This Week in Poverty: The Invisibles in Mississippi and the US

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/170222/week-poverty-invisibles-mississippi-and-us

Before there was Clinton-Gingrich Welfare Reform in 1996 there was Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice’s “Work First” pilot program in 1995.

That year, the Clinton administration granted the Republican governor a waiver to implement a new work requirement in six counties that Fordice claimed would result in 50 percent of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients getting off welfare and into jobs within three years.

One of the targeted counties was Harrison County, where Reverend Carol Burnett was running a literacy program for low-income women in east Biloxi. Burnett—one of the first women United Methodist ministers in Mississippi—would later serve as director of the state’s Department of Human Services (DHS) Office of Children and Youth in a Democratic administration.

“The women in this program were just trying to learn basic literacy skills, hoping they would be able to continue their education and get decent jobs in the future,” Burnett tells me. “Under the first President Bush women were allowed to pursue education while receiving welfare support. But the Mississippi pilot program changed that.”

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1. Welfare reform came at a time when the filthy rich wanted huge tax cuts.

What a coincidence.

"Mississippi now ranks worst in the nation with 31.8 percent of children living in poverty, and worst in the nation in child well-being according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2012 Kids Count Data Book, a national and state-by-state effort to track the well-being of children. For every 100 families with children in poverty in the state, only ten now receive TANF cash assistance. In 2009–10, according to the CBPP, there were 117,327 families with children in poverty, and just 11,773 TANF cases."

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink," Matthew 25

Mississippi, the most Unchristian state in the bible belt.

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