“Raising children in the US on a low income is already incredibly difficult, and parents have limited support from social safety net programs. Single parents, teen parents, and families of color face particular disadvantages; states with high Black populations tend to have the weakest social assistance programs, and welfare work requirements can trap parents in low-paying jobs. Cash welfare benefits through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which provides cash payments and other services to low-income families with children, are often insufficient to cover child care expenses. Nationwide, the average monthly payment is less than $500, well below the poverty line and half the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment as of 2021.
And seeking out help comes with its disadvantages. Poverty is considered a contributing risk factor for child neglect, which makes up the majority of Child Protective Services reports. And as such, CPS continues to scrutinize low-income families for neglect at a much higher rate than those who are above the poverty line, even when the resulting investigations can be harmful rather than helpful to vulnerable families. While child poverty rates have fallen, especially since the 2020 child tax credit expansion, 12 million children still lived below the poverty line as of 2022, and the system meant to help them is falling short. When foster kids age out of the system, they face higher rates of homelessness and incarceration and an increased likelihood of becoming teen parents when compared with the general population.
After the Dobbs verdict, 24 states are in the process of banning or heavily restricting abortion access, and these laws will hit hardest for low-income families and young, single, or Black parents, who are less able to travel to access abortion care. These states, mainly in the South and Midwest, already have disproportionately bad maternal and child health outcomes, with higher rates of maternal death and low birth weight infants. To make matters worse, women denied an abortion end up at even higher risk of poverty — and the abortion bans are mostly in states with limited and shrinking social safety net programs.”
“For more than two years, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has pursued an increasingly aggressive approach to the border, sending thousands of National Guard troops and police officers to patrol the Rio Grande and testing the legal limits of state action on immigration.
But in recent weeks, Texas law enforcement officials have taken those tactics much further, embarking on what the state has called a “hold-the-line” operation, according to interviews with state officials and documents reviewed by The New York Times. They have fortified the riverbanks with additional concertina wire, denied water to some migrants, shouted at others to return to Mexico and, in some cases, deliberately failed to alert federal Border Patrol agents who might assist arriving groups in coming ashore and making asylum claims, the review found.
The increasingly brutal, go-it-alone approach has alarmed people inside the U.S. Border Patrol and the Texas Department of Public Safety, the agency chiefly responsible for pursuing the governor’s border policies. Several Texas officers have lodged internal complaints and voiced opposition.”
“The government legislation that both companies are protesting is called the Online News Act, or C-18. The intention is to give the long-suffering journalism industry a little cash boost, likely at the expense of two companies that are partially responsible for its woes. It accomplishes this by compelling them to pay Canadian news outlets if they host links to their content. (Fenlon’s employer, which is a public broadcaster, officially supports the Online News Act.) That’s why Meta and Google are threatening to remove news links for all Canadian users, permanently, if the law applies to them when it takes effect, likely by the end of this year.”
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“The new Canadian law is modeled on a controversial Australian law, the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which went into effect in 2021. Google and Meta’s responses to that law were similar threats to pull links, but both companies ended up making payments to some news organizations. The Australian government estimates that news outlets got AU$200 million, although it doesn’t know that for sure — nor does it know how that money was distributed — because the companies were allowed to keep those figures private. Even so, other countries, like Canada, likely assumed they’d get similar results with similar laws and were less apt to take Google and Meta’s threats seriously.
If you’re Google and Meta, this may not seem fair. Links are meant to drive people to websites, right? News sites are getting traffic through those links they otherwise may not have gotten, and the platform loses eyeballs when people click away from it. Meta contends that it doesn’t even post the links in the first place; its users, including the outlets themselves, do that. In the eyes of Google and Meta, they’re doing news sites a favor. And, Meta has said, news content is a very small draw for its users. If the companies don’t really need news links to attract users, why should they be forced to pay for them and be subject to government regulation, something they want to avoid at all costs?”
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“In the eyes of the law’s supporters, however, Google and Meta’s business models have taken a lot away from journalism, and this “link tax” is the least they can do to pay some of that back. And, yes, the internet has decimated the journalism industry. One way is digital ad revenues: They’re a fraction of what news outlets commanded for their print and broadcast products, and that already smaller sum is reduced even further because online advertising companies — an industry dominated by Meta and Google — take a cut of it for themselves. One oft-cited statistic has Google and Meta getting 80 percent of online advertising revenue in the country. While Google and Meta have programs that pay news companies, including in Canada, they’re not legally required to do it, they can pick and choose who and what to support (and, by extension, who and what not to support), and they can change the terms whenever they want. Meta, for example, ended an emerging journalists fellowship program in Canada in response to C-18’s passage. The Online News Act is meant to ensure that even the smallest publications get something and that the DNIs have to pay at all. The Canadian government estimates the law will generate about CA$330 million a year for its news outlets.
But that’s all if there are links to Canadian news outlets on those platforms in the first place, which brings us to the current game of chicken between the Canadian government and Big Tech — and the yawning gaps on the news feeds of people like Fenlon and Krichel.”