Post Pandemic….
Republican efforts to cut back spending…..
Less money for benefits for Americans that REALLY need them…..
This while those same Amereican’s hear and see about Billions going to other places OUTSIDE America….
President Joe Biden has just under a year to convince skeptical U.S. voters they’re better off financially thanks to him. Widening holes in the country’s social safety net could make his task even harder.
A string of popular pandemic-era support programs have expired this fall, creating so-called benefit cliffs affecting millions of Americans. That coincides with policy changes to traditional welfare programs that are now kicking in, creating potential new hurdles for hundreds of thousands of participants.
The Biden administration and Democratic allies in Congress are fighting to restore some of the lapsed benefits when lawmakers take up the 2024 spending bills early next year. But at best it will be a partial reprieve — the student loan payment moratorium, for example, is gone for good.
The collective impact: a cascading set of new financial burdens that are disproportionately affecting women, young people and people of color — a core part of the Democratic electorate. Coming on top of stubbornly high inflation, they risk further undermining the president’s pitch that he’s rebuilding the economy “from the middle up and the bottom out,” particularly among voters he needs to turn out in November.
That includes millions of student loan borrowers, who faced the resumption of loan payments on Oct. 1, after a 3½-year moratorium. A $24 billion emergency support fund for day cares across the country also ended the same day, bringing warnings of rising day cares costs and reduced access.
In addition, new restrictions on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which feeds more than 40 million low-income Americans, started phasing in this fall, putting hundreds of thousands at risk of losing SNAP benefits, previously known as food stamps. And anti-hunger advocates are warning that if Congress doesn’t include another $1 billion for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known commonly as WIC, in its next funding bill, the program may have to startturning away hundreds of thousands of eligible mothers and babies.
The Biden administration has pushed to boost funding for these traditional parts of the safety net, as well as secure money to extend some of the temporary social programs created in response to the Covid emergency. In many cases, Biden has been stymied by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress, who argue the programs are too expensive and no longer necessary as the pandemic has eased. Republicans, for example, negotiated the end of the payment moratorium as part of the debt ceiling deal. It was the Supreme Court, however, that killed Biden’s broader effort to cancel student debt outright
As a result, the social safety net, which witnessed a historic expansion between 2020 and 2022, is shrinking again…..