The New Republic: on Welfare & Poverty

Marcia Fudge: Fought cuts to food stamp program

A longtime member of the House Agriculture Committee, Fudge chairs the subcommittee on nutrition, which has oversight of USDA. She gained national recognition for vociferously fighting the Trump administration's effort to slash the food stamp program and has a progressive understanding of the agency's role in not just food production but also nutrition policy, child hunger, and land conservation.

Marcia Fudge: Public housing should be a stopping point, not a lifetime

Rahm Emanuel: Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit

EMANUEL: We are getting to a point where we can make a pension payment or pave a road but we can't do both. I am not tough on pensions. I am realistic. There is a difference. It is also realistic from a fiscal side that, if all we do is make no changes, I would have to raise taxes at a level that would harm the economy.

Q: Are we seeing cleavages within the Democratic Party? On pensions? Negotiation with the unions?

EMANUEL: There are divisions, or I would call them differences. Too much of the debate in Washington is about ideological gradations. I have a piece today [in the Chicago Sun-Times] about the Earned Income Tax Credit. I have negotiated to expand it. Now, is that considered left or right?

Q: Uh--

EMANUEL: I consider myself a progressive. I have a passion for people who work. To me, this is about forward versus backward looking. Ideological gradations are the wrong way to look at it.

JD Vance: We spend our way to the poorhouse

"We spend our way to the poorhouse," he writes. "We buy giant TVs and iPads thanks to high-interest credit cards. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy. Thrift is inimical to our being." And he isn't interested in government solutions. All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did.