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      in US Politics

      The hidden cost of a shutdown: America’s battle with food insecurity

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      With 1 October 2023 looming, a US government shutdown appears imminent, and the farm bill is set to expire. Members of both the House and Senate have been drafting proposals for its renewal, which happens every five years. The bill is responsible for financing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that many Americans rely on to feed their families.Though hunger prevention advocates are calling for Congress to renew the bill before its expiration, the likelihood of a freshly revised iteration being near completion by the end of the day is low. Yet, food insecurity continues to rise in America.More than 34 million people, including nine million children, are struggling to put food on the table.In a recent household survey conducted by the US Census Bureau, more than 26 million Americans said they did not have enough to eat during the 12-day period of the study that concluded this month. That sample represents nearly a 50 percentage increase during a similar window from 2021. This upsurge is due to a number of factors, including the end of pandemic-era aid.Another study released this month by Feeding America reflected a similar finding, emphasizing the far-reaching consequences of hunger.That report underscored how the pandemic reshaped the landscape of food insecurity and its lingering effects, signaling one of America’s gravest growing crises. Approximately 80% of Americans experiencing hunger believe that inflation and rising food costs have worsened the issue of hunger nationwide and 93% of those surveyed expressed concern that the situation will deteriorate even more. They highlighted factors such as rising housing costs, job loss, unemployment, the presence of chronic health conditions or disabilities, and an abundance of low-paying jobs as significant contributors and interconnected root causes of their food vulnerability.“The pandemic not only put hunger in the spotlight, it also revealed just how many Americans were put in a situation that kept them from accessing the food they needed,” a spokesperson for Feeding America, a network of over 200 food banks nationwide, said. “And now, food prices and supply chain disruptions are affecting food banks, and households’ budgets for millions of families are tightening.”Another element of the rise in food insecurity, which saw almost 50 million Americans turning to food pantries and soup kitchens in 2022, is cuts to social assistance and fixed-income programs like food stamps, the child tax credit and pensions.“When someone is on a fixed income, it’s usually due to a disability, or that they are seniors,” said Marian Hutchins, executive director of the Father’s Heart Ministries. “Someone on disability is not allowed to work if they are receiving money for social security disability. So unless they can work and have it be off the books, they cannot get resources to match the rising cost of food.”Many who work on the front lines, like Hutchins, say the pandemic exacerbated this epidemic and exposed deep-seated vulnerabilities in our food systems and economic structures.At the non-profit Hutchins runs on the Lower East Side of New York, she said many keep returning because they tell her they simply can’t afford basic necessities, including food, on their own. And that number continues to be staggering, compounded by the end of the extra pandemic-era Snap – formerly the Food Stamp Program, which is still commonly referred to as just food stamps – benefits.Among their other food programs and services, the Father’s Heart Ministries, founded in 1997, hands out roughly 1,100 food pantry bags in a two-and-a-half hour window on Saturdays. Pre-pandemic, they averaged 560 guests in that same window. That’s a 96% increase. They’ve also seen a rise in new guest registration. Before the pandemic, they averaged 13 per Saturday – (during the pandemic, it was 43 per Saturday) – now, it’s closer to 20. That’s a 53% increase.Many reports and similar organizations echo this stark and steady increase, correlating it to the nearly 60% historic increase in poverty.“The Feeding America network of food banks distributed 5.3bn meals in fiscal year 2023,” the organization’s spokesperson said. “The latest Feeding America food bank pulse survey data shows that around 70% of responding food banks report seeing demand for food assistance increase or stay the same in July 2023 compared to June.”The CEO of City Harvest, New York City’s largest food rescue organization, Jilly Stephens, resonated those sentiments.“Average monthly visits to New York City food pantries and soup kitchens this year are up more than 60% compared to 2019,” she said. “City Harvest programs alone are seeing nearly 1m more visits each month than in 2019. In fact, the number of visits is nearly as high as at any point over the last three years. We know from previous crises that it can take years for food security levels to recover, and we expect the need to remain high for several years.”The pandemic has also particularly aggravated food insecurity among families with children and communities of color, who were already disproportionately affected by hunger before the outbreak. Many of these households don’t meet the eligibility criteria for federal nutrition programs, forcing them to turn to local food banks and other community food assistance programs for additional support. Research shows that there is a higher prevalence of hunger in African American, Latino and Native American communities that can be attributed to systemic racial injustices.Hutchins said food poverty is not as recognized of an issue as it once was because the glaring exigency of the pandemic has dwindled, so many Americans assume things are back to normal. But for many families struggling to feed their families, that’s far from the reality.“There was a lot of public awareness during the pandemic,” Hutchins said, “where media showed lines of people at soup kitchens and food pantries. People think it’s over now, but the same crazy food prices that we are all facing are being faced by those who have no alternatives but community food pantries. No one is talking about seniors or single-parent homes. Ignoring the problem could create more problems not only for our guests but for communities in general as people become desperate to survive.”That desperation to survive fueled by rising food costs is palpable. According to the Feeding America report, nearly 70% of Americans believe that the primary causes of hunger and food insecurity are inflation and increasing food prices.Food prices have been inflating in recent months due to factors such as supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index for food increased by 7.1% in July 2023 compared to the previous year.According to the recent food price outlook report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), it is expected that food prices will see a 5.9% increase this year.Specifically, prices for food at home – groceries from supermarkets – rose by 0.4% from June to July 2023 and were 3.6% higher compared to July 2022.The report also highlights expectations of continued price hikes across 10 food-at-home categories: beef and veal (4.2% increase), other meats (4.8%), poultry (3%), dairy products (4.1%), fats and oils (9.6%), processed fruits and vegetables (9.2%), sugar and sweets (9.3%), cereals and bakery products (9%), nonalcoholic beverages (7.6%) and other foods (7.4%).With no immediate end in sight, hunger prevention programs like the Father’s Heart Ministries have stepped in to fill the gap, turning to food organizations like City Harvest for ongoing support.Stephens said City Harvest supports grants and programs that provide funding and support for food access and justice solutions “led or informed by people with lived expertise, like the people that operate or participate in pantry services”.“Local food initiatives are critical to fighting food insecurity,” she continued, “because no one knows their neighborhood’s assets and challenges better than the people who live and work there.”Though many on the frontlines acknowledge there is no quick fix to food insecurity, they note that awareness is essential, and concerted efforts are needed to create lasting change and ensure that no one goes hungry. To address the widening gap of food deserts and overall insecurity in America, many advocates like Stephens and Hutchins are calling for increased Snap benefits, investing in workforce development and job training programs and initiatives, tackling the root causes of poverty and inequality through policy changes, and expanded access to food banks and other community-based food assistance programs.“One of the best ways to reduce food insecurity is a stronger farm bill,” Stephens said, “which is being reauthorized by Congress this year. The vast majority of the farm bill’s budget is devoted to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”While emphasizing the importance of transformative policy, Hutchins added that food insecurity is also a community-level issue.“Contributing and volunteering at places that are already providing food is the best way to start,” Hutchins said. “We can talk about the problem, but showing up to help is what our volunteers do.” More

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      in Elections

      Wrestling With Inequality, Some Conservatives Redraw Economic Blueprint

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      A growing number of Republican politicians and theorists are challenging party orthodoxy on pocketbook issues, corporate power and government’s role.More Republicans are coming to the view that economic inequality, or a lack of social mobility, is a problem in the United States — and that more can be done to enable families to attain or regain a middle-class life.Though discussions about inequality tend to be most visible among liberals, about four in 10 Republican or Republican-leaning adults think there is too much economic inequality in the country, according to a Pew Research survey. And among Republicans making less than about $40,000 a year who see too much economic inequality, 63 percent agree that the economic system “requires major changes” to address it.But a growing debate among conservative thinkers, politicians and the party base — online, in books and in public forums — reveals a group divided about how, in practice, to address pocketbook issues and the extent to which the government should be involved.“I don’t think just having a bigger government is a solution to a lot of these problems,” said Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum and a fellow with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank widely credited with giving Trumpism an intellectual framework. “But I do think that we could stand to think a little bit more on the right about how to make that 1950s middle-class life possible for people.”These yearnings and ideological stirrings have picked up as both whites without college degrees and the broader working class have grown as a share of Republican voters. (Hillary Clinton won college-educated white voters by 17 percentage points in her 2016 race against Donald J. Trump; four years earlier, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, carried that group.)A notable swipe against longtime Republican economic thinking has come from Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative who served as an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and the opinion editor of The New York Post. The metamorphosis of his worldview is laid out in a recently published book, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.”“I was writing editorials preaching the gospel of low taxes, free trade, et cetera,” Mr. Ahmari said in an interview. But Mr. Trump’s election inspired him to research how “American life in general for the lower rungs of the labor market is unbelievably precarious,” he said, and his politics changed.Mr. Ahmari recently endorsed a second term for Mr. Trump, but he has written that “while ferociously conservative on cultural issues,” he is also “increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the left — figures like Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.”In their own ways, Republican presidential primary candidates are jostling for ways to validate the populist energy and financial unease that Mr. Trump tapped into with a mix of pronouncements and policy promises. Some have set out economic goals that, according to many experts, are hard to square with their promises to reduce public debt and taxes and make deep cuts to government programs — especially now that many Republicans have backed away from calls to cut entitlement benefits.In a campaign speech in New Hampshire this summer called “A Declaration of Economic Independence,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican presidential contender, sharply critiqued China, diversity programming, “excessive regulation and excessive taxes” — a familiar set of modern conservative concerns. Yet he also echoed complaints and economic goals often heard from the left.“We want to be a country where you can raise a family on one sole income,” he told the crowd.“We cannot have policy that kowtows to the largest corporations and Wall Street at the expense of small businesses and average Americans,” he added. “There’s a difference between a free-market economy, which we want, and corporatism.”Critics on the left and the right argue that Mr. DeSantis has failed to clearly define how he would achieve those goals. The DeSantis campaign declined to comment for this article, but he has cited pathways to broader prosperity that include bringing industrial jobs back from abroad, increasing work force education and technical training, removing “red tape” faced by small businesses and aiming for annual U.S. economic growth of at least 3 percent.Though the fissures on the right over economic issues were evident when Mr. Trump upended the political scene eight years ago, the realignments are maturing and deepening, causing fresh tensions as factions disagree on the extent to which inequality, globalization and growing corporate power should be seen as problems.Some conservatives remain more concerned with the trajectory of federal spending and unlocking greater overall prosperity, rather than its distribution.Last year, Phil Gramm, a Republican who steered the passage of major tax cuts and deregulation during his time representing Texas in Congress from the 1970s to the early 2000s, published a book with his fellow economists Robert Ekelund and John Early called “The Myth of American Inequality.” The book — filled with alternative tabulations of impoverishment and living standards — argues that inequality is not high and rising as “the mainstream” suggests.It argues that when including welfare transfers, income inequality has been more stable than government figures suggest, and that the share of Americans living in poverty fell from 15 percent in 1967 to only 1.1 percent in 2017.“The point of the book is to get the facts straight,” Mr. Gramm said in an interview, adding that “we’re having these debates” with numbers that are “verifiably false.” (Some scholars have vehemently disagreed with the authors’ analysis.)Scott Lincicome, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that he largely agreed with Mr. Gramm’s thesis and that Americans were mostly wrestling with “keeping up with the Joneses,” not a loss of economic traction.“In general, folks at the bottom, up to the median, are doing better,” Mr. Lincicome concluded. “They’re not winning the game, but they’re doing better than the same group was 30-plus years ago.”He added: “You know, economists can debate all day long whether we’re better off, worse off overall or whatever. But when you factor in all the factors, I personally think things are fine.”To the extent that these debates have popular reach, the most public face of the revisionist camp may be Oren Cass, an adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 campaign, who has become immersed in a collective project among some right-leaning thinkers to “rebuild capitalism.”Mr. Cass and his allies want to use government spending and power to promote economic mobility with traditionalist goals in mind — like reducing the cost of living for the heads of married, two-parent households.Mr. Cass praised Mr. Ahmari’s book as one that “bravely goes where few conservatives dare tread, to the ideologically fraught realm in which the market appears inherently coercive and capitalism appears in tension with economic freedom.” (Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, is talking at a book event with Mr. Ahmari this month at the National Press Club in Washington.)Many economists and political scientists contend that the ideological realignment on the right is overblown, confused with a broader, hard-to-quantify loyalty to Mr. Trump rather than an explicit ideology giving life to Trumpism.“In a way,” Mr. Ahmari said, his critics — “the people who say, ‘Yeah, sure, you’re just a couple of guys: you, Oren, and a few others at magazines and think tanks’” — are “not wrong institutionally,” as there is little donor support for their efforts.“But they are wrong in terms of voters,” he added.Ms. Stepman of the Claremont Institute says she is personally “more traditional right” than thinkers like Mr. Ahmari but agrees they are tapping into something real.“There is a very underserved part of the political spectrum that is genuinely left of center on economic issues, right of center on cultural issues,” she said, pointing to issues including immigration, gun laws, education, gender norms and more.Gabe Guidarini is one of them.Growing up in Lake Bluff, Ill., in a working-class household where MSNBC often played in the background at night, Mr. Guidarini felt his view that “the status quo in this country is corrupt” was validated by the “anti-establishment” voices of both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump. But he came to the view that “you can’t get away with” social views that stray from progressive orthodoxy and still be accepted by Democrats. Now, at 19, he is the president of the University of Dayton College Republicans.In 2022, he worked as a campaign intern for J.D. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” who aligned himself with Trumpism after his 2016 book was credited for providing a “reference guide” for Mr. Trump’s electoral success. Mr. Vance, an Ohio Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate.In line with Tucker Carlson and some other conservatives, Mr. Guidarini thinks the party “should be taking policy samples from Viktor Orban in Hungary, and what he’s doing with family policies that aim to increase family creation, increase childbirth and make it easier to live a decent life as a working or middle-class taxpayer,” he said. “That’s what’s going to return the American dream for so many people, because to young people — and I feel like a lot of other people in America today — the American dream feels dead.”Mr. Guidarini, like many on the right, is wary of achieving those goals by increasing taxes on the wealthy. But according to Pew Research, more Republican or Republican-leaning adults support raising tax rates for those with incomes over $400,000 (46 percent) than say those rates should go unchanged (29 percent) or be lowered (24 percent). And more than half of low-income Republicans support higher taxes on the highest earners.For now, though, all economic debates are “tangential,” said Saagar Enjeti, a conservative millennial who is a co-host of two podcasts that often feature competing voices across the right.“‘What are we going to do when the Trump tax cuts expire?’ These are not the fights that are happening,” Mr. Enjeti said. “I wish they were, but they’re not. They’re just not.”With consensus on policy solutions elusive and “the culture wars” in the campaign forefront, Mr. Enjeti said, Republicans will mostly rally around what he believes will be Mr. Trump’s simple economic message: “Make America 2019 Again” — a time when unemployment, inflation and mortgage rates were low and, for all of life’s challenges, at least cultural conservatives were in the White House. More

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      in US Politics

      We bailed out the banks but we’re not prepared to bail out the planet

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      Like many other politicians, Joe Biden talks a good game about the need to tackle global heating. Climate change is an “existential threat”, the US president said last week, as America sizzled amid record-breaking temperatures.Biden had to do something in response to what António Guterres, the UN secretary general, described as the boiling of the planet. The White House announced a series of measures – such as improved access to drinking water and planting more trees – in response to what has been the hottest month on record.To Biden’s critics, this is fiddling while Rome burns. They say he should be declaring a climate emergency, which would allow him to block new fossil fuel projects without congressional approval. As it is, Biden has showed a marked reluctance to take this step. There are clearly limits to what the US government is prepared to do to counter this “existential threat”.It is a similar picture in the UK, where the Conservative party’s surprise victory in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection was in large part due to the plans by London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, to expand the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) to the capital’s outer boroughs.Put simply, the Ulez seeks to improve London’s air quality by placing a charge on the use of older petrol and diesel vehicles, which tend to be not just the most polluting but also the most likely to be owned by poorer households already struggling with Britain’s cost of living crisis.The byelection defeat clearly rattled the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer. “We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour party end up on each and every Tory leaflet,” he said. “We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.”In their different ways, recent events in the US and the UK show just how difficult it will be to put the global economy on a saner and more sustainable course.Problem number one is that politicians struggle to think beyond the next election. Biden is running for re-election next year, and Starmer wants to end a run of four successive defeats for Labour. The temptation to put off tough decisions to another day is powerful.That’s because of problem number two: the lack of consensus about what needs to be done and over what time period change needs to happen. What’s needed is for Democrats and Republicans in the US and Labour and the Conservatives in the UK to announce that they are jointly signed up to a course of action that will extend well beyond one presidential or parliamentary term. The failure to forge a bi-partisan approach provides an incentive for parties to look for short-term political gain, even when doing so risks longer-term harm.There’s a reason for that, namely that some of the policies required have upfront costs that make them unpopular for those that find them hard to bear. Telling a key worker who can only afford an ageing diesel car that they will have to pay £12.50 a day to drive to their job is never going to be easy, especially in a period when living standards are being squeezed. There is no getting away from the fact that the Ulez expansion is a regressive tax and, as Khan has found, changes that make hard-up people even worse off breed anger, and that anger will inevitably find a political outlet.So problem number three is that there are a lot of poor people in the UK and the US. And problem number four is that not nearly enough is being done to help these people make the green transition. For that to happen, there would need not just to be a recognition of the link between global heating and grotesque levels of inequality, but a willingness to do something about it.In the developed west, this means using the financial firepower of the state to reduce the number of losers from the green transition. In developing countries, it means transfers of both money and technical knowhow, so that countries that need growth as part of their anti-poverty programmes minimise the use of fossil fuels. Meeting the “existential” threat that Biden talks about requires action not just in the UK or the US but in China, India and other emerging countries, too. Climate action on a global scale will be costly.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat brings us to problem number five. The change from one economic paradigm to another – the creative destruction that the political economist Joseph Schumpeter talked about – is hard because it requires those who have invested in existing industries to recognise that the game is up. This transition can be prolonged if those wedded to the status quo have invested huge sums and wield enormous power, as is the case with the fossil fuel industry.The solution to these problems lies ultimately in the hands of politicians such as Biden, because they alone have the power to remove barriers to change.As the rapid responses to the global financial crisis of 2007-09 and the Covid pandemic proved, governments can act speedily, collectively and decisively if the crisis is deemed big enough. When the banks were facing their existential crisis in 2008, money was created to bail them out and prevent a second Great Depression. In 2020, economies were effectively put on a war footing.Should the same approach be adopted in the fight against climate change? Yes. Is there any sign of this happening? Not on the scale required. Effectively, this is like the 1930s, when there was resistance to meeting the threat of fascism. Then, as now, what was needed was rapid rearmament. Then, as now, what we’re getting is a failure to do what needs to be done. More

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      in US Politics

      The fourth leading cause of death in the US? Cumulative poverty | Rev William Barber and Gregg Gonsalves

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      Can you name the top 10 causes of death in America? Without too much trouble, most Americans could likely come up with some of them: cancer, heart disease, stroke, accidents. But it would come as a surprise to many to know that poverty is right up there with these other dreaded scourges – much higher, in fact, than many ills that have inspired investigative committees, major policy investments and sustained attention from the public and private sectors in American life.A recent study by one of our colleagues shows that cumulative poverty over many years is the fourth leading cause of death in this country. Current poverty – just being poor right now – is seventh on that list, and it alone causes 10 times as many deaths as homicide, close to five times as many deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as many deaths as drug overdoses. Cumulative poverty that lingers year after year is associated with approximately 60% more deaths than current poverty, putting only heart disease, cancer and smoking-related deaths ahead in the number of Americans it kills.But if this is true, why do we hear so much about crime rates, opioids and gun violence in America, but so little from our elected leaders about the crisis of poverty? Why is there no “Surgeon General’s Warning” on low-wage jobs? The relationship of poverty to disease and death is a well-established fact detailed in reports by the World Health Organization, the World Bank and our own government. But we as a people have become numb to the unnecessary deaths that are normalized by the ways we often think and talk about the economy in public life.Sadly, the United States is the leader in poverty among the rich countries of the world. As of 2019, the US had the worst poverty rate overall (17.8%) and in children specifically (20.9%) among the other 25 wealthy countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).In addition, poverty affects us all. Seventy-five per cent of all Americans between 20 and 75 years of age will be among the “current” poor or near poverty for at least one year of their lives. Contrary to popular belief, poverty is hardly just the province of the inner city: only 10% of poor Americans live in high-poverty census tracts – most are spread out across the country. They are our neighbors. And although the rates of poverty are highest among communities of color, by sheer volume most people living in poverty are white.Finally, poverty is a drag on our economy. Child poverty alone in the US presents an $800bn to $1.1tn price tag, based on reductions in adult productivity, criminal justice costs and the costs of healthcare for children from poor families.But what if we could end poverty in America, the misery and suffering it generates – the 500 deaths a day it causes in this country? Our colleague Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University, estimates that we could lift everyone within our borders above the poverty line for less than 1% of our national GDP – $177bn. Ending poverty is within our grasp. It is something we can accomplish together. So what’s stopping us?As the economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson said in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, “those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose.” Matthew Desmond elaborates a similar theme in his recent book Poverty, By America: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”It is difficult to believe that some people are pro-poverty. The incentives for maintaining the status quo, for keeping many Americans poor, rest on the fact that some people find considerable financial benefit from presiding over the misery of others. This is what a young Friedrich Engels – observing the deaths of factory workers, the conditions of the slums and the exploitation of children in Manchester, England in the mid-19th century – called “social murder”. Many were dying, while a few made a killing from their suffering. It was true then, and it is true now.But this is not our destiny. We can be the generation that abolishes poverty, the country that goes from the bottom of the heap among its peers – whether it’s about poverty, or life expectancy – to the top of it. We can rise to lead and “we the people” of the US can stand up to form a more perfect union, lifting this generation and the generations after it out of poverty, wiping away the deaths being poor causes in this nation.But this means holding up a mirror to who we are as a country. Those who gain from keeping people in the chains of poverty, condemning them to early death, must be confronted with a movement that names poverty in the richest nation on Earth as a public health crisis, an economic dead weight, a moral abomination and a stain on the republic. When the poor and low-wealth people of this nation link arms to make the moral case for an economy that works for everyone, we have the power to change the conversation about what is possible in Washington and in our statehouses.The US claims to be a beacon of democracy abroad and a nation committed to justice and general welfare at home. This cannot be true as long as poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the richest nation in the history of the world. Poor and low-wealth people are fighting for their lives and for the life of our democracy through the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, which worked with members of the US House of Representatives last year to introduce a Third Reconstruction Resolution that outlines policy priorities that can guide legislation to end poverty.In an echo of the Bible, this movement is saying, “Woe unto those who make unjust laws and rob the poor of their right.” But this prophetic challenge isn’t a condemnation. It is an invitation to life. Together, we can become the land of “liberty and justice for all” that has never yet been. Indeed, people who know that they do not have to accept the death sentence of poverty are leading the way.
      The Rev Dr William J Barber II is founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
      Gregg Gonsalves is associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health More

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      in US Politics

      We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage | Bernie Sanders

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      Congress can no longer ignore the needs of the working class of this country. At a time of massive and growing income and wealth inequality and record-breaking corporate profits, we must stand up for working families – many of whom are struggling every day to provide a minimal standard of living for their families.One important way to do that is to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage. In the year 2023, nobody in the US should be forced to work for starvation wages. It should be a basic truism that in the US, the richest country on earth, if you work 40 hours a week you do not live in poverty. Raising the minimum wage is not only the right thing to do morally. It is also good economics. Putting money into the hands of people who will spend it on basic needs is a strong economic stimulant.When over 60% of American workers are now living paycheck to paycheck, when the life expectancy of low-income Americans is in decline, when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country, we can no longer tolerate a federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, a wage that has not been raised since 2009. Incredibly, the federal minimum wage has lost over 27% of its purchasing power since it was last raised 14 years ago. That is unacceptable. Millions of Americans cannot be allowed to fall further and further behind economically, unable to afford the housing, food, healthcare, childcare and education they desperately need in order to live in health and dignity.Whether they are greeting us at Walmart, serving us hamburgers at McDonald’s, providing childcare for our kids or waiting on our table at a diner in rural America, there are too many Americans trying to survive and raise families on $9, $10 or $12 an hour. It cannot be done. This injustice must end. Low-income workers need a pay raise and the American people want them to get that raise.Poll after poll shows overwhelming support for raising the minimum wage to a living wage. But it’s not just polls. In 2021, the Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives voted to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The bad news is that we lacked the votes to pass this legislation through the equally divided Senate. Not only did a $15-an-hour minimum wage bill fail to win the vote of a single Republican in the Senate, eight Democrats voted against it as well.That was then. Now is now. And things are changing. As a result of years of congressional inaction, cities and states all across the country are taking the low-wage crisis into their own hands and raising their minimum wage. Some are doing it through legislative action. Others are doing it through ballot initiatives.Since 2013, the people of 12 states – New Jersey, South Dakota, Arkansas (twice), Alaska, Washington, Maine, Colorado, Arizona, Missouri, Florida, Nevada and Nebraska (twice) – have voted on ballot initiatives to raise their state’s minimum wage. Every single one of these initiatives passed, none with less than 55% of the vote. And these are not just strong “blue states” voting for economic justice. In the recent November 2022 midterm election, two states that voted in Republican governors, Nebraska and Nevada, voted to raise the minimum wage. In 2020, the citizens of Florida, with a Republican governor and two Republican senators, also voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.The MIT living wage calculator estimates a living wage as a salary that is adequate enough to support a family without luxuries. For two working adults and one child, a living hourly wage for each adult would be $18.69 in West Virginia, $17.55 in South Carolina, $21.57 in Maryland, $20.01 in Utah and $19.33 in Wisconsin. Even in my own state of Vermont, the living wage is $19.58, more than $6 above the current state minimum wage.But there are many families that do not have two working adults and rely on single moms who are raising their children on their own. In that case, the required living wage is much higher. As an example, a single mother in West Virginia would need to make $33.39 an hour to support herself and one child.So it is not radical to suggest that raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour over a period of several years is the right thing to do. In fact, had my 2015 bill to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour that was indexed to median wages became law, the federal minimum wage this January would be at least $17.40 an hour. And while we deal with the minimum wage, we must also address the scandal of the tipped wage, which has been stuck at an abysmally low $2.13 an hour for more than 30 years thanks, in large part, to the powerful restaurant lobby which has spent millions in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses since 1991 to keep workers in poverty.Together, these two proposals would provide an increase in pay for tens of millions of desperate Americans – disproportionately women and people of color. It would also be a huge boost to single moms. Let us not forget that these are the essential workers who kept the economy going during the worst of the Covid pandemic. At that time we called them heroes and heroines. Well, rhetorical praise is nice. A livable paycheck is better. Let’s do it.
      Bernie Sanders is a US senator from Vermont and the chair of the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions More

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      in US Politics

      Low-income Americans face a ‘hunger cliff’ as Snap benefits are cut

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      Gina Melton is facing a dilemma. Like millions of other Americans, Melton and her family relied on food assistance benefits boosted by Congress to help them through the pandemic. Now that extra cash is gone.The reduction has hit them hard. Three of her family members are disabled and one of her daughters works to take care of them through an agency. They had already relied on credit cards to pay for medical equipment that wasn’t covered by the federal health insurance schemes Medicare or Medicaid but have had to stop paying a couple of them in order to afford food.“When you have to choose between feeding your family and paying a credit card bill, you have to choose food,” said Melton, 62.Around 42 million Americans are currently enrolled in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits. Congress increased Snap benefits in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The last extra payments went out at the end of February in the remaining 32 states that were still issuing them, in addition to the District of Columbia, Guam and the US Virgin Islands.The emergency allotments were authorized in tandem with the Covid-19 emergency declaration in March 2022, but in December 2022, Congress passed a law to end the allotments.The lapse in the additional benefits will reduce Snap allotments for the average recipient by $90 a month, with some households losing $250 a month or more. Older adults at the minimum benefit level will see their monthly Snap benefits drop from $281 a month to $23.Though Melton’s husband, a diabetic, is still recovering from a recent surgery, he has been considering going back to work part time at the age of 65 as the family struggles to afford basic necessities, including healthy food. They’ve cut back on food purchases and buy what’s on sale or in reduced-price bins.“The extra food allotment was helping us a lot,” said Melton. “We’ve started shopping at lower-priced stores that don’t bag your groceries, but for a disabled person like myself, that requires me to go with a helper. We’ve also cut back on some more expensive necessities and are relying on the local food pantry more.”The end of the expanded benefits comes at a time when US consumer debt has been on the rise, with 20.5 million Americans currently behind on their utility payments and nearly 25 million behind on credit card, auto loan or personal loan payments, the highest number since 2009. Low-wage workers in the US, who make less than $20 an hour, have experienced drops in wage growth compared with other workers in recent months.Food prices have and are expected to continue to significantly rise in 2023 as well. The US Department of Agriculture estimated that all food prices will increase by 7.9% in 2023 – and they were already 9.5% higher in February 2023 compared with February 2022.With so many Americans receiving Snap benefits because of low wages, unemployment and underemployment, the sudden end of the emergency allotment has been characterized as a “hunger cliff”.Ellen Vollinger, Snap director for the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center, said: “The cliff is aptly named because this a very abrupt change in what people are going to have in their food budget and it’s affecting tens of millions of people.“When the federal government doesn’t provide as much support for food, it doesn’t mean that hungry people all of a sudden are better off, or no longer need assistance, or they go away. The hunger is still there, people are still there, the need is there, but the federal government is too abrupt in shifting the burden and costs of dealing with that downstream, to states [and] localities, and puts a greater burden on charities.”Vollinger noted that the end of emergency allotments leaves low-income families facing difficult choices around food, from forgoing meals and purchasing less to buying cheaper food.“There’s a lot of stress, that’s why we call it a hunger cliff. It’s very precipitous,” she added.Food banks have been bracing for a surge in demand as the expanded Snap benefits expire, with state agencies directing recipients to food pantries to help cope with the reduction in benefits.Studies have shown that the extra payments worked. The Urban Institute found that the increased Snap benefits during the Covid-19 pandemic kept 4.2 million Americans out of poverty in the fourth quarter of 2021, reducing poverty by 9.6% and child poverty by 14% in states with emergency allotments. They also have a wider economic benefit. Every $1 invested in Snap benefits yields between $1.50 and $1.80 in economic activity during economic downturns.A 2022 survey conducted by Propel found that among Snap recipients, there was a significant level of higher food insecurity in states where emergency allotments were cut off. In a January 2023 survey, there was an increase in the number of Snap recipients who reported skipping meals, eating less, visiting food pantries or relying on family or friends for meals compared with December 2022.The end of the emergency Snap allotments also coincides with a push from Republicans in Congress to cut regular Snap benefits this year, despite the majority of Americans having favorable views of the benefits. A January 2023 survey conducted by Purdue University found that seven out of 10 respondents supported permanent expansions of the Snap program.But an expansion looks very unlikely in the current Congress. In the meantime, recipients are facing tough choices.“I just received the last one last week,” said Patricia Ameral, 67, of Massachusetts, referring to the Covid emergency benefits. “I am certain it will mean the difference between consuming less fresh produce and less meat, fresh or frozen.” More

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      Britain’s Cautionary Tale of Self-Destruction

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      In December, as many as 500 patients per week were dying in Britain because of E.R. waits, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a figure rivaling (and perhaps surpassing) the death toll from Covid-19. On average, English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls, compared with a target time of 18 minutes; nationwide, 10 times as many patients spent more than four hours waiting in emergency rooms as did in 2011. The waiting list for scheduled treatments recently passed seven million — more than 10 percent of the country — prompting nurses to strike. The National Health Service has been in crisis for years, but over the holidays, as wait times spiked, the crisis moved to the very center of a narrative of national decline.Post-Covid, the geopolitical order has been thrown into tumult. At the beginning of the pandemic, commentators wondered about the fate of the United States, its indifferent political leadership and its apparently diminished “state capacity.” Lately, they have focused more on the sudden weakness of China: its population in decline, its economy struggling more than it has in decades, its “zero Covid” reversal a sign of both political weakness and political overreach, depending on whom you ask.But the descent of Britain is in many ways more dramatic. By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one.On the campaign trail and in office, promising a new prosperity, Boris Johnson used to talk incessantly about “leveling up.” But the last dozen years of uninterrupted Tory rule have produced, in economic terms, something much more like a national flatlining. In a 2020 academic analysis by Nicholas Crafts and Terence C. Mills, recently publicized by the economic historian Adam Tooze, the two economists asked whether the ongoing slowdown in British productivity was unprecedented. Their answer: not quite, but that it was certainly the worst in the last 250 years, since the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Which is to say: To find a fitting analogue to the British economic experience of the last decade, you have to reach back to a time before the arrival of any significant growth at all, to a period governed much more by Malthusianism, subsistence-level poverty and a nearly flat economic future. By all accounts, things have gotten worse since their paper was published. According to “Stagnation Nation,” a recent report by a think tank, there are eight million young Brits in the work force today who have not experienced sustained wage growth at all.Over the past several decades, the China boom and then the world’s populist turn have upended one of the basic promises of post-Cold War geopolitics: that free trade would not just bring predictable prosperity but also draw countries into closer political consensus around something like Anglo-American market liberalism. The experience of Britain over the same period suggests another fly in the end-of-history ointment, undermining a separate supposition of that era, which lives on in zombie form in ours: that convergence meant that rich and well-​governed countries would stay that way.For a few weeks last fall, as Liz Truss failed to survive longer as head of government than the shelf life of a head of lettuce, I found myself wondering how a country that had long seen itself — and to some significant degree been seen by the rest of the world — as a very beacon of good governance had become so seemingly ungovernable. It was of course not that long ago that American liberals looked with envy at the British system — admiring the speed of national elections, and the way that new governing coalitions always seemed able to get things done.Post-Brexit, both the outlook for Britain and the quality of its politics look very different, as everyone knows. But focusing on a single “Leave” vote risks confusing that one abrupt outburst of xenophobic populism with what in fact is a long-term story of manufactured decline. As Burn-Murdoch demonstrates in another in his series of data-rich analyses of the British plight, the country’s obvious struggles have a very obvious central cause: austerity. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and in the name of rebalancing budgets, the Tory-led government set about cutting annual public spending, as a proportion of G.D.P., to 39 percent from 46 percent. The cuts were far larger and more consistent than nearly all of Britain’s peer countries managed to enact; spending on new physical and digital health infrastructure, for instance, fell by half over the decade. In the United States, political reversals and partisan hypocrisy put a check on deep austerity; in Britain, the party making the cuts has stayed steadily in power for 12 years.The consequences have been remarkable: a very different Britain from the one that reached the turn of the millennium as Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia.” Real wages have actually declined, on average, over the last 15 years, making America’s wage stagnation over the same period seem appealing by comparison. As the political economist William Davies has written, the private sector is also behaving shortsightedly, skimping on long-term investments and extracting profits from financial speculation instead: “To put it bluntly, Britain’s capitalist class has effectively given up on the future.” Even the right-wing Daily Telegraph is now lamenting that England is “becoming a poor country.”Of course, trends aside, in absolute terms Britain remains a wealthy place: the sixth-largest economy in the world, though its G.D.P. is now smaller than that of India, its former colony. And while the deluded promises of Brexit boosters obviously haven’t come to pass, neither have the bleakest projections: food shortages, crippling labor crunches or economic chaos.Instead, there has been a slow, sighing decay — one that makes contemporary Britain a revealing case study in the way we talk and think about the fates of nations and the shape of contemporary history. Optimists like to point to global graphs of long-term progress, but if the political experience of the last decade has taught us anything, it is that whether the world as a whole is richer than it was 50 years ago matters much less to the people on it today than who got those gains, and how they compare with expectations. Worldwide child mortality statistics are indeed encouraging, as are measures of global poverty. But it’s cold comfort to point out to an American despairing over Covid-era life expectancy declines that, in fact, a child born today can still expect to live longer than one born in 1995, for instance, or to tell a Brit worrying over his or her economic prospects that added prosperity is likely to come eventually — at the same level enjoyed by economies in the former Eastern Bloc.Can Britain even stomach such a comparison? The wealthy West has long regarded development as a race that has already and definitively been won, with suspense remaining primarily about how quickly and how fully the rest of the world might catch up. Rich countries could stumble, the triumphalist narrative went, but even the worst-case scenarios would look something like Japan — a rich country that stalled out and stubbornly stopped growing. But Japan is an economic utopia compared with Argentina, among the richest countries of the world a century ago, or Italy, which has tripped its way into instability over the last few decades. Britain has long since formally relinquished its dreams of world domination, but the implied bargain of imperial retreat was something like a tenured chair at the table of global elders. As it turns out, things can fall apart in the metropole too. Over two centuries, a tiny island nation made itself an empire and a capitalist fable, essentially inventing economic growth and then, powered by it, swallowing half the world. Over just two decades now, it has remade itself as a cautionary tale.David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), a writer for Opinion and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth.” More

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      Pandemic Learning Loss

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      The role remote education played.Months into the current school year, most American students are still trying to make up for what they lost during the pandemic. This fall, we saw some of the clearest evidence yet of the extent to which the pandemic — and the school closures that came with it — hurt children’s education.Nine-year-olds lost the equivalent of two decades of progress in math and reading, according to an authoritative national test. Fourth and eighth graders also recorded sweeping declines, particularly in math, with eighth-grade scores falling in 49 of 50 states.The data comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a rigorous exam that evaluates thousands of children across the country and is overseen by a research arm of the U.S. Education Department.Today, I’ll break down the factors that drove these declines and explain an important trend that helps show why these results are so sobering.Remote learning’s roleFirst, to address one of the most common questions I hear as an education reporter: To what degree is remote learning responsible for these setbacks? The answer is both simple and complicated.At a basic level, there is good evidence and a growing consensus that extended remote learning harmed students. Some state test results from 2021 help show the damage. In Ohio, researchers found that districts that stayed fully remote during the 2020-21 school year experienced declines up to three times greater than those of districts that mostly taught students in person.More recently, the national test results capture both the initial academic declines and any recovery, and they offer some nuance. While there was a notable correlation between remote learning and declines in fourth-grade math, for example, there was little to no correlation in reading. Why the discrepancy? One explanation is that reading skills tend to be more influenced by parents and what happens at home, whereas math is more directly affected by what is taught in school.So remote learning does not explain the whole story. What else does? In a sophisticated analysis of thousands of public school districts in 29 states, researchers at Harvard and Stanford Universities found that poverty played an even bigger role in academic declines during the pandemic.“The poverty rate is very predictive of how much you lost,” Sean Reardon, an education professor at Stanford who helped lead the analysis, told me.Comparing two California school districts, one wealthier and the other poorer, illustrates this point. Cupertino Union, a Silicon Valley school district where about 6 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch (a marker that researchers use to estimate poverty), spent nearly half of the 2020-21 school year remote. So did Merced City in the Central Valley, where nearly 80 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, according to the Harvard-Stanford analysis.Yet despite spending roughly the same amount of time attending classes remotely, students in the wealthier Cupertino district actually gained ground in math, while students in poorer Merced City fell behind.High vs. low performersWhile the overall declines in student achievement were stark, the averages mask even deeper divergences between student groups. For example, Black and Hispanic students, who had started out behind white and Asian students in fourth-grade math, lost more ground than those groups during the pandemic.Notably, the gap is also growing between the country’s highest-achieving students and low-performing students who struggle the most.That gap — driven by declines among lower performers — was most clear for younger students and in reading. (Middle-school math declines were more significant across the board.)In fourth grade, the average reading score on the national exam fell three points. But results for students in the top 90th percentile did not fall at all, while those for students in the bottom 10th percentile plunged six points, double the overall average.In other words: The students who had the least ground to lose lost the most.There may be a twofold explanation. Recent research from NWEA, a nonprofit academic assessment organization, found that students at the bottom of their classes both experienced sharper setbacks at the start of the pandemic and showed less improvement last school year.I am sometimes asked: If the pandemic affected all students, how much does it matter? Isn’t everyone behind?What the latest data affirmed is that while the pandemic affected all students, it did not affect all students equally. That was true with remote learning, and it is playing out now in recovery. The students who had the greatest needs coming into the pandemic have the steepest challenge — and will need the most help — in the future.Related: On “The Daily,” I explained what schools can do to help students recover.THE LATEST NEWSProtests in ChinaDemonstrators in Beijing.Kevin Frayer/Getty ImagesChina has witnessed its most defiant eruption of public anger in years, after a deadly apartment fire last week set off nationwide protests against Covid lockdowns.Anger with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, helps explain how the demonstrations gained momentum.Chinese spam flooded Twitter and obscured news about the protests, The Washington Post reported.PoliticsA strong midterm performance eased some Democrats’ fears about President Biden’s potential re-election bid.Attorney General Merrick Garland is recalibrating his political approach as the Justice Department investigates Donald Trump.Biden’s sweeping marijuana pardons do not apply to many people with minor convictions.Other Big StoriesGunmen in explosive vests stormed a hotel in Somalia, trapping government officials in an ongoing siege. The militant group Al Shabab claimed responsibility.A small plane crashed into power lines in Maryland, injuring two people and knocking out electricity to roughly 117,000 customers.Many developed countries have reduced roadway deaths, but the U.S. has failed to keep up.“I simply wanted to save the family I found”: Another patron helped stop the shooter during the attack on an L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub in Colorado Springs.Millions of people in Houston were told to boil drinking water and schools were closed after a power failure at a purification plant.OpinionsGail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss gun violence.Just ignore Donald Trump, Patti Davis, a daughter of Ronald Reagan, writes.To protect patients, give older doctors competency assessments, Dr. Sandeep Jauhar writes.MORNING READSA wind farm in the North Sea.Francesca Jones for The New York TimesGreen transition: Oil and gas workers are finding jobs on Scotland’s wind farms.Vows: They met in an elevator and danced their way to a “beautifully intoxicating” romance.Metropolitan diary: The upside of a forgotten phone.Quiz time: Take our latest news quiz, and share your score (the average was 9.4).Advice from Wirecutter: The best advent calendars.Lives Lived: Irene Cara was an Oscar-winning singer who performed the title tracks for “Flashdance” and “Fame.” She died at 63.SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETICEagles beat Packers: Philadelphia maintained the N.F.L.’s best record with a 40-33 win over the Packers late last night. Aaron Rodgers left the game with a rib injury.No. 1 goes down: The Alabama men’s basketball team upset top-ranked North Carolina in four overtimes.WORLD CUPMorocco’s Zakaria Aboukhlal scores against Belgium.Amr Abdallah Dalsh/ReutersShock: Morocco upset Belgium, leading to riots in Brussels. And Canada is out after losing to Croatia. Manager John Herdman’s ill-fated bravado before the match proved disastrous.Powers draw even: Germany kept its tournament hopes alive with a 1-1 tie against Spain.Taking stock: Do all these upsets make for a more exciting tournament?Protest battle: Iran called for the U.S. to be expelled from the competition over a social media post featuring an altered flag.Photo collage: A V.I.P. entrance at Qatar’s showpiece stadium replaced a mural celebrating migrant workers.Today: Cameroon is playing Serbia, and Brazil will face Switzerland this afternoon — though without its star, Neymar, who is injured. Here are the latest scores.ARTS AND IDEAS The modern wine barPlace des Fêtes in Brooklyn.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThey’re popping up all over New York City. But what is a wine bar, anyway?American wine bars used to be a novelty — a space for customers to learn about the intricacies of a bottle’s taste and production. They have evolved over the last few decades, finding success with a new formula: simple food, casual atmosphere, inexpensive wine by the glass.This relaxed approach sets wine bars apart from restaurants. “Good wine bars are informal neighborhood gathering places rather than destinations, with occasional exceptions,” our critic Eric Asimov writes. Some of his favorite wine bars introduce new trends, like natural and orange wines.For more: Eric picks New York’s best wine bars.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookPeter DaSilva for The New York TimesCacio e Pepe is simple but incredible.What to seePuerto Rican artists at the Whitney.What to WatchAn “Unsolved Mysteries” reboot from an executive producer of “Stranger Things,” and six other shows to binge.Now Time to PlayThe pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was workload. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Moon goddess (four letters).And here’s today’s Wordle. After, use our bot to get better.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.P.S. Amanda Choy and Mantai Chow are joining Times Cooking to produce documentary-style videos.Here’s today’s front page. “The Daily” is about the World Cup.Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More