Latest news with #SNAP
Daily Mirror
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
Donald Trump 'moaned about White House computers blocking adult films'
Anthony Scaramucci, who was Donald Trump's director of communications for 11 days in 2017, claimed the US president complained he couldn't watch porn in the White House Donald Trump moaned about White House computers blocking porn, his former director of communications has claimed. Anthony Scaramucci worked with the US president during his first term in the White House but his stint as White House communications director lasted only 11 days before he was fired. Since then, he has been critical of Trump, voicing his support for Joe Biden and for Kamala Harris in the 2020 and 2024 elections respectively. Now the financier has claimed Trump complained to him that he couldn't watch X-rated films because computers at the White House blocked them. It isn't the first time this claim has emerged as back in 2018 Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski alleged a source told her the US president was frustrated with life in the White House as he couldn't watch porn. She made the comments while appearing on MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle seven years ago, to talk to Stormy Daniels ' attorney Michael Avenatti. The former adult actress claimed she had sex with Trump while he was married in 2006, just months after the birth of his youngest son, Barron. Their alleged affair was at the centre of Trump's hush-money trial in New York, during which he became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes. A jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to Ms Daniels who said the two had sex. When Ms Daniels made the allegations, Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Ms Daniels didn't have credibility and didn't deserve "respect" because she was a sex worker. "I respect women - beautiful women and women with value - but a woman who sells her body for sexual exploitation I don't respect," said Giuliani. "Someone who sells his or her body for money has no good name." In response, a lawyer for Ms Daniels, who sued Trump for defamation - but lost the case - called Giuliani "an absolute pig". The comments were the topic of discussion on MSNBC in June 2018 and Ms Brzezinski called out the "hypocrisy" while mentioning the allegations about Trump complaining about computers blocking porn. She said: "The hypocrisy is astounding. Because I know someone who spoke to Donald Trump recently about life in the White House, and Donald Trump's biggest complaint was that he's not allowed to watch porn in the White House. So there you go, there's a little bit of news for you. He's upset, he's upset that he can't watch porn in the White House." The claims, now repeated by Scaramucci, emerged after Trump's "big, beautiful bill" passed this week. Supporters of the bill, predominantly Republicans, are championing the tax reductions as a bulwark against tax increases for families and a catalyst for economic expansion. They assert their commitment to recalibrating welfare programmes such as SNAP, Medicare, and Medicaid to better serve their original target groups – expectant mothers, the disabled, and children – while simultaneously eliminating what they describe as rampant inefficiencies and corruption. The bill's passage marked a significant achievement for the president and it is set to become a defining feature of Trump's second administration while it is testament to his strength, with Republicans holding majority control over both the House and the Senate, as well as the Executive Branch. Even the Supreme Court majority leans conservative. The bill essentially overturns Democratic policies from Trump's predecessors. It fundamentally rejects the agendas of the previous two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. It chips away at the Medicaid expansion of Obama's Affordable Care Act and rolls back Biden's climate strategies in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Axios
18 hours ago
- Business
- Axios
An increasing share of American adults are going hungry
More Americans are going hungry, per new data from Morning Consult. The big picture: It's a shocking data point for the wealthiest country in the world, and comes at a time when the stock market is hitting record highs and President Trump just signed a bill slashing food benefits. The rise is like a slow-moving train wreck, says John Leer, chief economist at Morning Consult. "There's such a disconnect now between record highs on Wall Street and elevated levels of food insecurity." Zoom in: The share of adults who tell Morning Consult in monthly surveys that they sometimes or often don't have enough to eat — or are food insecure — has been creeping up over the past several years. In May, 15.6% of adults were food insecure, almost double the rate in 2021. At that time Congress had beefed up SNAP benefits and expanded the Child Tax Credit driving down poverty rates, and giving people more money for food. Zoom out: The rate appears higher than pre-pandemic levels. Morning Consult's data only goes back to 2021. However, federal data that measures food insecurity, and roughly lines up with Morning Consult's findings, shows the numbers were already above pro-COVID levels back in 2023. Demand for food is up 120% from three years ago at the Philadelphia-area food bank network where George Matysik is executive director. As soon as the government support pulled back in 2022, "we started to see the numbers go up," says Matysik, who is with the Share Food Network, which serves hundreds of thousands of people. Demand just continued to rise from there, along with grocery prices. Between the lines: Congress just passed a huge cut to food benefits, or SNAP, that is likely to make the situation far worse, says Matycik. The "big, beautiful bill" pushes states to provide more funding for SNAP, and tightens work requirements for benefits. Before, adults over age 54 weren't required to work; now the age limit is 64. And fewer parents are exempted from working, as well. It's expected that millions will lose benefits, and more would receive less. People will have less money for food, further driving folks to food banks, which had already been dealing with different spending cuts from the White House. Reality check: Some of the cuts to SNAP, involving state funding, don't take effect until 2028 — raising the possibility that they might not happen. The data also looks a bit volatile, bouncing around quite a bit — it spiked at the end of 2024, and it's not clear why. It is likely a reflection of how precarious it is to make ends meet for folks at the lower end of the wage scale — some are in hourly jobs with fluctuating schedules, which can be rough on one's personal finances. The other side: The White House and congressional Republicans argue that cuts to these benefits are a way to push more people into the labor market and reduce dependence on government assistance, as well as an effort to reduce waste, fraud and abuse.
Politico
19 hours ago
- Business
- Politico
‘We're the frontline of defense': Food banks grapple with megabill's impact
'Solving rural hunger is, by definition, much more expensive because you're moving smaller quantities of food over much longer distances to serve smaller populations,' said Vince Hall, chief government relations officer at Feeding America, the nation's largest network of food banks. Republicans have defended the cuts, arguing that the government needs to put its proverbial fiscal house in order and rid federal safety net programs of waste and fraud. They've pointed to high SNAP payment error rates, which measure how accurately states calculate food aid eligibility and benefits for households, as a prime example. 'The status quo, slap on the wrist penalties from USDA have failed at maintaining program integrity in SNAP,' House and Senate Agriculture committee chairs G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.) and John Boozman (R-Ark.) said in a statement earlier this week. '[The megabill's] historic reforms will give states skin in the game on SNAP benefits and ensure they have a real incentive to improve oversight and stop improper payments before they happen.' While some of Republicans' changes to SNAP and Medicaid won't take effect until fiscal year 2027, food banks are expecting to see increased numbers in their lines later this year, according to Hall. For example, the megabill's expanded work requirements for SNAP participants could take effect as soon as this year, potentially kicking some families out of the program within months. SNAP-Ed, a program that provides funding to food banks for nutrition education like cooking classes and tips for how to stretch a grocery budget, will also be cut. At Feeding America West Michigan, president Kenneth Estelle says his organization is launching a major fundraising campaign in August, anticipating even higher demand prompted by SNAP cuts. Share Food Program's George Matysik said he's working closely with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to increase state resources for food banks. For example, Shapiro's budget, which the state legislature hasn't yet passed, proposes an additional $8 million for local food purchasing and emergency food assistance. 'We're the frontline of defense because there's nowhere to go for free utilities or free rent but you can get free food from your local food shelf,' said Zach Rodvold, director of public affairs at Second Harvest Heartland, a food bank in Minnesota, which recently approved a new program for food banks. It's not entirely clear all the ways in which different pieces of the megabill will interact with each other, but many anti-hunger advocates say they fear the number of people kicked out of programs like Medicaid and SNAP could be even higher than currently estimated.
Express Tribune
a day ago
- Business
- Express Tribune
The big cruel ‘beauty' of Trump's bill
In a cruel twist of irony, America's Independence Day is being celebrated with the largest upward transfer of wealth in the country's history. By signing the so-called 'Big Beautiful Bill' into law on July 4, President Donald Trump has turned Robin Hood into a bogeyman – and made the rich the rightful folk heroes. With the sweeping tax-and-spending package, Trump has unleashed a legislative juggernaut that brings Karl Marx's warning into brutal focus: 'Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery at the opposite pole.' The bill robs the bottom 90 per cent of Americans of around $700 per household, while funnelling over $6,000 into the pockets of the wealthiest fifth, engineering misery on an industrial scale. With Yale's Budget Lab and the Congressional Budget Office projecting a $3.4 trillion hole in the federal budget over the next decade – before counting interest – it is an ideological project in plutocratic redistribution. In a staged heist against the social safety net, Medicaid, SNAP, clean energy credits and even lifesaving foreign aid are set to become collateral damage in a grand design to enrich the few and abandon the rest. It is a dagger at the heart of America's social contract. Or, in Bernie Sanders' remarks on the floor of the Senate: 'It is the most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.' 'It is a gift to the billionaire class, while causing massive pain for low-income and working-class Americans. Actually though, M. President, I'm wrong. This is not a gift to the billionaire class. They paid for it,' he quipped. In Arkansas alone, more than 100,000 people stand to lose their Medicaid coverage. Food stamp recipients will now face stiffer work requirements, a bitter irony at a time when grocery bills are soaring and rural job markets remain fragile. Across the country, the implications are chilling. Already struggling rural hospitals may face accelerated shutdowns. Families living paycheck to paycheck will be squeezed even harder. At the same time, tax cuts for billionaires are made permanent, fossil fuel subsidies are revived with a vengeance and the deficit balloons by an additional $3.5 trillion. Who wins and who loses? Independent analyses from the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) show that the bill will kick 16 million people off their health insurance, gut nutrition programmes and make college even harder to afford — all to bankroll massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The bill adds a whopping $3 trillion to the national debt, setting the stage for long-term economic drag and a grim inheritance for younger generations. Households making under $23,000 will lose around $1,600 annually, mostly from Medicaid and SNAP cuts, nearly 4% of their total income. Families earning under $55,000 a year will see a net loss in resources. Meanwhile, the middle class gets table scraps, a meagre 0.5–0.8% gain, barely enough to offset rising living costs. At the top, it's raining gold. Households making over $700,000 will gain $12,000 a year, not counting estate tax windfalls. Meanwhile, the top 10% rake in 68% of the bill's total benefits. Those earning over $500,000 will receive a $168 billion tax cut in 2027 alone while people making over $1 million will see a $93.6 billion tax windfall that same year. For the lowest earners, the pain is twofold: many will actually see tax increases, with those making less than $15,000 a year facing a 12% hike in 2027, ballooning to 73% by 2033 once temporary credits expire. Even crueller than the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the grandly-titled bill doles out nearly double the tax break to millionaires while stripping aid from those who need it most. In fact, TCJA at least gave modest cuts to low-income earners, but the "beauty" of Trump's latest attack lies in its spectacular theft. Generational theft The long-term hit is generational. Penn Wharton's model finds that a 40-year-old median-income earner will lose $7,500 over a lifetime under the bill. However, a 70-year-old with the same income will be $17,500 richer. In other words, the American Dream has been restructured into a senior savings plan, just hang in there till retirement and hope capitalism does not kill you first. For the young, the pursuit of happiness now comes with a warning label: not applicable during your lifetime. In a nutshell, the bill is a ledger of who matters and who does not in Trump's America. The arithmetic is brutally simple: if you're a CEO, hedge fund manager or a defence contractor, your stock just went up. However, if you are a working-class parent, a disabled veteran, a retiree or a single mother in rural Arkansas, you're collateral damage in a cynical calculation. While older, higher-income Americans stand to gain in the short term through generous tax breaks, younger workers and future generations are left footing the bill, both figuratively and literally. Because younger earners are typically in lower tax brackets, they benefit the least from income tax cuts. At the same time, they are disproportionately exposed to deep cuts in Medicaid and student aid — two critical lifelines for young families and students. Medicaid now covers four in ten hospital births in the US, meaning today's cuts are tomorrow's childhood health crises. As Jessica Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute puts it, even from the right: 'In the short term, the benefits are certainly tilted towards higher earners, which is often a good proxy for age.' However, the heaviest blow comes in the form of long-term debt. The bill adds $3 trillion to the national debt, which economists predict will push interest rates higher and eat away at future federal budgets, squeezing out investment in education, infrastructure and social services. 'There is an obvious intergenerational transfer here,' says John Ricco of the Yale Budget Lab, which estimates that by 2055, when today's newborns turn 30, the average annual mortgage will cost $4,000 more because of the bill's impact on interest rates. 'Making America white again' Moreover, the bill's border provisions read like the fevered dreams of a security‑state lobbyist. ICE's budget balloons by an order of magnitude, rippling from roughly $10 billion today to over $100 billion in a few short years. Funding for walls, detention facilities and mass deportations soars, reflecting a dark fusion of nationalist spectacle and capitalist discipline. Immigrants, refugees and asylum‑seekers become pawns in a broader project of social control, as the state draws lines in sand and steel across its own land. The Pentagon budget is padded by another $150 billion, ICE gets tens of billions for deportations and even a private border-enforcement army and massive wall project are shoehorned in. In short, if $1 is cut from Medicaid, $1.50 flies to police and walls. As Washington Monthly notes, the bill 'lavishes funding on ICE to raise a private army and set up detention camps'. The movement 'is primarily about… 'owning the libs,' 'Making America White Again,' and cruelty against the marginalised'. Public opinion polls tell the rest of the story: close to half of Americans – 49 per cent – oppose the Big Beautiful Bill, while only 29 per cent support it. Even within Republican ranks, fiscal hawks and swing‑district representatives bristled at the eye‑popping deficits and social carnage baked into the legislation. Three‑headed hydra of class warfare From a leftist vantage point, the Big Beautiful Bill is a three‑headed hydra of class warfare, eco‑fascism and bio‑political abandonment. It rebrands austerity as patriotism, casting the poor as 'undeserving' parasites even as it showers the wealthy with boons. By shredding Medicaid, SNAP, and foreign‑aid programs, lawmakers legislate life‑and‑death outcomes for the poor, the elderly, children abroad and immunocompromised Americans alike. Green betrayal Climate leftists see the bill as an eco‑fascist manifesto: a blueprint for resource control through environmental destruction, with the state's coercive machinery gearing up to enforce a fossil‑fuel future at gunpoint. Perhaps the ugliest manifestation of the 'beautiful bill' is in its astonishing show of capitalism's climate death drive, an embrace of catastrophe for private profit, where planetary care is too high a price to pay. The bill's architects also saw fit to annihilate the scaffolding of the clean‑energy transition. With the stroke of a pen, the EV tax credit that buoyed nascent electric‑vehicle markets vanishes, wind and solar developers find their pipeline choked off and carbon‑capture investments are relegated to the dustbin. Environmental finance specialists forecast the loss of up to 250,000 clean‑energy jobs, even as household electricity bills spike by double digits. In effect, the legislation slams on the brakes of climate progress while flooring the accelerator on fossil‑fuel extraction – an eco‑dead end if there ever was one. The bill quietly scraps much of the Biden administration's clean-energy agenda. Solar and wind tax credits are repealed, even as fossil fuel subsidies persist. Analysts warn that by punishing solar and wind generation the law will devastate energy grids in red states like Texas. The bill is an eco-political undoing: the countryside continues to flood and burn while lawmakers dismantle the very buffers — renewables, efficiency programs and green jobs – that could soften the blow. Instead of weaning us off coal and oil, Congress doubles down on drilling and emissions, casting our children as future sacrifices. The irony is cruel: at a moment of record wildfires and hurricanes, politicians fetishize fossil fuel profits. By design, the working forests and windmills of tomorrow become victims to drive short-term windfall. The bill's very 'beauty' is in its ritualised cruelty. It taps into a perverse collective glee, inviting supporters to revel in the punishment of the 'lazy' and 'undeserving,' all while the architects of the legislation themselves benefit. The broader lesson is clear: the Big Beautiful Bill is the Empire striking back (internally, on its own unwanted), wielding fiscal hammers and regulatory scalpel alike to carve out a new world order – one where the poor are expendable, the planet dispensable and the state an instrument of predatory elites. It is a monstrous legislative conflation of class warfare, climate sabotage and state violence – an apex of neoliberal authoritarianism.
CBS News
a day ago
- Business
- CBS News
Colorado food security advocates decry proposed changes to food stamp requirements and benefits
Proposed changes to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -- often referred to as SNAP or food stamps -- benefits have raised concerns among those who work to end hunger throughout Colorado. About 40 million tax-paying Americans rely on SNAP to buy groceries. New proposals would require states to cover at least 5% of benefit costs and tighten eligibility rules. Food security advocates worry that this could leave many families struggling, especially after federal cuts earlier this year. "It's real food -- no corn syrups, no dyes, things like that," said Elena Salinas, who runs A Fresh Move Colorado, a community store that prioritizes local and fresh food. Salinas, who accepts Electronic Benefit Transfer or "EBT" payments at her store, said she was once a SNAP recipient herself. "It really helped my family get through some really hard times," she said. Supporters of the proposed cuts say they would help reduce fraud. But Salinas argues there's a misconception that recipients are freeloading or lazy. Nearly half of the children who benefit from SNAP live in single-mother households. "That's the last thing you want — your children to go hungry," she said. In 2024, more than half a million Coloradans received SNAP benefits. Erika Cervantes with Hunger Free Colorado said the impact of further cuts would ripple through the economy. "This impact wouldn't just be felt by families," Cervantes said. "It'd be felt by our local economy, and especially our farmers who are growing some of that food." With less to spend, families may turn to food banks. But some federal grants that helped run those programs have already ended, leaving pantries stretched thin. "I can only imagine this would further put them at capacity," Cervantes said. Beyond selling groceries, Salinas teaches customers how to stretch their food budgets. "Storing your own food properly, making it stretch," she said. But she worries the cuts will force even more people into hunger. "People don't know the need unless they know what hunger really is," she said. Hunger Free Colorado is urging residents to call their local representatives and explain why SNAP is important to their communities. They're also encouraging donations to local food banks, regardless of whether the bill passes.
