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CORONA, Calif.—Roberta Gordon never thought she’d still be alive at age 76. She definitely didn’t think she’d still be working. But every Saturday, she goes down to the local grocery store and hands out samples, earning $50 a day, because she needs the money. “I’m a working woman again,” she told me, in the common room of the senior apartment complex where she now lives, here in California’s Inland Empire. Gordon has worked dozens of odd jobs throughout her life—as a house cleaner, a home health aide, a telemarketer, a librarian, a fundraiser—but at many times in her life, she...

In a proposal dubbed “America’s Harvest Box,” President Trump’s new budget calls for replacing half of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) vouchers with actual food for 80% of the program’s recipients. The “box” would contain allotments of shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit and vegetables. Democrats were quick to attack the plan. Michigan Sen Debbie Stabenow, the ranking Democrat on the agriculture committee, labeled it “not a serious proposal.” Rep Jim McGovern (D-Mass) called it “a cruel joke. It unfairly limits the choices of those dependent on the government for their living....

Kentucky became the first state with a work requirement for Medicaid, and now it has to do something arguably more daring: Build a mobile-friendly website that works. The state will require people who get taxpayer-funded health insurance to work or volunteer. It's the kind of government program that often draws disdain from small-government Republicans, but GOP Gov. Matt Bevin has embraced it as "a more efficient use of resources." Government-run websites are notorious for glitches. Kentucky had problems in 2016 when "Benefind" — meant to consolidate all assistance programs — caused chaos. Kentucky officials say this time will be different....

Imagine if you were poor and you got Medicaid, heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, but you had to pay between $1 and $15 a month in premiums. Wouldn't that be confusing? For many people, it is so confusing that they don't understand how to pay and end up being kicked off Medicaid. [Snip] Critics of the plan point to Indiana, which dropped about 25,000 adults from its Medicaid program from 2015 through 2017 for failing to pay premiums there. Some also find the new work requirements some states have imposed troubling ...

A few moments ago, Tucker Carlson quoted 2009 federal statistics citing that 75% of immigrants from Mexico are on some kind of welfare...STUNNING!!!!!!!!!! And these are only the latest numbers...imagine how much larger that number is now after Obama's Mexican invasion!!!!

Not only did Mitch McConnell just give Schumer everything he wanted on budget and health care, he ensured that for the remainder of the year, Democrats can get everything they want and conservatives will not pass a single priority. Not one. snip McConnell is planning to introduce debate in the Senate on immigration next week by putting forth a blank bill with nothing in it. He will then allow anyone to offer amendments, and, in his words, “whoever gets to 60 wins.” snip The GOP platform has become a free-for-all. The only ones who don’t get blank checks are conservatives....

Michael Tubbs, the 26-year-old mayor of Stockton, California, thinks handing out $6,000 a year to low-income residents (with no strings attached) is the way to lift people out of poverty. “Stockton is absolutely Ground Zero for a lot of the issues we’re facing as a nation,” Tubbs told CBS San Francisco (video below). “Ideally, I would like to serve 100 families for 18 months at $500 a month.” Stockton is experimenting with a welfare program called “universal basic income,” which gives low-income residents $500 a month, no questions asked. The money is coming from a private grant. The California city,...

An online petition to include pet food in SNAP benefits is getting a lot of traction. The petition on Care2 has more than 88,500 supports as of Monday morning. According to the website, the petition was created by Edward B. Johnston Jr., who wrote that he’s been on SNAP benefits for a few months and hasn’t been able to feed his dog due to government regulations.

A California city plans to give several dozen families $500 a month for a year as part of a program to study the economic and social impacts of giving people a basic income. The program in Stockton will track what residents do with the money and how having a universal basic income affects their self-esteem and identity, San Francisco radio station KQED reported .

Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country? Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California, where nearly one out of five residents is poor. That's according to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the cost of housing, food, utilities and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income.

A new civil rights act has come into force in Switzerland that prevents residents who have been on welfare in the past three years from becoming citizens unless they pay back the money they received to the state.

A trio of recently released economic statistics have boosted Democratic hopes of retaking the majority in the House and Senate later this year. First, in December, private employers increased payrolls by stepping up hiring and reducing layoffs. Second, unemployment among blacks fell to the lowest level since 1972. Third, the number of Americans on food stamps fell by two million. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez labeled these statistics “the starkest of warnings concerning the sad fate in store for average Americans under Republican government. Millions are being forced out of the social safety net so meticulously constructed for them...

There’s another round of arguments brewing over welfare reform (or “workfare” as we used to say in the 90s), this time caused by hints that the Trump administration would begin granting waivers to states that want to impose work requirements on able-bodied recipients of Medicaid. These waivers were all denied under the Obama administration but, as you might expect, things are different now.These rumors have led Washington Post editorial team member Elizabeth Bruenig to take to her keyboard and make a sweeping argument which goes far beyond the question of workfare. Taking time out to toss an endorsement to her...

...But there is one detail in the jobs report that suggests there is still room for improvement. The labor force participation rate, which is a measure of how many people are employed or actively seeking work compared to the whole population (not just those looking for work), is 62.7 percent. According to the report, this is “unchanged over the month and over the year.” In total numbers, there are 96,230,000 Americans who are not in the labor force, which is an increase of 456,000 since President Obama’s last year in office. ... The Trump administration is likewise set to release...

The Donald Trump administration hopes to unveil a new Labor Department regulation in June requiring drug testing for unemployment benefits. Republicans used the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal an Obama-era regulation that limited states’ ability to limit drug testing for people who apply for unemployment benefits. After President Trump signed the CRA repealing the Obama-era regulation, House Ways and Means chairman Kevin Brady (R-TX) said: President Trump just signed into law my bill that abolishes an Obama-era rule. After five years of battling with the Obama Department of Labor, states like Texas will now be allowed to drug test...

Is a low income or prolonged unemployment truly cause for financial stress? According to one study, not really. In some states, public assistance programs, or welfare, could pay more than full-time, minimum-wage jobs. Cato Institute’s 2013 Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off study totaled the welfare benefits offered in each state and compared that value with the wages workers would need to earn in order to have an equivalent take-home income. Cato found for long-term dependents, welfare actually pays pretty well. The study examined the package for a single mother with two children, who could use programs such as Temporary Assistance for...

Guillory calculates the average SNAP benefit of $270.22 monthly will go down $6.50 to $263.72. “But at the same time the client will be receiving about $20 more per month from their other program benefits,” Guillory said. “Overall they’re better off. Their income has to go up for their SNAP benefits to go down.”... SNAP cost the federal government $71 billion in 2016. Of that amount about $1.4 billion was spent in Louisiana. About a quarter of all Louisiana households receive food stamps.

Maine is having trouble finding enough snowplow drivers, another sign of the way low unemployment is taxing states. The state Department of Transportation has about 50 openings among about 700 positions and expects 30 snow storms in the season that stretches from mid-November to mid-April. Exacerbating the problem: some cities like Portland hire their own drivers and pay more, and private sector demand for experienced drivers is also high.

Fighting terrorism is now morphing into clamping down on human migration, as far as the European Union is concerned. France’s President Emmanuel Macron is leading the charge, claiming at a conference in Paris last week that terrorism and human trafficking are part of the same problem, requiring the deployment of a military force spread across Africa. The melding of the two concepts provokes serious legal and moral questions. But so desperate, it seems, is the EU to halt illegal migration into the bloc that it is moving to militarize the problem in Africa – under the guise of “fighting terrorism”....