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food aid
How States and Cities Can Take Care of Those Left Behind by the GOP’s Big Ugly Bill
With Trump and Congress turning their backs on American families, states have to rise to the moment.
Aug 18, 2025
The new tax law US President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans passed this summer drastically reduces taxes on the wealthiest, slashes essential spending, and adds over $4 trillion to the deficit over a decade.
The law weakens healthcare and food assistance more than any legislation in history. Combined with tax cuts that give a whopping $1 trillion to the richest 1%, no law has ever done so much to enrich the wealthy while hurting those of modest income.
What does it mean for your state and community? For starters, states will lose billions in federal funding for healthcare, food, and other necessities.
Federal funds provided more than 1 of every 3 dollars that states spent last year—and much more in places like Mississippi, Indiana, and South Dakota. In Louisiana, federal aid delivers fully half of state spending. But we’re likely to see layoffs of federal employees in every state—and potentially of state and local employees whose paychecks rely on federal dollars, too.
All in all, this law will leave our communities sicker, less educated, and less safe.
For families, it means less access to the basics.
Hospitals and nonprofits (like food banks) depend on federal funding and will reduce staff at best and shutter at worst. More than 300 rural hospitals face likely elimination. And because of Trump’s healthcare cuts, more than 50,000 Americans will die early every single year.
In addition to these cuts, Trump has also illegally withheld congressionally authorized funding for healthcare, Head Start, child care, disease control, disability services, and more, causing crises at organizations nationwide.
Funding is also getting cut for community colleges, four-year universities, financial aid, loans, and first-generation students. This will block access to degrees for working class kids coast to coast.
Federal emergency funding, long the bedrock of state response to floods, hurricanes, and other disasters, is also on the chopping block—meaning more devastation, less recovery, and billions in costs shifted to states. Transportation projects will stall too, harming commuters and construction jobs.
All in all, this law will leave our communities sicker, less educated, and less safe.
Only the federal government can raise sufficient funds from those most able to pay and distribute them to poorer states like Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia, who have less capacity to raise dollars locally.
But policymakers can fill some of the gap with improved state and local taxation. With Trump and Congress turning their backs on American families, states have to rise to the moment.
States have many options.
They can raise more by bolstering income taxes on the wealthiest—policies that have won recently in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Minnesota. They can also tax income from wealth by improving capital gains income taxation. Washington, Maryland, Minnesota, and New Mexico have passed such reforms recently.
And they can stop corporations from hiding profits in other states, as most states now do, or in other countries, something innovators are increasingly proposing.
Localities have options too: enacting mansion taxes, as cities in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, and New York have done, and passing local income taxes as thousands of communities in Ohio, Indiana, and 13 other states do. At the very least, local policymakers could rein in costly corporate tax breaks that shortchange schools.
Tax dollars pay for essentials that make America healthy, educated, and safe. If Trump and his allies slash those fundamentals to enrich the richest, we must insist that states and cities get creative in taking care of the rest of us.
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Israeli Troops Gun Down 30+ Palestinians in Yet Another Food Aid Massacre
One witness said Israeli forces opened fire indiscriminately at Palestinians seeking food aid near a hub operated by the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
Jul 19, 2025
Israeli forces on Saturday opened fire on Palestinians seeking food aid in the besieged Gaza Strip, killing more than 30 people as the manufactured hunger emergency in the enclave intensifies.
The Associated Press reported that the massacre "occurred near hubs operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation," which the United Nations and aid organizations have described as death traps.
GHF, a private entity backed by the U.S. and Israel, attempted to distance itself from Saturday's killings, saying in a statement that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shooting took place "hours before our sites opened."
But CNN noted that Gazans have said they "have to travel to distribution points several hours before they open to have a chance of receiving aid."
One witness, Mahmoud Mokeimar, said he was traveling with a large number of people toward the GHF aid hub in Khan Younis early Saturday morning when Israeli forces "opened fire at us indiscriminately."
The entire population of the Gaza Strip is in the grip of an increasingly devastating hunger crisis under Israel's blockade, pushing the enclave's desperate residents to travel to the GHF aid sites in the hope of obtaining food—even if it means risking their lives.
"Bread is what drives me to risk death. There's no alternative," said one Palestinian man who was recently shot in the leg by Israeli forces. "Has the world failed to provide a safe channel for aid delivery?"
The U.N. Human Rights Office estimates that Israeli forces have killed more than 870 Palestinians seeking food aid since late May.
The World Food Program said Friday that nearly a third of Gazans are "not eating for days at a time" and "thousands of people are on the verge of catastrophic hunger."
"WFP continues to call for an immediate and sustained cease-fire, and safe, unhindered access to reach all those in need," the organization added.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) echoed that call on Saturday, writing on social media that it "has enough food for the entire population of Gaza for over three months stockpiled in warehouses—including this one in Al Arish, Egypt–awaiting entry."
"The supplies are available," UNRWA said. "The systems are in place. Open the gates, lift the siege, allow UNRWA to do its work and help people in need, among them 1 million children."
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5 Facts That Show the Enormity of US Inequality
Well-off Americans have quietly conspired for over 40 years to transfer the riches to themselves, leading to a state of inequality that leaves the entire bottom half of our country with only about 2.5% of total national wealth.
Jul 12, 2025
The Trump administration wants us to believe that lower-income Americans, especially Medicaid recipients, are the biggest drain on the country's wealth. That couldn't be further from the truth.
Well-positioned Americans have quietly conspired for over 40 years to transfer the riches to themselves, leading to a state of inequality that leaves the entire bottom half of our country with only about 2.5% of total national wealth.
Whatever wealth exists among America's poor should not be taken away because of some ignorant prejudice of the rich. Following are some of the insidious effects of greed and blame-passing.
1. The Richest 1% Have Transferred a Third of America's Wealth From the Bottom 90% to Themselves
A Time report, referring to a Rand study, estimated that "the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality... crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020."
To put $50 trillion in perspective, total U.S. wealth at the end of 2023 was about $150 trillion.
Elon Musk is leading the prospective trillionaires with over $400 billion at the end of June, 2025.
Yet with all this wealth rising to the top, American billionaires, according to economist Gabriel Zucman, have an effective tax rate of 8%.
2. Taxes Owed on Decades of Stock Market Gains Will Be Wiped Out When the Rich Kids Inherit the Wealth
In a blatant example of a system exploited by the wealthy, the tax code includes a so-called stepped-up provision which allows the super-rich to leave much of their multi-trillion-dollar stock market fortunes to their children with all the accumulated gains magically erased, and thus, in many instances, without a single dollar in taxes coming due.
It is estimated that by the middle of this century anywhere from $84 to $124 trillion in assets will be transferred to heirs, much of which will qualify for the tax-free stepped-up provision. So much for our meritocracy.
3. The Richest 1% Have Enough Money to Buy Almost ALL the Houses in America
A Redfin report explains: "The combined value of nearly 100 million U.S. homes reached $49.7 trillion at the end of 2024, while the combined net worth of America's wealthiest 1% has grown to a record $49.2 trillion."
4. The World's Richest 1% (40% of Whom are Americans) Emit as Much Pollution as Two-Thirds of Humanity
Oxfam summarizes: "The richest 1% of the world's population produced as much carbon pollution in 2019 than the 5 billion people who made up the poorest two-thirds of humanity."
5. The Poor Are Being Systematically Diminished
After 40 years of growing inequality, the "Big Beautiful Bill" is about to make it even worse.
Almost 12 million Americans are expected to lose healthcare coverage with the trillion-dollar Medicaid cuts. Major health research cuts are planned for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Most damaging could be the impact on the kids. Even though nearly 1 out of 5 households with children in America experiences food insecurity, the administration is cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by a quarter-trillion dollars over the next decade. A Propublica report states: "The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don't die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse.."
And at a time when young students are struggling to deal with the pressures of a social networking society, the administration is cutting over a $1 billion in youth mental health funding.
The poor seem to have nowhere to turn. A Vera report explains: "Almost every state has at least one law that bans activities people experiencing homelessness engage in simply to survive. Laws that prohibit panhandling, loitering, living in vehicles, or sharing food and water in public spaces all discriminate against people experiencing homelessness, as authorities eject them from public spaces, confiscate and destroy their property, and transport them to mass shelters and jails."
The Republican Response
U.S. Vice President JD Vance shrugged off the "minutiae of the Medicaid policy." President Donald Trump agreed that Republicans were "not doing any cutting of anything meaningful."
But just in case the cuts turn out to be meaningful for Americans, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) assures us that they'll "get over it."
In Trump's world of wealth and status, tolerance for poor Americans has turned into an ugly sense of disdain.
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