Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/tag/welfare/)
Amid all the 50-years-later press about LBJ’s war on poverty, a deafening silence surrounds government support for single heads of household. This program, known as welfare, was ransacked in 1996 and today’s single mothers are paying the price.
U.S. lawmakers will be trying to reconcile bills this week that will reduce benefits in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps.
She has enough money to live, thanks to the government, says Behlor Santi in this excerpt from her upcoming memoir about living in New York with a diagnosis of mental illness. But what she really longs for is a home she can decorate and call her own.
She’s the new, openly lesbian U.S. senator-elect from Wisconsin and she just defeated Tommy Thompson, the man who did irreparable harm to millions of single mothers by adding huge new hardships to our welfare system.
Romney attacks welfare policy around the same time that a prominent journalist links single motherhood to the nation’s glaring class divide. Mimi Abramovitz says this distracts from what really keeps single mothers and their children down and out.
The FDA’s recent expansion of gastric-banding weight-loss surgery to millions more Americans could burden the nation’s E.R. with complications that patients discuss in online forums, such as vomiting and abdominal pain. The third of three stories.
Missouri’s State Senate is about to consider whether to subject welfare recipients to drug testing. Numerous other states have said no to the idea and an anti-poverty group has re-released a report calling it a waste of money.
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Last week Congress let federal funding expire, potentially costing more than 200,000 parents and young people their jobs. In contrast to the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, the $1 billion program that created these jobs was actually working.
Welfare recipients say a sense of isolation often comes with the predicament of needing public assistance. But there are activist leaders and support groups out there helping to battle that lonely, outcast feeling.
Petra Rodriguez lost her welfare benefits when she injured her back and couldn’t keep her welfare work assignment. A Legal Aid lawyer says situations like hers help explain why the rolls have dropped–people are just discouraged from applying.