Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) — A crackdown on illegal immigration under President Donald Trump has driven some poor people to take a drastic step: opt out of federal food assistance because they are fearful of deportation, activists and immigrants say. People who are not legal residents of the U.S. are not eligible to take part in what is formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But many poor families include a mix of non-legal residents and legal ones, such as children who have citizenship because they were born in the U.S. In those cases, it is often an adult...

Parade to help American taxpayer get used to burden of change.Reginald Cooper, of Martinsburg, has had one dream, besides driving drunk in Busch series auto racing event: to march in President Barrack Obama's inaugural parade. There's only one thing that's stopping him from achieving both dreams. Cooper has a degenerative condition that has been passed down through three generations of hadly-working men: He is agressively slothful and highly manipulative.OK. Two things are keeping him back."It hurts because Obama represents the best hope for people like me in years," said Cooper. "I just wanted to be there, but not be cold,...

Allegations that members of a southern Utah polygamous sect are guilty of widespread welfare fraud were raised repeatedly this summer during a U.S. Senate judiciary committee hearing. They surfaced frequently, too, in messages sent to Texas Gov. Rick Perry after an April raid on the Eldorado ranch occupied by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. "Please pull the plug on the freebies for the cult. Why are the taxpayers of your state paying for this illegal group?" wrote a Michigan couple on April 17. But welfare data from Utah, Arizona and Texas do not support the...

The Census Bureau last week released its latest estimate of the U.S. poverty rate... The 2005 poverty rate of 12.6 percent...was substantially higher than the 11.1 percent level back in 1973... The results seem to suggest a prolonged failure of national policies to address poverty. However, the problem here lies less with actual living conditions than with the flawed and misleading poverty measure .... Today's poor households are more likely to have telephone and television sets than non-poor households in 1970; much more likely to have central air conditioning than the typical home of 1980, almost as likely to have...