(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week By The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
The pandemic forced upon the savants of the American economy an uncomfortable truth. For all the talk of bootstraps and deficits, hammocks and debt, if you give poor people more money, their lives will generally improve because they will become less poor. This, of course, is a corollary to the shebeen’s First Law of Economics: Fck The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. And if you take that money away, these people become more poor again. From CBS News:
The poverty rate for children in the U.S. has surged since monthly government checks from the expanded Child Tax Credit ended in December, according to a recent study from Columbia University researchers. An additional 3.7 million children slipped into poverty in January, their analysis found. That pushed the national child poverty rate to 17% last month compared with 12.1% in December — the highest poverty rate for kids in the U.S. since the end of 2020, the researchers noted. A total 12.6 million children were living below the poverty line as of last month, compared with 8.9 million in December, the study found.
An extension of the CTC was part of the Build Back Better Act, which resides in Manchin-induced carbon freeze in the Senate. Experts in child poverty did everything but hang pink neon from the Senate galleries to inform the senators that this exact thing would happen if the CTC were allowed to expire. And that the following would happen as a result.
"It's been a struggle — we have less food on the table," said Meighen Lovelace, a mom in her 40s who lives in Avon, Colorado, with her two daughters, ages 10 and 14. "I also haven't been able to get all of my daughter's medications. Some aren't covered by insurance, so we haven't been able to buy those.” She added, "And we turn our heat pretty low and sleep in our sweaters to keep the heating bill down.” Lovelace said one of her daughters' disability means she spends much of her time providing care, which limits her ability to work. The CTC checks enabled them to pay for essentials like gas, medicine and rent, but the family's financial situation is precarious since the checks ended, she said.
"It's not just the money part — it's the sense of safety and ease" of knowing when the monthly checks would arrive, Lovelace said. "When we cannot budget for it, there is a heightened sense of stress knowing that we have to find a way to pay for our basic needs.”
Joe Manchin helped do this damage to Meighen Lovelace because a) Joe Manchin is a meathead, and b) Joe Manchin claimed to be afraid that Meighen Lovelace would use her money to buy drugs, and this is not hyperbole. Or deer hunting. From ABC News:
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., privately questioned whether parents would misuse Child Tax Credit payments to buy drugs, according to three sources familiar with his comments. Sources tell ABC News Manchin detailed his concerns privately to colleagues and others on Capitol Hill in recent months…In private conversations, Manchin also said he believed paid family leave would be exploited by Americans to go hunting during deer season -- particularly in his home state of West Virginia, according to two separate sources familiar with the comments. Both remarks were first reported by the Huffington Post.
So because Joe Manchin and every damn Republican in the Senate have imbibed every wingnut cliché about poverty and poor people from the past 40 years, millions of children are back in poverty again. Somehow, Manchin’s own millions haven’t blunted his work ethic, at least when it comes to knuckling the poor.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Indians Jumping On Fire” (Mahogany Brass Band): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1935, is the Song of the Harvesters in Ukraine. This is two years after the end of the Russian-engineered famine that killed millions of people, so all that yammering at the beginning about fields of corn and vast pasturelands is…ah…riven with non-facts. History is so cool, but gaslighting, even ancient gaslighting, is not.
I do not miss going to CPAC every year. It was hard enough to handle before the Trump Variant lit up the prion disease afflicting conservatism generally and the GOP in particular. Now, though, with people like Nikki Haley and Mike Pence declared personae non gratae, we are left with the seeds and stems of the Trumpist hardcore. I tuned in long enough to hear Governor Kristi Noem lie about the Durham “investigation.” That was enough. I don’t need to see United States Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio publicly debase themselves again. I recall Sydney Pollack’s comeback in Tootsie, when Dustin Hoffman brings him a play about people who moved back to Love Canal.
Nobody wants to pay $20 to see people living next to chemical waste. They can see that in New Jersey.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, BBC? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
If even they would leave us, it could’ve been in springtime.
Ms During has just published her analysis of fossil paddlefish and sturgeon at a site called Tanis in North Dakota, US. These investigations suggest very strongly that the fish died in springtime. If you haven't yet heard of Tanis, you're going to - a lot - over the next few years. It's the place that records in extraordinary detail not just the day 66 million years ago that a 12km-wide asteroid slammed down on the planet, but the minutes and hours that followed the catastrophic impact.
The giant space rock actually struck Earth in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, some 3,000km away from Tanis, but such was the energy imparted in the event, its devastation was felt far and wide. The North Dakota fossil site holds the remains of fish hurled on to land and buried in sediment by waves of water set in train by unimaginable earth tremors. The fish have particles stuck in their gills. These are the spherules of molten rock kicked out from the impact to then rain down across the planet.
Fish blowing into North Dakota from the Caribbean? That was a bad day. They could have died more easily considering how happy they make us now.
I’ll be back on Monday with the latest from the land war in Europe. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, wear the damn mask, and take the damn shots, especially the damn boosters. And spare a thought for the people of Ukraine, who just want to govern themselves.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
