After spending the summer being heckled by constituents who are angry about the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” GOP lawmakers are being advised by the White House to instead focus on the bill’s impacts on “working families.” But this new marketing strategy particularly highlights the impact of the bill on people who don’t belong to traditional “working families” in the first place.
A recent article by Matt Browning in Jacobin gave me a new perspective on poverty, its causes and how need for aid can be anticipated and targeted: “Poverty hits people as they move in and out of different life stages and events: job loss, disability, divorce, having children, family deaths. When they do, they will often dip into poverty — if the welfare state is not there for them.”
This made me understand poverty in a new way, not as a monolithic problem, but as a circumstance-correlated one. Caregivers, especially of older people, are one category that this certainly applies to.
“the bulk of the new work requirements fall on one group of people: adults below retirement age, without diagnosed disabilities, and without young children in the home.”
And who are they? 14 percent are caregivers. I see these people in my community. Also interesting was that “childless adults represented 29 percent of EITC filers, but received only 4 percent of benefits. The average benefit was only $295 a year, less than one-tenth of what families with children received.” Wow.
A recent article by Matt Browning in Jacobin gave me a new perspective on poverty, its causes and how need for aid can be anticipated and targeted: “Poverty hits people as they move in and out of different life stages and events: job loss, disability, divorce, having children, family deaths. When they do, they will often dip into poverty — if the welfare state is not there for them.”
This made me understand poverty in a new way, not as a monolithic problem, but as a circumstance-correlated one. Caregivers, especially of older people, are one category that this certainly applies to.
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/welfare-state-poverty-aging-disability-unemployment?utm_campaign=as-npt105112517
Great information here:
“the bulk of the new work requirements fall on one group of people: adults below retirement age, without diagnosed disabilities, and without young children in the home.”
And who are they? 14 percent are caregivers. I see these people in my community. Also interesting was that “childless adults represented 29 percent of EITC filers, but received only 4 percent of benefits. The average benefit was only $295 a year, less than one-tenth of what families with children received.” Wow.