Jake Johnson at Common Dreams writes—Nearly 1.4 Million Puerto Ricans Facing 'Dangerous' Food Stamp Cuts as Trump and Congress Fail to Act:
With hurricane relief funding stalled in Congress due to opposition from the Trump administration, Puerto Rico has reportedly started slashing food stamps in an attempt to preserve the life-saving program.
The move could harm as many as 1.4 million Puerto Ricans—including hundreds of thousands of children and elderly people.
"This is not about politics—this is literally about people's lives and their ability to feed their children and their elders in Puerto Rico," Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, told the Washington Post. "The need is still there."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued an urgent call for congressional action in response to news of the cuts.
"Puerto Rico needs food assistance funding due to the hurricanes which devastated the island. Some 1.4 million U.S. citizens will face large cuts to their food assistance benefits, 230,000 will lose the benefits entirely," Sanders tweeted. "We must act now to end this crisis."
Food stamp use soared in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island and—according to one study—may have killed as many as 6,000 people.
Due to lack of assistance from the federal government, Puerto Rican officials are reportedly cutting food stamps to pre-hurricane levels.
"For a senior citizen who lives alone, their benefits have dipped from $194 per month to $112 per month," Buzzfeed reported, citing Puerto Rican authorities. "A family of four with a monthly income of around $2,000 has seen their benefits drop from $649 per month to $410 per month."
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2014—GOP will repeat Ryan budget history by adopting Camp tax plan next year:
Last month, Republican House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) introduced his proposal for a major overhaul of the U.S. tax code. But among Republican leaders in Congress, its arrival was about as welcome as an ill-timed fart.
Hoping to focus the 2014 midterm elections on Obamacare instead of controversial new tax provisions, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pronounced Camp's plan dead on arrival, cynically lamenting, "I think we will not be able to finish the job, regretfully. I don't see how we can." Meanwhile, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) rejected the idea that Camp's was the official House GOP tax plan and responded simply, "Ah, Jesus" when asked if he would bring it up for a vote. And Paul Ryan (R-WI), who if he does not run for president in 2016 will likely take Camp's committee gavel next year, "ducked questions on the proposal's substance" before blandly declaring, "this is the beginning of a good debate."
But the skittish reaction of the GOP's best and brightest should not mislead anyone into believing that this is the beginning of the end for Dave Camp's tax code rewrite. Instead, it is just the end of the beginning. After all, in early 2010 Republicans in Congress terrified about its impact on the upcoming midterms ran away from Paul Ryan's budget-busting, upper class tax-cutting, Medicare rationing, Social Security privatizing and safety net shredding "Roadmap for America's Future." Yet a year later, 95 percent of Republicans on Capitol Hill voted for the Ryan budget, a near-unanimous endorsement they would repeat in 2012 and 2013.
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