightened its grip on Minnesota over the spring and summer months. - Humphrey School of Public Affairs

How to deal with pandemic profiteering

For anyone who doesn't have his head permanently up the billionaires' butts, this makes complete sense.

America's 651 billionaires have gained so much wealth during the coronavirus pandemic that they could fully pay for one-time $3,000 stimulus checks for every person in the United States and still be better off than they were before the crisis.

That's according to new research released Wednesday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), groups that have been tracking the "pandemic profits" of U.S. billionaires since mid-March.

In the nearly nine-month period between March 18 and December 7, American billionaires gained more than $1 trillion in wealth as people across the U.S. lost their jobs, their businesses, their homes, and their lives to the pandemic. The collective net worth of U.S. billionaires now sits just above $4 trillion—nearly double the combined wealth owned by the bottom 50% of the American population. - Common Dreams

Pandemic profiteering should be a much bigger story

A lot of people seem to be just resigned to this. A lot of others apparently honestly believe that backing the likes of Trump is the way to change it. It's all really unfortunate.

As over a thousand people in the U.S. alone die each day during the deadliest pandemic in a century, plutocrats and their businesses are thriving like never before, in no small part due to a system rife with profiteering, opportunism, and worker exploitation. So says the report, entitled Billionaire Wealth vs. Community Health: Protecting Essential Workers from Pandemic Profiteers, which focuses on 12 of the most egregious pandemic profiteers—the "Delinquent Dozen"—who include the owners of Walmart and the CEOs of Amazon and Target.

These companies and their owners and executives have benefited from their "monopoly positions," the report states, but their success "hasn't translated into better pay or safer working conditions for the employees showing up to work in a pandemic." - Common Dreams

The Trump tax giveaway is exactly what many of us thought

The numbers have been crunched.

The first data showing how all Americans are faring under Donald Trump reveal the poor and working classes sinking slightly, the middle class treading water, the upper-middle class growing and the richest, well, luxuriating in rising rivers of greenbacks.

More than half of Americans had to make ends meet in 2018 on less money than in 2016, my analysis of new income and tax data shows.

The nearly 87 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 had to get by in 2018 on $307 less per household than in 2016, the year before Trump took office, I find.

That 57% of American households were better off under Obama contradicts Trump’s often-repeated claim he created the best economy ever until the pandemic. - DC Report

The plutocrats are screwing us maybe worse than ever

Great current summary, well worth saving for reference.

When Dr. Jonas Salk was asked about a patent on his polio vaccine in 1955, he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” When Gilead Sciences recently developed an anti-Covid drug for about $12 per treatment, they set the price at $3,200.

As Republicans and business leaders decry the word ‘social’ as anti-American, they continue to promote the free-market “winner take all” philosophy that has caused over half of our nation to try to survive without adequate health care and life savings and job opportunities. Our richest corporations are much to blame. A review of the facts should make this clear. - Nation of Change

What the deal is now, with SNAP work requirements

Late last week there was this:

The Trump administration is moving ahead with its plan to enact strict work requirements on people who use food stamps despite the coronavirus pandemic — a move that could result in hundreds of thousands of people losing their eligibility for the program.

People could soon be forced to work public-facing jobs when they should stay home or else risk losing access to the assistance they get to buy food. - BuzzFeed News

Subsequently:

- The Pelosi coronavirus deal includes a suspension of SNAP work requirements;

- Those same requirements were blocked by a federal judge.

So a certain crew of sickos, intent on producing more hunger just because they can, are stymied for now. They won’t stop trying.

35K Minnesotans may face added food insecurity, thanks to Trump and his party

Hopefully every one of them who is eligible will get out and vote, not only against Trump himself (if he’s still running by Election Day) but anyone and everyone from the Party of Trump. Plenty are rural residents whose votes could make the difference in close state legislative races.

If the option is available, voting for progressives (as opposed to corporate DFLers) in primaries would also kick butt.

More than 35,000 Minnesotans could lose federal food stamp benefits under a proposed Trump administration rule change that would leave more people hungry in the state, Minnesota officials say.

Some 18,000 children in Minnesota would be affected, according to the Department of Human Services. A public comment period on the proposal ends Monday and interested people can submit their comments online through the Federal Register. - MPR