The Twelve Days of Welfare
(Sung to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”)
On the twelfth day of welfare, the system gave to me …
no childcare service,
crooks in charge of welfare,
ten angry talk shows,
“motivation” meetings,
phony-baloney job search,
Maximus38 and workfare,
one termination,
no ben-e-fits,
a five-hour wait,
no callback,
no fo-od stamps,
and a [case]worker who never did work.
—WELFARE WARRIOR PROTEST SONG, ON EVE OF 2005 REAUTHORIZATION OF TANF, IN WELFARE WARRIORS BY PREMILLA NADASEN
“Arbeit macht frei,” which translates to “work sets you free” in English, was soldered onto the gates of multiple Nazi concentration and death camps during the World War II Holocaust. The saying was made popular by German writer Lorenz Diefenbach, who wrote a novel with this title in 1873 depicting gamblers and con artists getting “saved” through standardized work. This Prussian philosophy turned Holocaust horror has made a place in American welfare politics. It lands in places such as among clean-cut Ayn Rand aficionados like Paul Ryan and nameless trolls who write anonymous comments after a person talks about being low income in the newspaper. Those self-ascribed news commentators are usually first to anonymously shout in article comments sections, “GET A JOB!”
Even in progressive circles, one of the first recommendations for getting people out of poverty has been to help people “find work.” This is why TANF still has a primary focus on getting people to work, regardless of pay, quality, convenience, or meaning. Since the mid-2000s, progressives have started pushing for living wages and family leave. Most people who can find work were already making terrible wages and still did not have enough money for food. Conservatives stick to their party line, however, that work is the way out of poverty, without ever referencing wages or quality. In the meantime, since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been stagnating at $7.25 per hour.
Almost everyone I have spoken to who works in this system—from PhD level, to director, manager, administrator, and caseworker, knows the TANF programs do not really help. They know that the TANF grant amount is criminally low and the sole purpose of TANF is to ensure people’s compliance. Many have written about how it breaks families apart, and that the program is rooted in racism and misogyny.1
Yet the program continues.
By intentional design.
When you are successful in getting TANF benefits, you are required to do “work participation” for at least twenty hours a week if you have at least one child under age six and thirty hours if your kids are older.
Most people in the Network participate in TANF so that they can receive support to pay for childcare. But if you do not comply with the rules and regulations—let’s say you feel sick and do not show up for the work participation hours, yet still bring your child to day care—you may receive a letter in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS telling you to pay back the state for the cost. A Network member showed us the letter she received. The state took out over $80 from her biweekly TANF grant to “pay back” the state for childcare. She was expected to live on $118 for two weeks.
It gets worse. Let’s say you find a job on your own. This is what Witnesses member Esther did. Esther is a deeply thoughtful Black woman with unparalleled insight into the racial and social politics of the day. In fall 2008, she got a job as a customer service agent at Comcast without help from her TANF caseworker. Comcast offered to pay Esther $11 dollars an hour. The welfare case manager said, “Good for you, you got a job! Now since you no longer qualify for TANF, we will stop paying for your childcare.” In Pennsylvania in 2008, childcare cost over $40,000 annually. Low-wage workers can receive a subsidy to defray costs, but there is usually a long waiting list. When I knew Esther in 2008, that list in Pennsylvania was backed up to a three-year “wait.” If Esther had waited on it, her youngest daughter would be about five years old before Esther would be eligible for childcare assistance. In the meantime, Esther struggled to find affordable childcare for her daughters. Ultimately, she could not show up to her new job at Comcast because she could not find affordable childcare. So she left a moderately low-paying job and went back to the county assistance office to reapply for TANF, with the hope of getting childcare. In doing so, she was forced to go to a lesser-wage job and begin, again, hoarding receipts.
Others participating in TANF know about this dragnet. So despite getting offered a better job, they will not take it. Because if they do accept a higher-paying job, they will be hungrier than they were before. This phenomenon is known as the cliff effect. A person receives supports to make it out of poverty. But once they start earning, the money and other supports that help people stay afloat disappear. And they are worse off than they were before.2
Notice the weaponization of one’s children. TANF will pay for your childcare only if you take a lower-paying job with companies with which the state has contracts. Paid childcare lures parents into compliance. It also bolsters the profits of employers that refuse to pay living wages.
This dynamic is the invisible twin of previous iterations of child separation and state-sanctioned family abuse. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, African American and Indigenous women were told by state caseworkers and doctors to get sterilized to continue to receive welfare. Or they were sterilized without their consent. The sterilization of Black, Indigenous, and Puerto Rican women continued up through the 1980s.3
Shadows of this dynamic continue. Several states still have what is called a “family cap.” This means that if a mother has another child while participating in welfare, even as their costs increase, the size of the TANF grant does not. This pushes them and their family deeper into poverty.
Joanna’s experience reveals the pathology of TANF. She was living in that house you read about in chapter 1. She was receiving SNAP and TANF. Joanna used her camera to take a picture of bus tokens, and another photo of two large stacks of papers and folders.
These, Mariana, are my two sad little tokens.
I had to sell my last tokens for cash
because I didn’t have enough money to feed my kids.
But then I had no way of getting to the welfare office to file their papers.
Now I am afraid they will cut me off
for not showing up.
Joanna explained she was quite depressed. She hated her “community service” job filing people’s records. For her, the photo, which consisted of the stacks of folders, was a metaphor for her poor mental health and desperate situation.
She had no money and was forced into making this trade-off: selling her tokens for a few dollars in order to feed her kids in the moment versus hanging on to the tokens and letting her kids go hungry, so she could then go to her mandated community service and receive a TANF payment weeks later. She gave me the common refrain that many members of Witnesses gave: “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
The state wants to make you work but not succeed. If you succeeded, who would line up for the next poor-paying job?
The “welfare” compliance machine holds you down, chains you up, separates you from your children, or forces you into compliance for fear of losing your children. In other words, it is the prison-industrial complex for mothers and children.
State administrators explain this differently. They are eager to get people off TANF and to stay off TANF because the state gets a “caseload reduction credit,” and therefore can draw down more federal funds or be released from some reporting requirements. These are contradictory goals within the system itself. It needs TANF recipients to demonstrate the state succeeded in getting people employed, yet it wants people off the rolls. State administrators interpret this as simply making people go away.
For several years in Pennsylvania, caseworkers were not allowed to provide TANF on the spot if a person was deemed eligible. Instead, caseworkers were obligated to send people away from the county assistance office for three weeks to find a job on their own. This is called diversion. If a person still needed money to live after three weeks and had proof that they looked for jobs, only then were they allowed to get support. This cut down on the number of people the state counted and contributed to the state’s bottom line for TANF dollars. Among Pennsylvania public assistance workers, there were millions of dollars that the state set aside from TANF for emergency funding, yet much of those funds were unused. They were not alone. A recent report from ProPublica found that states such as Hawaii, Tennessee, and Maine were hoarding TANF dollars in the state coffers. The full total withheld from families in poverty as of 2020—yes, during the pandemic—was $5.2 billion.4
From most TANF participant’s perspectives, the systems in place are intended to frustrate and befuddle. For instance, to stay compliant, you have to rely on caseworkers who, most of the time, never pick up the phone.
Mariah, a Black member of Witnesses and mother of one-year-old twins, wanted to go back to school so she could get a higher-paying job. She showed us a childcare support flyer, which stated, “You qualify for childcare subsidies!” in about fifteen languages including Vietnamese, Russian, Mandarin, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Cambodian. But when she called to ask about access to childcare, they said she could only get on the waiting list and there was no guarantee that anything would open up soon, even though she explained that she was planning on matriculating at Philadelphia Community College the following week. They could not give her the name of one childcare provider near her home or school.
The requirement for paperwork, lost paperwork, mean caseworkers, and inability and unwillingness of the state to adapt to the reality of people’s lives is a form of sabotage. Let us consider the CIA Sabotage Manual. Back in the 1940s, the Central Intelligence Agency distributed this manual among operatives in areas that were occupied by allied Germany to get regular organizations and companies to undermine Nazis and their friends. Simple sabotage is a way to frustrate and undermine the “enemy.” It is something that any ordinary citizen can do. Here are some forms of sabotage:
In relation to TANF, people with low incomes are the enemy of the state. This is why we have such robust legal services for the poor in some areas because the state is constantly inflicting bureaucratic frustrations on people who have much better things to do with their time and potential.
This is also why many refuse to participate. Nationwide, TANF serves only 30 percent of those eligible. Some call this the “TANF misery index,” which consists of eligible people who do not receive TANF.6 Participation rates vary by state. States with the highest population of people who are Black are far less likely to be serving the majority of TANF-eligible people. Alabama only serves 8 percent of its eligible population, and Louisiana and Arkansas just about 4 percent. Each of these states has a high percentage of Black people living in poverty. On the other hand, Vermont, which has a high population of white people living in poverty, serves 54 percent.7 Back in 1995–1996 (pre-PRWORA), most states served at least 80 percent of the eligible population. Either way, people in poverty are frustrated by the system, and the vast majority do not have access to a comprehensive, well-designed system that can help them stay afloat to meet their basic needs. The ongoing racism and misogyny in TANF is apparent at every turn. Many scholars have written of TANF’s history along with the ongoing degradations of Black families through racialized political rhetoric on welfare, punitive policies, and low grant amounts.8
The decline in TANF participation and TANF grant amounts has resulted in a substantial increase in the number of children, especially children of color, who are suffering and stuck in deep poverty.9
As if keeping people off TANF, frustrating them, or kicking them off TANF were not enough, let us say you succeed in hanging on and getting TANF dollars. Once you are in the TANF and SNAP electronic systems, you are discouraged and often blocked from participating in the financial mainstream. Each state has its own way of referring to an EBT. The EBT card is like a cement wall between people experiencing poverty and the rest of society.
EBT does not attach to a bank account, and it houses SNAP and TANF dollars. In some states, it also includes funds for WIC-approved foods. SNAP and WIC benefits can only be redeemed at an authorized grocery store; TANF benefits are undesignated money.
Let’s say you need real paper cash, perhaps to pay your landlord. So you go to a bank machine and take out cash. You get charged a bank fee—somewhere between $0.50 to $1.50. Who gets that money? JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Citibank do, depending on which company successfully negotiated for the state contract to run your state EBT program.
Again, the EBT is not money in the bank. It acts like a credit card but comes with none of the benefits, and you certainly cannot use Venmo or CASHApp because EBT is its own system. EBT is a handy way for JPMorgan and Wells Fargo to capitalize off people who are low income with state help. The banks get a cut both ways: via money from the state to run the system and a cut out of people’s extremely low wages at the ATM machine. In the meantime, you cannot build your credit, build up a savings account, or have access to conventional banking activities with these funds.
Add to the ongoing racism and misogyny in the TANF system, and the very fabric of TANF and SNAP contribute to everyday financial apartheid.
It’s 2009. Put yourself in Maria’s worn-out pink sneakers. You are desperate to move out of your abusive mother’s home and get out of the basement where she makes you sleep with your two toddlers, aged ten months and two and a half. The roof and the walls are leaking, and you would like to move out before the next big rain comes so you can get your life out of plastic bags and breathe fresh air again.
But a market rent apartment in Philadelphia is $750. Additionally, you need first and last month’s rent or at least a security deposit. So you need $1,500 up front. The current Pennsylvania TANF asset limit of $1,000 (what a person can have in a savings account) makes it impossible for you to build up savings, pay a deposit, and get out of your situation. So you are stuck in the basement. You could hide a little extra money you earned from cleaning houses or selling your things right from the inside of your plastic bag. Or you could put it under your mattress—not so safe. Or in your bra—never safe.
It was Friday night at about 7:00 on a summer evening. It was still light out, and I was drawing a bath for my kids. The phone rang. It was Maria.
Mariana. I need help.
I went to the ATM to get out my rent money,
and my boyfriend [the father of her two toddlers]
was following me,
and he beat me up,
broke my ribs,
and took all of my money.
She had just taken out a few months’ worth of her TANF benefits from the EBT card that she somehow managed save. She put $750 in her bra so she could pay her new landlord. Her boyfriend found her, grabbed her, and you know the rest.
Here’s another. When I paid Carla $50 cash for an extra-long interview, she smiled and said, “Thanks!” She took the money out of the envelope, put it in her bra, and told me, “I’m putting this in my bank.”
Me: Please tell me you have a bank account.
Carla: Yes. (She pats her breast.) Right here, Mariana. This is my bank.
Me: Why don’t you have a bank account?
Carla: ’Cause I don’t want welfare to see it.
Her welfare caseworker would consider that $50 to be reportable income, which would then trigger a reduction in her TANF check.
While it is unlikely that a caseworker would ask to see a bank account statement, most people I met would never want to get into a situation in which they would be asked to show a bank account, much less have to report such a paltry sum of $50. But anything over $25 must be reported to welfare, otherwise it is considered “fraud.” Such a designation turns a mother who is struggling to feed their kids into a common criminal.
You might find this hard to believe. It’s beyond reason, but it’s the truth. We know this is the way it works because my team and I have worked within the TANF system with the Building Wealth and Health Network. Once we got a contract to run the Network in the TANF system, the state would not let us pay more than $25 per research interview. The state staff told us to keep our “gift” incentive amounts small. Because once it was over $25, we would be forced to account for it in an endless stream of paperwork. The member would have to hoard the receipt. The state would also have to account for it, demanding more paperwork.
This financial and social sabotage is why so many people we work with started their side hustles. Carla would buy food with SNAP and make dinners to sell from her porch. Shandra, a brilliant Black woman entrepreneur, did hair and nails for other people’s children. It is no wonder she was popular among her neighbors. She was gorgeous and talented with her hands, which always had nails perfectly manicured. Prom weekend was a windfall; she could earn almost $200. To make a little bit of cash for necessities, Joanna would crochet, bake, and sell crafts for ridiculously small amounts.
In the Building Wealth and Health Network, we knew that more than half the members worked under the table. How many reported this paltry sporadic income to their caseworker? Less than half. Does this mean they were slumming the system? Surely not. The amount of occasional extra money is no more than $100 to $200. Remember, people in the system are simply trying to feed their families and buy diapers, tampons, sneakers, or a coat. If they have to, they will sell their tokens.
Another way to forcibly move people into the workforce is to provide the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The EITC is a tax credit that, at tax time, is offered to people who work low-wage jobs. Because their wages are appallingly low, millions of people on TANF and SNAP are eligible for the EITC.
Shirley explained the inanity of this system through one of her photographs. It is a photo of six women dressed in white with graduation caps with tassels. Each woman is holding at least one baby under the age of two, and there are a few other children standing with them. They had participated in a TANF-funded program to get certified for work in medical billing.
She called the photo “Graduation to the Same Poor Wages.” Here is what she described:
I just graduated from medical billing school [paid for by TANF].
But I cannot get a job in my new field.
I need a job now because I need the tax refund
to pay for furniture for the kids.
My friend convinced me
to go to McDonald’s
to apply.
They pay $8 an hour.
I got to do
what I got to do.
Desperate for money and eager to receive a tax credit, she stooped to apply for a job at McDonald’s. Not because McDonald’s was a good job, or even a safe and desirable workplace, but because if Shirley worked a low-wage job, she could get some funds through the EITC to pay her bills. Nothing felt good about it.
Legislators left, right, and center along with poverty pundits all praise the EITC. To question it is almost sacrilegious. The EITC is a tax credit that increases with each additional dollar earned by a person who works for low wages. It therefore “encourages work” (albeit low-wage work) by supplementing earnings. According to the research, the EITC is also a prescription for good health; it helps improve children’s school performance and college attendance rates.10
The Urban Institute, a nationally renowned think tank and research institute, holds many panel discussions regarding the EITC to promote it to policymakers. Maria was invited to speak at one of those panels. The National Academies of Science also generated a report on how to reduce child poverty by 50 percent.11 It suggested a full array of work-oriented and income supports, such as raising the minimum wage to $10.25 an hour, expanding the childcare tax credit, and expanding access to the EITC. The right-leaning 2017 American Enterprise Institute report on poverty called A Safety Net That Works said that in 2014, “28.5 million tax units” (yes, tax units, not human beings) received $68.3 billion from the EITC, which amounted, it said, to “lifting 7.3 million individuals above the poverty line.”12 The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which leans center-left, also insists that the program “lifts people out of poverty.” In 2016, for instance, according to the center, the EITC “lifted 5.8 million people out of poverty.”13
Through the EITC, advocates as well as the federal and state government can take credit for “lifting people out of poverty.”
But this claim is false.
Remember you need to work low wages in order to be eligible for the “benefit.” Earning low wages is a prerequisite for receiving the EITC. The EITC does not “lift” people above the poverty line. On the contrary, it forces people to dig their own ditch and stay in low-wage jobs with no career potential while large corporations profit off this because they can continue to pay low wages. These corporations are enabled by the government, which supplements wages with SNAP and Medicaid (health care for people experiencing poverty). In other words, the EITC is another tax haven for the corporations and businesses that refuse to pay higher wages.
Advocates and lawmakers on the Left and Right are complicit in this “work makes you free” system. Welfare researchers Felicia Ann Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink are some of the few people who call it like it is: the EITC is like putting lipstick on a pig.14
Lean in for a kiss.
Shirley worked at McDonald’s because she needed the EITC for her family. Yet she was treated badly and paid horribly. As the largest fast-food company in the United States, McDonald’s generated $23.8 billion in sales in the United States in 2021.15 It is one of the largest private sector employers in the world.
If you read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, you will remember that fast-food workplaces are unsafe for workers and customers, and tend to be hostile places.16 According to an article in Bloomberg, on average, every thirty-six hours, local news outlets in the United States report about workplace violence at a McDonald’s, though police reports suggest rates of violence that are much higher.17 These incidents range from angry customers throwing hot coffee at workers, to armed robbery and assault, dangers with fry grease, and sexual harassment and rape among coworkers.18
Shirley would much rather work in health care billing, the job for which she was trained. She felt forced to work in any kind of low-wage job so she could get a little bit of the EITC just to meet basic needs. It felt degrading and bad for her health as well as that of her children.
When we listen to women participating in TANF and other welfare programs, we see that American bosses want people to work for them at the lowest wages possible. Government assistance programs help this along. As an example, in her book Storming Caesar’s Palace about how Ruby Duncan and many other leaders of the welfare rights movement fought against the gambling moguls in Nevada, Annelise Orleck describes how mob bosses in Las Vegas worked with state legislators in Nevada to keep welfare financial assistance so meager that people would be desperate to work for slightly higher wages in the casinos.19 Though that was forty years ago, the same dynamics are at play today.
Our modern-day public assistance programs are forms of entrapment constructed by big companies and facilitated by US government policy. The US government is pimping women and their children to America’s corporations.
Another system with this type of neglectful entrapment is Medicaid, health insurance for people who have very low income and/or disabilities, and for children who are in the foster care system. Most people participating in TANF also access health insurance through Medicaid. The states that refused to expand Medicaid were those that had the highest percentage of Black people in their populations. On the other hand, consider those states that did expand Medicaid. They saw vast reductions in health inequities between Black and white people, especially in the areas of cancer treatment.20 States that did not expand Medicaid are seeing comparably worse health outcomes, and some states have made it almost impossible to get Medicaid coverage. In Texas, the Medicaid application is thirty-eight pages long, sixteen times longer than a 1040 tax form.21 Not only does this make it extremely difficult to get Medicaid coverage, but it delays people months to see a generalist and even longer to see a specialist. Such red tape delays in states without Medicaid expansion are responsible for infant mortality and maternal death rates that are far higher than those in states that did expand Medicaid.22 Additionally, the state of Texas refuses to offer immigrants any health insurance coverage. The state will pay for health care for a fetus, but not for the mother. That is, even before a child is born, Texas is separating the child from the mother—even though it is the mother’s health that leads to a healthy child. See the “don’t feed adults” pattern of separation?
As another example, Carla not only hid the paltry “earnings” from research and selling meals in her bra but also tried to hide from caseworkers the fact that she lived with a caring, loving partner who was the father of her children. He made very little money and always contributed his earnings to the family and household expenses. But in order to participate in TANF to get access to childcare and receive the tiny grant amount, she claimed she did not know the father of her kids. Carla claimed he was her pimp, and she did not know his identity. Otherwise, she knew that if she did identify him, the caseworker would enter him into the system and start trying to chase him down for child support made payable to the state.
If a father does not pay child support, they may get sent to prison. For instance, in North Carolina, one-eighth of the Black men in prison are jailed for not paying child support to state coffers. You might remember Walter Scott, who was murdered by North Carolina police. It was a “routine” traffic stop, but Scott ran from police, many say, because he was worried he would be imprisoned again for not paying child support. As he ran away, a white cop, Michael Slager, shot Scott in the back and killed him.
These examples demonstrate how racism and misogyny are baked into public assistance, and are funded by the government to generate revenue for large corporations that refuse to provide adequate wages and health coverage for their workers. Simultaneously, adults and children, especially those of color, get snagged up in the chains of welfare. The welfare system, labor laws, health care expenditures, and criminal justice operate a death-dealing revolving door.
This truth was explained to me by the ex-boyfriend of a member of Witnesses, a Black man who had just returned from prison. We were walking together in West Philadelphia down Market Street toward the county assistance offices under the L train at Fifty-Seventh and Market. Remarking on the row of buildings and the group of women and children outside one of the doors, and a line of men waiting at the side door of the building next door, he said,
That’s where all the people are lined up
from the parole office,
to the methadone clinic,
to the welfare offices.
It’s like a revolving door for Black men and women.
Government and corporations weaponize the public assistance programs to churn Black and Brown people around and around, or stop them dead.
1. Sanford Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, eds., Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card against America’s Poor (New York: Routledge, 2001).
2. Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba et al., “Loss of SNAP Is Associated with Food Insecurity and Poor Health in Working Families with Young Children,” Health Affairs 38, no. 5 (May 2019): 765–773, https://
3. Lisa Ko, “Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States,” Independent Lens (blog), January 29, 2016, https://
4. Tom Yamachika, “TAX MAN: TANF Hoarding Does No One Any Good,” Garden Island, January 9, 2022, https://
5. US Office of Strategic Services, “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” January 17, 1944, 25, 29, 30, https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=750070.
6. Felicia Ann Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink, Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
7. Ife Floyd et al., TANF Policies Reflect Racist Legacy of Cash Assistance: Reimagined Program Should Center Black Mothers (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 2021).
8. Neubeck and Cazenave, Welfare Racism; Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty; Mary Corcoran, Sandra K. Danziger, and Richard Tolman, “Long Term Employment of African-American and White Welfare Recipients and the Role of Persistent Health and Mental Health Problems,” Journal of Women’s Health 39, no. 4 (2004): 21–40; Eugenie Hildebrandt and Patricia Stevens, “Impoverished Women with Children and No Welfare Benefits: The Urgency of Researching Failures of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program,” American Journal of Public Health 99, no. 5 (2009): 793–801; Schram, Soss, and Fording, Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform; Janice H. Laakso and Denise J. Drevdahl, “Women, Abuse, and the Welfare Bureaucracy,” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 21, no. 1 (2006): 84–96.
9. Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (Boston: Mariner Books, 2016).
10. Dayanand S. Manoli and Nicholas Turner, “Cash-on-Hand & College Enrollment: Evidence from Population Tax Data and Policy Nonlinearities” (working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2014), https://
11. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine et al., eds., A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty: A Consensus Study Report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2019).
12. Douglas J. Besharov et al., eds., A Safety Net That Works: Improving Federal Programs for Low-Income Americans (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2017).
13. “Policy Basics: The Earned Income Tax Credit,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, December 10, 2019, https://
14. Kornbluh and Mink, Ensuring Poverty, xv.
15. Trefis Team, “McDonald’s Stock to Gain after Q3 Earnings?,” Forbes, November 15, 2021, https://
16. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, rep. ed. (Boston: Mariner Books, 2012).
17. Josh Eidelson, “McDonald’s Workers Want OSHA to Investigate Pattern of Violence,” Bloomberg, May 22, 2019, https://
18. Deborah Berkowitz, “Behind the Arches: How McDonald’s Fails to Protect Workers from Workplace Violence” (National Employment Law Project, May 22, 2019), https://
19. Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).
20. Mike Fillon, “Medicaid Expansion Increases Survival for Patients with Cancer,” CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 72, no. 5 (September 2022): 407–408, https://
21. Julia Belluz and Nina Martin, “The Extraordinary Danger of Being Pregnant and Uninsured in Texas,” Vox (blog), December 19, 2019, https://
22. Chintan B. Bhatt and Consuelo M. Beck-Sagué, “Medicaid Expansion and Infant Mortality in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 4 (April 2018): 565–567, https://