JACKSON, Miss. — Farish Street has an all-too-familiar story. 

Once a booming Black-owned entertainment and business district that drew Black customers from all over Mississippi, it struggled after segregation ended. Today, it suffers from the same blight and infrastructure issues as many other Jackson neighborhoods — and far too many once-segregated communities across the country.

I decided to visit Farish Street to get the perspective of small business owners on the state’s tax cut policies for an investigation published this week about a wave of such cuts pushed by conservative groups. Several told me that the state’s income and corporate tax cuts rarely benefit the Black business owners there. 

“The tax cuts are for big businesses and the rich,” said Eric Collins, owner of Herbal Blessings, a health food store and vegan cafe. “As for the support our small businesses get from the state? It’s very little.”

Marshall’s Music and Bookstore, owned by Maati Jone Primm, is located a few doors down. Primm’s grandmother, an activist who came to Jackson from nearby Utica, started the bookstore 85 years ago. 

“This used to be a hotspot,” Primm said. “The elders will tell you that on a Saturday, Black people used to come from all over Mississippi to come to Farish Street. You used to have to walk sideways.”

Primm connects the way the state Legislature handles taxes to a longstanding practice in the state to oppress Black Mississippians. Its tax structure – and the new reforms – benefit the state’s wealthiest, who are mostly white. And the majority-white state Legislature has long starved majority-Black Jackson of tax revenue.  

She sees taxes as one tool in a box filled with policies enacted by the mostly white Legislature, including voter restrictions, limited access to medical care and underfunded public schools, that make it difficult for Black residents to thrive. 

“I feel like they are attacking us,” Primm said. “It’s plantation politics. It’s absolutely awful. You have all these different attacks. It’s almost death by a thousand cuts.” 

Part of that punishment, she said, is starving Jackson of tax revenue.

It’s not a new allegation. The NAACP and nine Jackson residents filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year alleging that state decisions about Jackson’s access to tax revenue have reduced or blocked funds needed to maintain the city’s water supply, ultimately resulting in long-running problems accessing clean water. City residents suffered through a days-long outage last summer.

“It’s the culture of Mississippi that says they must oppress Black people,” Primm said. “They don’t want to share power, and they really don’t want to share resources.” 

Mississippi enacted a substantial income tax cut in 2022 that moved the state to a single tax bracket, regardless of how much you make. These “flat” taxes sound equitable, in that everyone is paying the same percentage of their income in taxes. But the rest of a state’s taxes don’t work that way, sales taxes especially, and the main way governments can avoid leaning most heavily on lower-income people is with income-tax rates that increase as earnings do. 

Mississippi’s tax structure already took a larger share of income from its poor and middle-income residents than its richest, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The newest change will worsen that inequity. According to the group’s analysis, the state’s highest-income residents would receive an estimated $31,400 in tax cuts on average each year, while the lowest would get average savings of $20.

The state will likely see a $419 million reduction in revenue every year on average from the income tax cut, according to the University Research Center, a division of Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning that studies state and local policies.

Primm is most concerned about what that could mean for Mississippi’s public education system, already underfunded and underperforming, especially in places with larger lower-income Black communities. 

Her great-grandmother, who was enslaved, created a school. A visit to Primm’s bookstore makes her passion for education clear. As I waited to speak with Primm, she was helping provide books for a local church group. She’s stocked her store with countless books on Black culture and history, from Maya Angelou poems to soul food cookbooks to nonfiction on medical discrimination and books detailing the history of how African slavery in the U.S. began. Primm has adorned its walls with pictures of freedom fighters; Black people who have been murdered throughout the country’s history, including Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin; and modern cultural icons, like Morgan Freeman and Oprah Winfrey.

Underfunding education is a form of disenfranchisement in itself, Primm said. 

“The largely white power brokers want to maintain the status quo and in order to do that, they need to disenfranchise us,” Primm said. “What they count on is the people to be silent for all of this and suffer in silence. I’m not going to do that.”

The post In a historic Black business district, ‘death by a thousand cuts’ appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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ABERDEEN, Wash. — Under an overcast sky, Patty Flores led a group of colleagues to an empty lot in the mobile home park where she lived. A bare patch of grass traced the outline of a home set ablaze in an electrical fire.

She saw it as a symptom of a larger problem, one that connected to her rising rent, the potholes pockmarking the street and the paradox that taking another job to cover the extra rent would require child care that she couldn’t afford.

The tax system in her state has long been one of the most inequitable in the country, leaning most heavily on the people with the least money. That, in turn, means less revenue to spend on services that can help people live less tenuous lives.

“I want to trust that there will be change,” Flores said. “I want a better life for my kids.”

When legislators proposed a bill in 2021 to increase taxes on Washington’s wealthiest residents and put the money toward child care and education, Flores was elated. She showed up to testify in support.

The bill passed. This year, the money started flowing in — hundreds of millions more than legislators anticipated. 

While efforts to pass a federal wealth tax are at a standstill, a nascent movement at the state level to get high-income people to contribute more to public coffers is beginning to notch successes. 

Washington state’s tax, on capital gains, overcame a court challenge in March. Massachusetts voters amended their constitution in November to tax millionaires at a higher rate. And legislators in eight more states introduced bills this year aimed at reforming tax systems that take a smaller share of household income from people with the most money than from people with the least. Those changes would yield hundreds of billions of dollars in potential new revenue. 

But this push is a far cry from the decades-long conservative effort to reduce taxes, particularly ones that higher-income people pay. 

Most of the recent tax-the-wealthy proposals never made it out of committee. The Washington and Massachusetts measures took years of efforts organized by local groups facing well-funded opposition. 

The State Innovation Exchange and State Revenue Alliance, two national groups now helping to coordinate state wealth-tax efforts, are outspent by billionaire-funded organizations that argue for yet more cuts. 

“The reality is wealthy people across this country wield enormous political power in terms of lobbyists, think tanks and organizations created to entrench their financial advantage,” said Kyle Huelsman, senior director of legislative affairs at the State Innovation Exchange. 

“We are really in a generational fight, and an incredibly disproportionate fight in terms of resources.” 

Washington and Massachusetts offer lessons for states wanting to make their tax systems more equitable. A big one: Drumming up the support can take a long time — and a lot of money. 

A ‘pure tax justice argument’

In Massachusetts, a constitutional amendment to increase taxes on the wealthy took a decade of advocacy work. Supporters gathered signatures to put it on the 2018 ballot, only to see it booted off by a court ruling after business groups sued. The Legislature then put it on the 2022 ballot, bypassing restrictions that doomed the other attempt.

A key reason that states take a higher share of household income from their lower-income residents than their wealthiest is sales tax. An income tax with different brackets — rates that go up as your income does — is the main tool states have to counterbalance that impact.

Massachusetts didn’t design its income tax that way. It had a single rate across income levels since its enactment in 1916, because its constitution required it.

That’s what the proposed amendment that went before voters in 2022 aimed to change. It called for an additional 4% income tax for millionaires on top of the state’s 5% flat tax. The proposal specified that revenue would go toward schools, public transportation, roads and bridges, more than 650 of which need repair. 

Labor, community and faith groups joined forces to support the ballot measure. Business interests and conservatives lined up in opposition.

The latter organized the Coalition to Stop the Tax Hike Amendment and raised more than $14 million to defeat it, with funders that included billionaires Jim Davis, the chairman of New Balance, and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, through his containerboard company. The Boston-based Pioneer Institute, a member of the State Policy Network, which advocates for tax cuts around the nation, wrote a book in opposition — “Back to Taxachusetts?”

While the money flowing to national tax-cutting groups is substantial, supporters of the Massachusetts amendment outspent the opposition. They did it by raising more than $32 million as Fair Share Massachusetts, a large part from teachers’ unions and other worker-funded groups. 

The conservative State Policy Network and its affiliates know that unions can be a key counterweight to the struggle over taxes. The groups’ solution: Cut off their opponents’ funding at the source. 

In a 2016 fundraising letter reported on by The Guardian, the State Policy Network said that “freeing teachers and other government workers from coercive unionism” would mean “permanently depriving the Left from access to millions of dollars in dues.”

Two of the network’s partner organizations provided free legal representation in a lawsuit that produced the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling weakening public unions’ ability to collect membership fees.    

But that didn’t stave off a big-money battle in Massachusetts. Once the ballot measure survived a trip to the state’s high court, the decision was up to voters. 

Both coalitions made their pitch as the November election loomed. 

The Stop the Tax Hike group argued that the measure would impose one of the largest tax increases in state history, that the revenue could be put toward spending beyond the intended purposes, and that the results would leave small business owners “reeling from an unprecedented new financial hit.”

The Fair Share group pointed to Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center data showing that the wealthiest residents paid an average of 6.8% of their income in state and local taxes, while everyone else paid an average of 8.9%. Changing that, the group said, “is how we build an economy that works for everyone.”

“It became a pure tax justice argument,” said Phineas Baxandall, policy director of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. “The richest need to pay their fair share.”

Voters approved the amendment, 52% to 48%.

The Pioneer Institute vowed to track the tax’s impact. State and national teachers’ unions “claimed that it would be a net benefit for the state. However, they ignore the negative impact on the overall economy while at the same time avoiding accountability when it comes to how those dollars are spent and whether or not we are doing a better job of educating our children,” Mary Connaughton, the group’s director of government transparency and chief operating officer, said in an email.

For Huelsman, Massachusetts demonstrated what’s possible. 

“They really put out the guiding light of an incredibly popular issue,” he said. 

The fight over taxes on the wealthy

Taxing wealthy people at higher rates than residents with less money isn’t a novel idea. That’s how the federal income tax is designed to work. But Congress has cut top tax rates in big ways over the past four decades, contributing to the growing gap between the rich and everyone else. 

And the U.S. doesn’t impose an annual tax on wealth, a person’s assets. A ProPublica investigation showed that loopholes in the system allow the country’s richest people to pay very low tax rates, when they owe anything at all.

Several other countries impose wealth taxes. In Norway, for instance, such taxes are levied up to 1.1%. Switzerland’s cantons — semi-sovereign states — have had them since the early 18th century, accounting for nearly 10% of canton and local tax revenues in 2018. Colombia and Spain both approved wealth taxes last year, the latter for 2023 and 2024 only. 

In the United States, though, proposals for a tax on the ultrarich, including from Democrats Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington have stalled in Congress. That’s despite polling showing that the majority of Americans support the concept.

And in the past two years, at least 19 states have lowered their income taxes in ways that primarily benefit their most well-off residents, pushed along by conservative groups that include the State Policy Network.

All of that is energizing legislators and activists in Democratic-led states to band together to try to increase taxes on the wealthy — in some cases with actual wealth-tax proposals.

On Jan. 19, elected officials in eight states — Connecticut, New York, California, Washington, Hawaii, Maryland, Illinois and Minnesota — introduced legislation or held rallies for bills filed afterward. In March, Nevada legislators proposed a study on wealth taxes. It was the first public effort of a movement organized by State Innovation Exchange and State Revenue Alliance to move the needle on tax parity.  

They set the stage last summer, convening activists, think tanks and lawmakers from 10 states to strategize. Formed in 2014, State Innovation Exchange provides lawmakers with research, training, strategy and policy guidance to advance progressive legislation.

“One of the things that we saw really clearly in those conversations” was that “fights around wealth taxes were very siloed in individual states,” State Innovation Exchange’s Huelsman said. “But at the same time, the problem is very much felt across every state in the country in terms of the ultrawealthy avoiding taxes.”

The cohort met virtually once a month through April to share best practices and lessons learned. They’re planning an in-person meeting in September and are looking to add people from additional states.

How long it might take to see results outside of Massachusetts’ “millionaire tax” and Washington state’s capital gains tax remains to be seen. None of the proposals introduced this year have become law, and the infrastructure built to produce more tax cuts, especially tax cuts aimed at high-income people, is better funded.

According to 2021 tax filings, the most recent available, the State Innovation Exchange had just over $9 million in revenue. The fledgling State Revenue Alliance said it had about $2 million. 

Meanwhile, that same year, revenue at the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network was about $35 million combined. That doesn’t count the network’s state affiliates, which also raise money to advocate for tax cuts. 

And Americans for Prosperity, an influential State Policy Network partner whose lobbying efforts include tax cuts, had revenue of nearly $114 million.

They’re only some of the groups in the fight. Among U.S. think tanks conducting tax policy research or advocacy, organizations on the right have two-and-a-half times the money of the ones on the left, according to a 2020 study published in the Nonprofit Policy Forum journal.

ALEC and Americans for Prosperity did not respond to requests for comment. The State Policy Network, while not answering questions about funding disparities, characterized its tax-cut efforts as sensible.

“States have received record amounts of revenue in every year since the coronavirus pandemic,” Michael Lucci, State Policy Network visiting economy policy fellow, said in a statement provided to the Center for Public Integrity. “Cutting taxes provides relief and allows revenues to grow a bit less quickly than they otherwise would. Even some states that are not cutting taxes have struggled to figure out what to do with all the excess revenue.”

Temporary infusions of federal pandemic aid is part of the reason. Opponents of the tax cuts argue that budget consequences will follow.

“The same people and organizations who patiently packed the courts with judges who would take away our rights are the same who are making it harder to raise revenue for what our communities need,” Kristen Crowell, executive director of the State Revenue Alliance, said in an email. “For them, it’s a business decision — spend millions to avoid paying billions in taxes. For us, tax justice is woven into the fight for democracy, racial and economic justice.” 

‘We’ve suffered for so many years’

In 2019, Flores from Aberdeen went door to door, listening to low-wage workers in Washington state’s timber country talk about the problems they saw and the solutions they wanted. 

Flores was volunteering for Firelands Workers Action, a group that organizes and advocates on behalf of working people in rural and small-town swaths of the state. 

The survey results from over 200 conversations revealed pressing worries about affordable housing, health insurance, mounting disasters like wildfires and “impossible choices.”

“When the fires were coming through, they just had one cop car coming around to tell us to evacuate,” a veteran told Firelands volunteers. “No help getting out, nothing.” A social worker said that she paid as much for child care as she did on her mortgage. Asked what they thought should be done to help fix the challenges their communities faced, 69% of respondents said they supported taxing the rich.

In Washington state, “we live and breathe the regressive tax system every day through the many different ways we’re seeing our communities facing decades of disinvestment,” said Firelands’ executive director, Stina Janssen.

The nonprofit’s workers and volunteers sought to change that. They wanted to see investment by the state — one of nine without an income tax — that would usher in more affordable housing and public child care.

But there’s a history of pushback in the state when people have tried to change the tax system. 

In the early 20th century, the state relied on revenue from property taxes to fund the government — largely through farmland. But by 1930, the farm population dropped by nearly a third, placing a disproportionate amount of the tax burden on farmers’ shoulders. Many were unable to pay. 

A fraternal group called the Washington State Grange, which fought for the improvement of farmers’ lives through political action, spent years trying to get an income tax enacted. A ballot measure the group spearheaded passed by more than 70% of the vote in 1932. 

The Washington State Supreme Court overturned it the next year, arguing that its graduated rates violated the state constitution’s requirement “that all taxes shall be uniform upon the same class of property.” The high court did the same to another attempt a few years later.

The justices left intact new sales, business and occupation taxes. Washington’s system has largely been the same ever since: It relies heavily on state and local sales taxes that average more than 9% — among the nation’s highest. That’s why it leans hardest on the poor.

Washington’s constitutional requirement that all taxes be “uniform” has a backstory rooted in inequity: Slaveholders in Southern states pushed for the policy as a lucrative loophole.

“The ’personal property’ at issue in the adoption of the first uniformity clauses was not commercial wealth, tangible or intangible,” Robin Einhorn of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in a Journal of Economic History article. “It was slaves.”

Uniformity clauses spread from there. But Massachusetts and Washington are among the few states where courts have interpreted it to prohibit different tax rates. 

Tax policy has been “used as a weapon against overburdened communities, especially the Black community,” said Sen. Joe Nguyễn, a Democrat who represents a Seattle-area district. “So for me, our tax structure is rooted in racism, is rooted in economic division, but it’s also a way for us to heal some of that from the past as well.”

Efforts in the early 2000s again fell short, including a ballot measure for a tax on the wealthy that failed after two of the state’s wealthiest residents helped fund the opposition in 2010. 

A decade later, Firelands and other tax reform proponents set their sights on capital gains. This time, they aimed for a clear message and strong public support. 

The 2021 bill filed from that effort called for levying a 7% tax on profits exceeding $250,000 from the sale and exchange of assets such as stocks and bonds. Lawmakers earmarked the revenue for early childhood education. 

More than 100 groups, including labor unions, human service organizations and immigrant rights nonprofits, teamed up to push the legislation forward. As soon as the Legislature passed it, several Washington residents represented in part by a State Policy Network affiliate, the Freedom Foundation, filed a lawsuit challenging the policy. 

“Washington has long benefited from its status as one of the few states without an income tax, though attempts by the political Left to impose one have continued unabated for about 90 years,” the Freedom Foundation’s director of labor policy, Maxford Nelsen, wrote in a statement at the time.

The group didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Flores, recalling that lawsuit, switched from English to Spanish at the Firelands office as Janssen, Firelands’ executive director, provided translation.

“So even as the common people are making a small incremental advancement, we see that some wealthy people are strategizing to repeal and roll back even that win,” she said. “We’ve suffered for so many years.”

But this time, when the case reached Washington’s high court, its ruling allowed the tax to stand. 

As of May, the state had raised more than triple the expected amount, with nearly $850 million collected from 3,190 payments. The first $500 million of annual revenue will go toward child care and early learning programs. The remainder will fund school construction.

Those results inspired advocates in Hawaii, one of the states where wealth tax and capital gains tax legislation was proposed this year.

“We can point to that and say, ’Look at this huge success,’” said Will Caron with Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice.

The tip of the iceberg

In Flores’ blue mobile home, mold stretched along the walls and ceiling. She feared it caused the respiratory problems plaguing her then 4-year-old son, Mathias.

Flores wanted to move into a single-family home with proper insulation. That, she thought, would be the end of her constant worries about mold. But the three-bedroom homes in her area cost around $200,000. 

“How am I supposed to pay when the wages are so low?” asked Flores, who was working two part-time jobs, at Firelands and a grocery store. 

Her experience is a common one. An analysis by Washington state’s Tax Structure Work Group revealed that those earning between $17,000 and $30,000 per year pay 15% of their annual incomes in Washington state and local taxes — substantially reducing their take-home pay.

By contrast, the wealthiest 10% of Washingtonians — those making at least $208,000 — pay only 3.4% of their annual incomes in state and local taxes.

Wealth inequality is growing, and “taxes are an important tool at all levels of government for pushing back against that,” said Washington Budget and Policy Center Senior Fellow Andy Nicholas. “And yet, we have a tax code that not only doesn’t push back against that, but makes it worse.”

But recent changes that make the system slightly more equitable are starting to kick in. The Working Families Tax Credit — a state version of the federal earned income tax credit — went into effect this year and offers up to $1,200 for low-to-moderate income working households in Washington. As many as 400,000 Washingtonians may receive the credit. The deadline to apply for the 2022 tax year is Dec. 31, 2023. 

The capital gains tax will increase annual state and local taxes for the wealthiest earners by half a percentage point on average, while the Working Families Tax Credit will lower the same taxes by 1.1 percentage points for the lowest earners, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. 

Nguyễn, the Seattle-area legislator, co-sponsored a wealth tax bill in this year’s legislative session that would impose a 1% tax on individuals owning financial assets including stocks, bonds and mutual funds exceeding $250 million. Revenue would go toward education, affordable housing, disability services and a tax credit for low-to-moderate income people. 

The state’s Department of Revenue estimated that the tax would collect $3.1 billion per year beginning in 2026 from around 700 Washingtonians, some of whom are the wealthiest people in the world. 

“The main wealth-building tool of the middle class has always been our homes, and we already tax that,” state Sen. Noel Frame, a Democrat who represents Seattle, said during a March 9 Senate committee hearing. “But the main wealth-building tool of the billionaires and ultra-millionaires is financial property, and we don’t tax that at all.” 

The Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute worked with the Legislature to help draft the proposed tax on what’s known as “unrealized” capital gains. For the organization’s Carolyn Brotherton, wealth is an iceberg. Realized capital gains — what the state just began taxing — serve as the tip of the iceberg, while “unrealized capital gains are everything floating beneath the surface,” she said. 

The proposal has stalled in committee. 

A major claim leveled against these types of measures by the groups opposing them: People and companies will be driven out.

“A lot of businesses are leaving the state,” Lance Christensen, California Policy Center’s education policy and government affairs vice president, said in an interview with Public Integrity. The group is a State Policy Network affiliate that dismissed a California wealth-tax proposal as a “goofy” union effort. “Once they decide they can’t do business here, they’ll move to Texas, Florida, Tennessee.”

Over 30 multimillionaires and billionaires left Norway in 2022, according to local newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv, after the nation increased its existing wealth tax. 

But a growing body of U.S. research shows that while some rich people migrate out of state because of increased taxes, most stay. A recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report showed that lower-income households are more likely to move out of state than higher-income people across 41 states. 

“Wealthy people, like all of us, are embedded in our communities. [They] have businesses in the state, go to church, have family and communities in those specific places. Those connections root everybody, including wealthy folks,” said State Innovation Exchange’s Huelsman, who sees the “millionaire tax flight” argument as an empty threat designed to maintain an unfair tax code.

Case in point: Shortly after Massachusetts’ voters agreed to raise taxes on millionaires, the Lego Group toy company announced its plans to relocate its Americas office to the state. 

In search of the dream

Originally from Michoacan, Mexico, Flores moved to Aberdeen 17 years ago to pursue the American dream. To her, that meant access to affordable housing, health care and child care. With a more equitable tax system, Flores believed that could be possible. 

But the mother of two struggled to find affordable child care. She’s not alone. Flores’ sister quit her job at a local grocery store to avoid hiring a babysitter. Instead, she took up cleaning houses so she could bring her children with her.

For Flores, the gulf between the dream and reality was large. She walked through the mobile home park where she lived in July 2022, pointing out the signs of decay.

“I have hope,” she explained later that afternoon, over a lunch of pupusas in the Firelands office. “That’s why I’m still here.”

That summer, Flores and her family managed to buy a house — a place with no mold. A year later, her 5-year-old son Mathias is healthy and breathes easily. She now works full time as a Firelands organizer.

They are inching closer to a more comfortable life. But there’s still a long way to go. 

“When the American dream comes true is when we have equity,” Flores said.

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JACKSON, Miss. — Amia Edwards lives here because she wants to make a difference. But in this majority-Black city, long starved for funding by the state’s mostly white Legislature, that’s proved a steep challenge.

The city’s recent water crisis came after years of chronic underfunding of Jackson’s aging water infrastructure. The stench lingers in Edwards’ front yard after raw sewage flooded her home twice — neither the city nor the state agreeing to help. Abandoned homes blemish her south Jackson neighborhood as residents fled for better-funded communities. And at her nonprofit that prepares Jackson youth for performing-arts careers, she sees the results of cash-strapped schools when her kids struggle to read scripts and rap lyrics.

Then Mississippi further sliced into its revenue to fund such needs by cutting income taxes in a way that mostly benefits its wealthiest — largely white — residents.

It’s one of at least 19 legislatures that seized the opportunity to do so in the midst of budget surpluses fed by federal pandemic funding. The expected revenue hit, according to the states’ own estimates: more than $10 billion in fiscal years 2023 and 2024. That’s more than double the entire 2023 general-revenue budget for the state of West Virginia, one of the states making cuts. 

Residents of Jackson, such as Edwards, say the move to disproportionately lower what the wealthy pay in taxes will further undermine communities that suffer from disinvestment. They worry that more budget cuts will come for essential services, like public education and infrastructure maintenance. Lower-income residents, they warn, will be hurt most. 

“The wealthy tend to always look out for themselves,” Edwards said. 

Conservative groups funded by rich political donors pushed these tax cuts. It’s a well-oiled machine working to ensure that the highest earners in every state pay as little in taxes as possible.

A network that includes the American Legislative Exchange Council (known as ALEC), the State Policy Network, Americans for Prosperity and their member groups have advocated for tax-cut efforts in at least 21 states in the past two years while opposing efforts to raise taxes for the wealthy in at least eight others, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation. Their funding sources include billionaire Charles Koch and a dark money fund used by wealthy conservatives.

The groups have it down to a science: ALEC disseminates model bills. The State Policy Network puts out research and commentary promising economic benefits. Americans for Prosperity handles on-the-ground lobbying. And in a few cases, groups in their network sue.

Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn, a Republican who sits on ALEC’s board, introduced that state’s income tax cuts in 2022 — something he had tried to pass before.

Mississippi’s tax structure already took a larger share of income from its poor and middle-income residents than its richest, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. That’s common nationwide, driven by states’ reliance on sales taxes that fall hardest on people with the least money. 

The main way to at least partially counterbalance that: income taxes with rates that increase as income does.

Gunn’s bill, which a State Policy Network member group campaigned for and ALEC lauded, would eliminate Mississippi’s graduated rates and replace them with a “flat” tax. It passed the Legislature in April 2022. Now everyone in the state pays the same income-tax rate.

And the gap between the share of income that people with the least and most money contribute to the government will worsen. According to an Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy analysis, the state’s highest-income group would receive an estimated $31,400 in tax cuts on average per year, while the lowest would get an average of $20. 

Gunn did not respond to requests for comment.

Washington state, meanwhile, has tried to ease the burden on its lower-income residents from a system that disproportionately taxes them, but the same network of conservative organizations tried to stop the effort.

Washington is one of only nine states without an income tax and heavily relies on its high sales tax to fund its government. After a decade of attempts to make the system more equitable, the Legislature in 2021 passed a tax on certain types of capital gains — the profit on sales or exchanges of assets, like stocks — over $250,000. 

The Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank that’s part of the State Policy Network, filed a lawsuit on behalf of Washington residents to overturn the tax before the governor had even signed the measure.  

“There is a general hostility to taxation, considering it theft, which is false,” said Lisa Graves, the executive director of True North Research, a progressive corporate watchdog group. “The second component is tactical. They want to limit the power of government — state and federal — and one way is to limit their revenue to fund things like public schools.” 

ALEC, Americans for Prosperity and the Freedom Foundation did not respond to requests for comment. In blog posts, legislative testimony and other public comments about their tax efforts, the groups say that states benefit when taxes drop.

State Policy Network spokeswoman Camille Walsh said in a statement provided to Public Integrity that the group’s policy priorities include “reducing state income taxes so that there is a lower tax burden on taxpayers, while balancing other important objectives like tax environments that incentivize investment in the United States.” 

The new cuts are the latest front in a quiet financial war over taxes as a tool to consolidate wealth and power — to the detriment of lower-income Americans and people of color. The same conservative groups organized a similar campaign roughly a decade ago. 

Kansas was a high-profile example. Its 2012 legislation was designed with help from a former Reagan administration adviser on ALEC’s board of scholars, economist Arthur Laffer. Proponents of the tax cut claimed it would increase economic activity and pay for itself. Instead, the state lost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, slashed public spending, hurt its credit rating and eventually repealed the tax cuts. 

This year, Kansas’ Republican-led Legislature tried again, passing a flat tax like Mississippi’s that state fiscal estimates said would reduce revenue by $330 million annually. 

Americans for Prosperity and a Kansas-based State Policy Network organization were among those in favor. ALEC testified that the lesson to take from 2012 was to pair tax cuts with “appropriate spending reforms.” 

Multiple studies have found that income tax cuts, especially those that mostly benefit higher-income households, don’t have significant impacts on economic growth or unemployment, but they do increase wealth inequality.

Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the bill.  She cited the budgetary disaster after the previous tax cuts. 

“I refuse to take us back to an era of chronically underfunded schools, four-day school weeks, crumbling roads and bridges, and crippling debt,” Kelly said in April. “That’s exactly what this bill would do.” 

Republican Kansas legislators have vowed to try again next year.

In Washington state, where the capital-gains tax survived its legal challenge, a lopsided tax structure is at the heart of inequities faced by lower-income people, said state Sen. Joe Nguyen, a Democrat who represents a Seattle-area district.

“We have so many billionaires here who have been able to build wealth and generate value because of the resources and the people in Washington state,” Nguyen said. Revenue from capital gains “is an investment in the community that helped build their businesses and that will generate economic opportunities in the future.”

‘Intolerable in any modern society’

States braced for tough economic times in 2020 when faced with the COVID-19 pandemic. But many found their coffers flush with cash in the following years. 

The surpluses were largely created by federal pandemic aid and other factors, including consumers purchasing more goods than services, helping states because the former is taxed more than the latter. 

Members of Congress thought states might use the fleeting budget boost of the stimulus aid to cut taxes, and the law is written to prevent that. But states sued. A federal appeals court ruled that the provision was unconstitutional.

This set the stage for the flurry of state income tax cuts passed in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Reversing a tax cut is politically unpopular. So when state budgets contract, cuts to public services follow. Public education is often one of the largest cuts, as K-12 education makes up big chunks of state budgets.

Lower-income residents feel that most keenly because they don’t have the money to, for instance, seek out a private school if their children’s public schools are badly underfunded. Higher-income residents often won’t feel the same reduction in quality in their local schools — and they’re the ones getting most of the benefits from the tax cuts. 

The changes in tax policy will hit hardest in states where funding for public services already is low.

In Mississippi, households with incomes below $30,000 will receive only 7% of the savings from its tax cut despite making up more than half the state, according to an analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. 

Households making more than $100,000 will get 55% of the savings, even though they’re just 12 percent of all households.  

Meanwhile, the state will likely see a $419 million reduction in revenue every year on average, according to a forecast for the next decade produced by the University Research Center, a division of Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning that studies state and local policies.

That revenue reduction is equal to salaries for 8,700 teachers at the state’s average rates. 

Or it’s equal to state funding for childcare for more than 70,000 children.

It also is equal to almost half of what state and local officials have estimated is needed to fix Jackson’s water system.

Six months after the Legislature approved the tax cut, the NAACP and nine Jackson residents filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency alleging that state decisions about water funding are discriminatory. 

“The State has repeatedly interfered with Jackson’s access to tax revenue and repeatedly reduced or blocked funds from flowing to Jackson for its water facilities,” the complaint alleged in the aftermath of a days-long shutdown of the city’s water supply. “The result is persistently unsafe and unreliable drinking water and massive gaps in the access to safe drinking water that are intolerable in any modern society.”

The EPA is investigating the complaint.

West Virginia, the second-poorest state after Mississippi, approved a more than 20% reduction in income taxes in March. The new law could phase out the individual income tax entirely over time if the state’s sales-tax revenue growth outpaces inflation.

But the state’s fiscal impact estimate projects a loss of nearly $700 million in revenue next year alone. 

That amount could pay the salaries of nearly 14,000 teachers at the state’s average rate.

The top 1% of earners in the state would receive an average tax cut of about $10,000 per year, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. The bottom 20% of earners, the groups say, would receive an average of $21 per year — less than the cost of a tank of gas. 

In February, as the Legislature considered the plan, Republican Gov. Jim Justice held a roundtable forum with two State Policy Network partners, Americans for Tax Reform and The Heritage Foundation, to hail the march to zero income tax. 

“That would be a flashing billboard around the country to entrepreneurs, businesses and to workers that West Virginia is open for business,” Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation  distinguished fellow, said during the forum. “You have a big surplus, don’t flounder. This is a magical moment for the state.”

Asked for comment, Moore said in an email that people at the bottom of the income ladder benefit the most from pro-growth policies like cutting income taxes. He said he tells State Policy Network organizations across the country that eliminating the income tax is a proven path to prosperity. 

That argument lacks context, said Richard Auxier, a senior policy associate with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

“If you’re in Mississippi and West Virginia and you think the only difference between your states and Florida and Texas is income tax, I really think you ought to be doing a whole lot more looking,” Auxier said. “The reason you have an income tax is to shift the burden onto higher-income households. The reason to get rid of an income tax is because it can shift the burden onto lower-income households.”

The disparate impact of these income tax cuts can also be seen across racial groups. Auxier found that Arizona and Ohio’s 2021 tax cuts, for example, mostly benefited white households, while Latino households in the former state and Black households in the latter saw little to no benefit.

In Arkansas, the nation’s third-poorest state, the Legislature has lowered the personal income tax rate repeatedly, most recently in 2022 and 2023. Legislators cut the corporate income tax rate, too.

Arkansas is home to Walmart’s headquarters. The Waltons, whose family founded Walmart and are among the richest in America, contributed $1.2 million to the State Policy Network in 2021 through their foundation. The money was earmarked for “an education policy and advocacy program.” (The Walton Family Foundation is among Public Integrity’s funders, providing a grant for improving national-local news collaborations.)

One State Policy Network affiliate in Arkansas touts the income tax cuts on a list of its accomplishments. Another affiliate advocates for the state to eliminate its income tax entirely.

For some advocates in these poor states, the loss in revenue is alarming.

“We have so many other issues to deal with,” said Kyra Roby, a policy analyst with One Voice Mississippi, an advocacy group. “The state is embroiled in a welfare scandal, a health crisis in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision that originated out of Mississippi. We have one of the highest maternal mortality rates. Our rural hospitals are closing. Education is still underfunded. The residents in Jackson are still fighting for clean drinking water. But tax cuts are being pushed by outside interest groups.”

State Rep. Ronnie Crudup Jr., a Democrat who represents south Jackson in the state’s Legislature, voted against the tax cuts. He said the surplus of funds used to justify the cuts could have been put toward urgent problems.

“I just don't understand, for the life of me, why we continue to try to cut taxes when there's so many needs across this state,” he said.

Kelly Allen, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, shares the same concerns in her state. Tuition for state colleges doubled over the past decade as West Virginia’s funding dropped, according to an October analysis by her group.

“Instead of further future revenue growth going to schools or infrastructure or healthcare or programs that benefit families, it will automatically be diverted to income tax cuts, which mostly benefit the state's wealthiest,” Allen said. 

Advocates of tax cuts often argue that they will attract businesses or that the money is better spent by taxpayers directly. In Mississippi, both those arguments draw skepticism. 

“If you’re not funding basic services, there’s no new businesses moving to a state where your kids can’t get an education, you can’t move your products out on the state roads and bridges, you don’t know where the closest hospital is going to be,” said Sarah Stripp, managing director of Springboard to Opportunities, a Mississippi nonprofit that works with low-income families. 

Added Nancy Loome, executive director of The Parents’ Campaign, a public school advocacy group: “You can give me money back, but I can’t hire public school teachers or pave the roads by myself. There are so many things Mississippians want that are why we pay taxes.”

‘The No. 1 issue’

The 2010 midterm elections saw a wave of conservative wins across the country. Republican-controlled states — where the party held the governor’s seat and both houses of the legislature — jumped from nine to 21. 

The following year brought a slew of similar proposals across these states to weaken unions and collective bargaining power, scale back access to abortion and voting rights, expand the ability to buy and carry guns and lower taxes on wealthy people and businesses, as documented by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University in his book, “State Capture.”

Many of these bills were largely identical. They were introduced and passed with unusual speed. And it was thanks to the trifecta of ALEC, the State Policy Network and Americans for Prosperity. 

ALEC, which first launched in the 1970s, is a network of conservative state legislators, philanthropies, wealthy donors, advocacy groups and private-sector businesses that drafts and disseminates “model bill” proposals for state legislation.

The State Policy Network is made up of state-level conservative, pro-business think tanks that produce reports, media commentary and testimony, often on behalf of bills that ALEC drafts.

Americans for Prosperity, the newest of the three organizations, was created and directed by the Koch brothers’ political network. It conducts electoral work and policy lobbying at both the state and federal level.

Financial disclosures show that donors to these organizations, in addition to the Walton Family Foundation and Charles Koch Foundation, include the foundation for the Coors family of Coors beer fame; the Sarah Scaife Foundation, started with money from Pennsylvania’s wealthy Mellon family; the Roe Foundation, whose businessman founder was an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and started the State Policy Network; and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, a major funder of the anti-critical race theory movement.

But many of the people underwriting these groups’ efforts are anonymous. They send their money through DonorsTrust, which shows up as the contributor instead.

That obscures who’s benefiting from the tax cuts that their donations — tax deductible in the case of the State Policy Network and ALEC — helped bring about.

In 2021 alone, DonorsTrust funneled around $48 million to the State Policy Network and its affiliates and partners, including ALEC and Americans for Prosperity, according to the organization’s latest financial disclosures. On its website, DonorsTrust describes its donors as “conservative- and libertarian-minded.”

“We help streamline our givers’ charitable wishes and don’t comment on the specific policy positions of the organizations our accountholders recommend grants to,” said Lawson Bader, president and CEO of DonorsTrust, said in an emailed statement. “That said, our givers are ideologically diverse and over the years have directed their giving to more than 1,100 unique charities, some of which approach the tax-policy debate from different perspectives.”

A 2019 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and USA TODAY found that Mississippi’s Legislature introduced more ALEC model legislation than any other state in the country.

“I don’t understand the state thinking the way they think,” said Credell Calhoun, a Democratic supervisor of the county where Jackson is predominantly located, which he said struggles to get state funds to fix roads and bridges. “But I think it’s coming from the national Republicans, pushing, pushing down here to cut taxes.” 

Usually business groups are reliable supporters of such a move. But in a 2022 report detailing the concerns of local business leaders, the state’s chamber of commerce wrote that “the Mississippi tax environment was not high profile nor ever discussed significantly as a priority.”

ALEC's 2022 annual report credits ALEC legislators for helping to dump graduated income tax rates in five states. A State Policy Network member, the Goldwater Institute, describes itself as having helped write Arizona’s 2021 tax-cut law. In nearly every state with a recent income tax reduction that benefited the state’s wealthiest households, these groups or their affiliates were there, promoting these policies.

“This is the No. 1 issue that we’ve heard from Utahns all over the state, and the No. 1 concern is that they’re feeling the pinch in their pocketbooks with inflation at all time highs,” Heather Andrews, Utah state director for Americans for Prosperity, said at a hearing last year for a tax-cut bill.

The legislation passed. She urged Utah to cut even more.

And this year it did, with a law the state estimated would reduce revenue by $475 million next year ⁠— the equivalent of average salaries for nearly 8,000 Utah teachers.  

“Utah does more with less,” Andrews said in her testimony for this year’s bill, “and that’s what we do.”  

‘ALEC puppet state’

The atmosphere was somber as people who advocate for policies that benefit lower-income households gathered in a modest, chilly conference room at a Homewood Suites in Jackson in March.

Advocates, local politicians and service providers bustled in and out, grabbing lunch and talking about taxes while keeping an eye on other legislative proposals in the waning days of the session. 

Further tax cuts had been floated in Mississippi this year but didn’t make it through.

Even so, they know more will come.

A provision in the 2022 tax law requires the Legislature to revisit by 2026 a proposal to eliminate the income tax entirely. Everyone in the room worried about funding for education, housing, infrastructure and other public goods their communities rely on.

Roby, with One Voice Mississippi, laid out two potential policy solutions: raise taxes on the wealthy to bring in more revenue or enact tax credits aimed at lower-income households to make the state’s tax system less reliant on money from poor people.

Both seem unlikely in the state’s current political climate. For now, Roby said to the people around the conference table, her primary goal is to stave off more cuts.

Alicia Netterville, principal at Acclivity Group and former deputy director of ACLU Mississippi, listened and then turned the conversation to a basic right underpinning every other policy: “Your vote is your currency.” State decisions would look different, she said, if every Black person in Mississippi could vote and participate in state government equally to white people.

Overall voter turnout in the 2020 presidential election in Mississippi was about 60%, sixth worst in the country. Registering to vote here is more difficult than in almost any other state, Public Integrity found as part of a 2022 review of voting access. The state employs most of the tactics traditionally used to keep Black people from voting or thwart their influence in government, including felony disenfranchisement, racial gerrymandering and strict photo ID requirements at the polls.

“You have to pay to play in Mississippi, and that leaves out a lot of people,” Netterville said.

Among the groups pushing restrictions that suppress voting across the country: ALEC and the State Policy Network.

Such restrictions can help state officials enact or ignore policies without worrying as much about the breadth of support for the ideas.

A Mississippi Today/Siena College poll in January, for instance, found that cutting the state’s grocery tax, which most impacts lower-income households, is more popular than eliminating the state’s income tax. 

Mississippi’s grocery tax is the nation’s highest. Most states don’t have one.

“You know, I will argue all day that we're an ALEC puppet state,” Stripp, with Springboard to Opportunities, said at the March meeting. “I think the hardest part of this argument is that the Mississippi Legislature is not accountable to the people of Mississippi. How do we as people of Mississippi push them forward when it's hard to make them accountable to their actual citizens?”

The post State tax systems contribute to inequality. These states are doubling down. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

In the past year, the Supreme Court has made several decisions that have radically reshaped essential rights for Americans spanning from abortion access to gun rights to the separation of church and state. 

The higher court rulings have prompted an array of analyses of how some of these decisions will disproportionately impact some already marginalized groups – like how gutting affirmative action could sharply decrease Black and Latino student enrollment in colleges and overturning abortion rights will especially hurt Black women. A recent article published in the American University Law Review urges readers to also focus on how these decisions, and others pending before the Supreme Court, could affect another marginalized group: people with disabilities. 

The article, “The Disability Docket” — co-authored by University of Pennsylvania professors Jasmine Harris and Karen Tani as well as Shira Wakschlag, senior director of legal advocacy and general counsel of The Arc of the United States — applies a “disability lens” to the Supreme Court’s 2021 and 2022 terms to show how these decisions could have far-reaching implications for marginalized communities. 

And it goes deep into how decisions that aren’t specifically considered disability cases, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, may disproportionately impact people with disabilities. 

But it also delves into how some cases that focus more on disability rights — and are pending before the court — may have broader civil rights impact. One case is Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer for which the court will review the “tester” standing to challenge a hotel’s failure to provide accessibility information on its website, even if the tester never intended to stay at the hotel. Testers act as investigators, where someone voluntarily will put themselves in a situation to experience discrimination for the purpose of a legal challenge. The outcome of that case can have broader impacts on the use of testers in other civil rights cases, like fair housing.

The authors also explore the historical context behind the legal decisions regarding the rights of people with disabilities and other marginalized groups. These decisions, they say, have always been intertwined. The authors also provide advice to litigators and advocates who may find themselves arguing disability cases before this Supreme Court.  

The Center for Public Integrity spoke with two of the papers’ authors, Harris and Tani, to learn more about their findings and why it is important to apply this “disability lens” to the country’s current legal landscape.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: Why was it important to undergo this study of how decisions made by this Supreme Court would impact people with disabilities in particular?

Harris: Disability is an often forgotten piece of the court’s docket and often neglected in terms of how it operates, and that’s reflective of how disability is in society as well. We have differential treatments for people with disabilities, and sometimes that’s warranted, and at other times it’s not. … At all corners of both society and law, you have this sense that disability is different and ought to be treated differently. 

Tani: Disability cases do really important work for the law. Their reach is broader than disability. But my sense is – and I think the sense of other people – is that those decisions tend to get kind of under-appreciated or not recognized at the time. And so the actual significance, the legal significance of those decisions has gone under appreciated.

I think part of the impetus for wanting to do this kind of Supreme Court roundup with the disability throughline was just to say, historically, there’s a pattern here of these cases actually being in some sense much more significant and far reaching, but because they’re labeled like a disability case, they’re not kind of as hot button. They’re not as sexy. They’re considered sort of in that silo. And so the idea, I think was to kind of like, carry that insight forward and see how cases more recent cases might fit that pattern.

Harris: Look, more than 61 million adults in the United States – that’s just adults – have one or more disabilities. And that’s before COVID. We haven’t had the post-COVID numbers with long haulers included in there. Disability is more pervasive than we think, and so if we see disability as touching many more things, places and people than it already does then applying a disability lens becomes even more important. 

Q:   What are some examples of “non-disability” cases heard by this Supreme Court that impact people with disabilities?

Tani: There are these big cases where they’re going to affect people with disabilities, and that effect has just not been part of the conversation. So I think our insights with both — Dobbs and West Virginia vs. the EPA — is to say, look this has a really particular and potentially severe impact on certain people with disabilities. And let’s kind of surface that as well. 

For the West Virginia vs. the EPA case, we drew on some great evidence, by other folks, about the way that people with disabilities are just disproportionately impacted by climate disasters and other disasters for various reasons, some of which have to do with underlying vulnerability and economic precarity. 

Harris: For people with disabilities, abortion has always been part of healthcare. It’s always been something that’s been talked about, not only from an individual body standpoint that [pregnancy will result in the body] taking on more stressors that create or exacerbate disabilities, but also in terms of reproductive options and choices more broadly. It’s also for people with disabilities who want to become parents, and the kind of struggle that has been around that, and that dates back to eugenics.

With respect to Dobbs, you have situations where it’s already really hard for people with disabilities to travel right independently. Now they have to cross state lines in order to get abortion care that makes it disproportionately difficult.

And so that kind of insight in terms of thinking about the ways in which these cases have compounded effects, when you think about intersectionality, it’s going to affect poor disabled Black and Brown women. That’s who’s going to be disproportionately affected and harmed the most. You have to look at Mississippi, where the rates of disability are incredibly high. The rates of poverty are high, and it’s Black and Brown people in those situations, and when you see all of that together it gives you a different picture of what the discrimination looks like and how it’s operating.

Q: Why is it important for everyone interested in civil rights to be paying attention to the outcome of some disability cases pending before the court?

Tani: Like it or not, the statutes are sort of tethered together. Your lawmakers have basically patterned one after the other, such that, you know, they’re kind of traveling together in the law. So you really do have to pay attention. 

Harris: There’s a sense in which the lack of publicity was a good thing at one point, because the disability rights movement started heavily based on white men. And it was really veterans who had connections with Congress. So there was a way in which that allowed the foundation of the law to push through very quickly in ways that the public didn’t get a chance to understand what this law was going to do and what disability discrimination looked like. 

When something goes wrong in the Supreme Court, the popular retort is, well, you’ve got Congress, so you can go to Congress, and you can vote and your vote matters. I think this is a particularly difficult issue for people with disabilities, because voting and voting rights and access to the vote has been so constrained over time and continues to be [constrained].

How will people with disabilities be able to actually have their voices heard and remedy the harm that comes out of this court?

Tani: I mean, one last thing that I’ll say is that there are disability civil rights cases with the potential to have vast implications for other civil rights laws. The Acheson case is about tester standing and testers are important, not just in the [Americans with Disabilities Act] context, but also the race and fair housing context. It’s an obvious example of where there could be spillover to other contexts. 

Q: What is some of the advice you have for attorneys and advocates bringing disability cases before this Supreme Court?

Tani: Strategy is really important before this court because they could make bad laws. We tried to call attention to some times when you’ll be asked a bad question for the court to decide and you just have to mobilize to change public opinion.

If this case is really going to be that bad, how can we get it off the docket anticipating what the court might do?

The post ‘Disability is an often forgotten piece of the court’s docket’ appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

In the year since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling struck down the constitutional right to abortion, society has been seeing the results of a post-Roe world.

While there is no law in the U.S. that regulates what a man can do with his body, the reproductive health of women is now more regulated than it has been in 50 years. And the scope of reproductive health care that women can receive is highly dependent on where they live.

This creates a system of inequalities and further exacerbates health disparities.

I am a nurse practitioner who studies women’s reproductive health across the lifespan.

My research found that college women are concerned about pregnancy, but they lack knowledge and skills about navigating sexual consent and often participate in sexual activity without explicit consent, leaving them at risk for not using contraception and exposure to sexually transmitted infections.

These findings indicate that women are at risk of pregnancy at a historic time when women’s reproductive rights in the U.S. are restricted and not guaranteed.

Current state of abortion in the US

The Dobbs v. Jackson ruling returned decisions regarding abortion to individual states. This has led to a patchwork of laws that span the entire range from complete bans and tight restrictions to full state protection for abortion.

In some states, such as Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, abortion is banned beginning at six weeks gestational age, when very few women even know they are pregnant. Other states, such as Massachusetts, Vermont, New York and Oregon, have enacted state-level protections for abortion.

The patchwork of state laws also results in a great deal of confusion. In the past year, women’s rights organizations and women’s health advocates have brought numerous legal challenges to restrictive abortion laws. These cases have halted the implementation of some of the strictest abortion regulations until additional court rulings are finalized.

Downstream effects for health care professionals

Abortion training is considered essential health care and a core competency for physicians in obstetrics and gynecology, or OB-GYN, residency programs. Approximately 50% of OB-GYN residency programs are located in states with restricted or highly restricted access to abortion. This will logically result in not only fewer health care providers being trained to perform gynecologic procedures for abortion, but also other conditions such as miscarriage, fetal death and nonviable pregnancies.

In states with changing abortion laws and legal challenges to new laws, physicians are uncertain of what procedures can be legally done. Penalties for violating abortion laws may include arrest, loss of medical license, fines and discipline by state boards of medicine.

As a result, physicians are choosing to leave states with the most restrictive abortion laws, and clinics are closing, which is contributing to the current shortage of health care providers.

Inequalities in health care access

The unequal access to abortion procedures across the country is most directly affecting the poorest women in the U.S.

Currently, 12 states restrict abortion coverage by private insurance, and more than 30 states prohibit public Medicaid payment for abortion. Women who qualify for Medicaid are among the poorest in the U.S. Lack of access to abortion limits education and wage earning and contributes to poverty. States with the most restrictive abortion laws also have limited access to pregnancy care and supportive programs for pregnant and parenting women.

In addition, traveling to a different state to obtain an abortion is often not possible for poor women. Lack of transportation and limited financial resources reduce or eliminate options to obtain an abortion in a different geographic location.

What’s more, states with the most abortion restrictions have some of the worst pregnancy and maternal health outcomes for women, especially women of color. Pregnancy itself is associated with a risk of dying.

Maternal morbidity is the term used to describe short- or long-term health problems that result from pregnancy. Maternal mortality refers to the death of women during pregnancy or within the first six weeks after birth.

For example, Mississippi and Louisiana have the highest rates of maternal mortality in the U.S. and also have the most restrictive abortion laws. Black women have the highest maternal mortality of all races and ethnicities. Women in these states who are unable to terminate a pregnancy have a higher risk of dying as a result of the pregnancy than women in other states.

Additionally, research shows that a woman’s risk of dying related to pregnancy or childbirth is about 14 times higher than the risk of death from an abortion.

In addition to the increased risks of death, there are other physical and mental health implications associated with carrying an undesired pregnancy to term. Being denied access to abortion is associated with increased anxiety and fewer future plans for the next year. Research also shows that not being able to obtain an abortion makes women more likely to live below the federal poverty level and to lack partner support.

Conversely, research has shown that there are few if any significant negative mental health outcomes among women who have abortions.

Unsafe abortions

Restricting legal abortion increases the risk that women will seek out pregnancy termination from unskilled people in unsafe settings. Or they may not seek care quickly for pregnancy complications due to fear of being accused of a crime.

In Texas, physicians are reporting an increase in sepsis, or an overwhelming response to infection, from incomplete abortions. These physicians predict that sepsis will become the leading cause of maternal death in Texas.

Prior to 1973, when Roe v. Wade established constitutional protection for abortion in the U.S., women often resorted to unsafe methods to induce abortion that resulted in a high death toll. Septic abortion wards – or designated areas of hospitals where women were treated for sepsis as a result of illegal abortions – were common. In 1965, 17% of all deaths related to pregnancy were attributed to illegal abortion.

Now that the constitutional right to abortion has been eliminated, more women will inevitably die or become seriously ill due to lack of safe access to abortion services. In states with the most restrictions on abortion, whether a woman meets the criteria for an exemption to save the life of the mother may be decided by a hospital committee. This can delay necessary care and increase the risk to the mother.

Women affected by violence

In the U.S., more than 25% of women will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Violence from an intimate partner is a leading reason for abortion. My research shows that women affected by violence have a higher risk of pregnancy and that college women are at increased risk of nonconsensual and forced sexual encounters.

Currently, there are 14 states with abortion bans that contain no exception for rape or incest or require that the sexual assault be reported to law enforcement to qualify for exception.

Research has shown that women often don’t report sexual assault due to stigma, embarrassment or fear of not being believed. Even if women qualify for an abortion as a result of sexual violence, those who have not filed a formal police report lack “proof” that their pregnancy resulted from assault.

While the changes that have occurred since the fall of Roe one year ago are already deeply concerning, the full effect of eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion won’t be known for years. And as laws are enacted and subsequently challenged, uncertainty and confusion regarding women’s reproductive health care will undoubtedly continue for years to come.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The ability of millions of Americans to make ends meet hinges on how we measure poverty.

But the “how” may shift after a national panel recommended changes to one of the Census Bureau’s poverty measures.

Designing a fair and accurate measure is no simple matter. It’s also surprisingly political because it drives public policy and government spending, including who gets access to help such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. 

“There’s two main uses for poverty measures,” said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, executive director of the Center for Law and Social Poverty. “One is determining eligibility for programs or benefits or tax credits. The other is just to paint a portrait of the actual income deprivation that families face throughout the country.”

Some of the debate boils down to which of the Census Bureau’s two poverty yardsticks is more appropriate for determining who qualifies for government aid: the Official Poverty Measure or the Supplemental Poverty Measure. 

The country’s Official Poverty Measure was developed in the 1960s, based solely on a family’s ability to purchase food. The supplemental, with data first released in 2011, uses a standard of living based on expenditures that include food, clothing, shelter and utilities, compared against a household’s post-tax income, which accounts for government aid and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

It’s rare for the two measures to go in different directions — but recently they have.

The poverty rate under the Official Poverty Measure grew from an estimated 10.5% to 11.6% of the population between 2019 and 2021, the Census Bureau reported last year. In contrast, the rate under the Supplemental Poverty Measure decreased from 11.8% to 7.8%. 

One of the main reasons: stimulus payments from the government to households during the COVID-19 pandemic, which helped raise many households’ incomes temporarily. 

That’s the backdrop to a new National Academy of Sciences panel report, requested by the Census Bureau, that recommends the agency make the Supplemental Poverty Measure its official yardstick and incorporate several updates to it. 

Unlike the Official Poverty Measure, whose methodology has remained largely unchanged since its inception, the Supplemental Poverty Measure was designed to evolve with the changing demands of society. 

The panel was tasked by the Census Bureau to see if the supplemental measure, or SPM,  “was adequately measuring the economic needs of disadvantaged households in the country,” said James Ziliak, professor of economics and director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky, who chaired the panel.

“The SPM has a long and sound conceptual basis but itself is imperfect and should be continuously improved,” said Dutta-Gupta, who was also on the panel. “The hope is to get a more accurate portrait of poverty in the United States.”

Medical care — and specifically health insurance — should be included when considering a basic-needs bundle for a household, the panel found. 

The panel also determined that child care has become a large and rapidly growing portion of families’ out-of-pocket spending.

“Every child needs care, and we’re spending significant resources for households to meet that care,” said Ziliak.

The panel also suggested ways  for the Census Bureau to better capture housing costs, generally the largest component of a household’s spending. 

Perhaps most significantly, the panel felt that this measure should no longer be considered “supplemental” but be elevated to be the “Principal Poverty Measure” and used as the “nation’s headline poverty statistic.” 

That could have big ripple effects. The Official Poverty Measure — or a close variation — is used by nearly two dozen government agencies to determine eligibility for federal programs, according to the panel’s report.

There’s wide recognition that the current official measure’s income thresholds for poverty are far below what families need to sustain themselves. Many agencies try to account for that with their program eligibility limits: The USDA sets the maximum income to qualify for the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program at 185% of the Official Poverty Measure thresholds, for instance.  

“There is a desire to have an absolute measure of poverty,” said Gregory Acs, vice president for income and benefits policy at the Urban Institute, who was not on the panel. That’s what the Official Poverty Measure is meant to do, “but that misses the point. What food a family needs to buy and what constitutes a healthy diet has changed over time — and what you need to participate in society has changed.” 

The panel suggested continuing to use the current Official Poverty Measure — though perhaps renaming it the Basic Poverty Measure or Basic Income Poverty Measure — to maintain data on historical poverty trends and as an alternative yardstick for program eligibility.

The panel’s recommendations sparked some political pushback. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, sent a letter to the Census Bureau that expressed concern over the potential impacts.

The report, Rubio wrote, “recommends a sweeping set of changes that would prevent our government from accurately measuring poverty and would instead advance progressive political priorities. The authors of this report have not only overstepped their commission, but have also broken a sacred trust long defining the relationship between research experts and policymakers.” 

“Poverty measures, in other words, are not purely technical instruments,” he added. “They signal a national consensus about the goals of our economy and system of government.”

In addition to criticizing the panel’s recommendation to elevate the Supplemental Poverty Measure, Rubio disagreed with the suggestions to include other variables in the calculation, like childcare and health insurance. 

A May study from a right-leaning think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, determined that several federal programs — including food assistance — would expand to cover families making more money if the Supplemental Poverty Measure was broadly used to determine program eligibility. That would come with a multi-billion-dollar price tag, the study concluded.

The Official Poverty Measure has long been criticized by experts across the political spectrum, but many say it still serves a purpose.

“For program eligibility at the household level, you want a straightforward measure that’s not hard for people to document or produce lots of paperwork for sources of income,” Dutta-Gupta said. “If you made that measure too complex for program eligibility, then families struggling would have to figure out if they need to get their housing assistance before food assistance and other things that would be highly undesirable.”

Ziliak said it would be a huge administrative undertaking for the federal government to change eligibility rules for so many programs. The Official Poverty Measure also offers historical trends and data going much further back than the supplemental measure. 

“Official poverty gives us a consistent long history,” said Liana Fox, assistant division chief for economic characteristics at the Census Bureau. “SPM allows us to study the impact of government programs on reducing poverty.” 

Others have said that neither of these measures are adequate for determining who is most disadvantaged economically, but have suggested that a consumption-based measure, rather than an income-based measure, would be better.

The debate over the National Academy of Sciences panel’s suggestions shows just how subjective defining poverty is. And it underscores the importance of that definition for households struggling to cover basic costs of living.

“I think it’s important for people to understand how we measure poverty so they understand how public policy and macroeconomic conditions impact poverty,” Dutta-Gupta said. “Large changes [in poverty] are entirely because of the economy or public policy changes. It has shockingly little to do with people’s individual choices.” 

But all of these measures have been facing new challenges over the past decade. Survey responses involved in these data collection efforts are decreasing as people regularly screen phone calls from unknown numbers and answer their doors less — and some communities have long been hard to reach. To address this, the Census Bureau is trying to use other data, including administrative information from programs like Social Security.

“But that data is often terrible at identifying some identities, like race, and don’t perfectly align with the poverty measures,” Dutta-Gupta said of the administrative data. “I would note that in general, the worst data quality is often from people who are struggling the most.”

The Census Bureau’s Fox said that any changes implemented to the Supplemental Poverty Measure would take years to implement. 

An interagency working group will be vetting the report’s recommendations. Once that’s done, there will be a multiyear process for public engagement. 

Fox said the agency’s priority is to be transparent.

Acs thinks it’s important not to lose sight of the people that the poverty rate encompasses as we weigh these changes.

“We measure poverty because there are people who have such limited resources that they cannot make ends meet,” Acs said. “They cannot fully participate in society. They are so resource-deprived that it is a threat to their health and wellbeing.”

The post Why the way we measure poverty matters appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

This story was published as a partnership between the Center for Public Integrity and Fresnoland

When Arlin Benavides Jr. set out to hear residents’ environmental concerns in one of the most marginalized parts of a region facing water scarcity, groundwater contamination, extreme heat and other woes, he wasn’t sure if people would open their doors, much less talk. 

He was aiming to engage with people in Tulare County in California’s Central Valley, a region known as the food basket of the world and a place with extreme poverty. Many of the residents live in remote, isolated farming hamlets.     

In these far-flung communities, Benavides, an AmeriCorps CivicSpark Fellow working for Tulare County’s Resource Management Agency, discovered that residents felt forgotten by their local government officials. When he explained that he was part of the agency’s effort to develop an environmental justice element for the county’s general plan, he was met with suspicion and skepticism. 

“You could see anger rise within them. They would tell me stories of just not having good experiences — most commonly it was the story that they had told previous government agencies what they needed, what were the challenges, and they felt like those changes were not done soon enough,” said Benavides, whose fellowship was part of a CivicSpark program that aims to help local public agencies address community issues such as climate change, water resource management and housing.

What had changed between those experiences and Benavides showing up on their doorsteps: California started requiring local governments to integrate environmental justice principles into their planning processes. 

The first such law in the nation, Senate Bill 1000 calls for municipal leaders to engage communities in a meaningful way while doing land use work, such as updating general plans, which set priorities for development. Ultimately, the 2016 law aims to address environmental inequities caused by land use policies, such as poor air quality in communities of color hemmed in by industrial facilities. But on the ground, addressing entrenched inequities baked into urban planning policies can be tough.     

In a newly released study, two researchers examined those challenges as municipalities across California implemented SB 1000. It’s an analysis they hope can illuminate efforts across the nation as civic leaders seek solutions for communities burdened by pollution — often Black, Latino, Indigenous and low income.

The study’s authors, Michelle E. Zuñiga and Michael Méndez, said the research was inspired by feedback they heard from community and environmental justice organizations who shared their struggles about how SB 1000 was being implemented and what they described as spotty compliance, particularly in communities facing environmental hazards. 

For example: city or county planners who don’t understand institutional and socio-economic barriers facing residents, or planning managers who aren’t supportive of or in some cases are hostile to incorporating environmental justice into their work. 

Some municipalities argue that existing land use regulations and policies benefit everyone equally, and that explicit environmental justice ordinances or provisions in a general plan are unnecessary, said Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine. 

“Time and time again we see how that is not the case, that urban planning has been used as a racist tool kit to enforce existing disparities within and among communities,” he said.

To determine how the law was being implemented in communities with high levels of cumulative environmental health impacts, Zuñiga and Méndez focused their study on cities and counties with census tracts identified by the state’s environmental health screening tool as the most disadvantaged by pollution, such as toxic releases, groundwater threats, traffic fumes and hazardous waste. 

Results, they found, have been mixed. There are positive outcomes, such as the creation of environmental justice advisory committees in Tulare and other counties. But many obstacles remain. The researchers found that some communities experience ineffective community engagement, little support from elected officials, limited discussions of environmental racism and a lack of resources to implement and monitor the measures needed to comply with the law. 

These challenges mean progress toward environmental justice will be slow and uneven, the authors wrote: “Environmental justice will not be fully realized without strong oversight and political leadership, and racial diversification of urban planning institutions.” 

Their research also affirmed the need for the type of guidance that the California Attorney General’s bureau of environmental justice has issued to local governments about the law. The bureau has done this via comment letters that point out shortcomings in local approaches, but it also provides feedback on how to comply with the law. One of those letters to Tulare County, for example, urged officials not to rush through their general plan amendments before fully engaging with disadvantaged communities.

Attorney General Rob Bonta has also intervened in Fresno, saying in 2022 that Fresno County’s draft general plan raised “civil rights and environmental justice concerns” and pressing Fresno city leaders not to approve a rezoning proposal that would add pollution in “some of the most over-burdened and under-invested environmental justice communities in all of California.”

In some cases,  Zuñiga and Méndez discovered a lack of understanding among planners on how to define environmental justice, so they outlined in the paper how environmental justice is measured, observed and defined. 

Last fall when they presented their preliminary findings at the American Planning Association conference, some planners shared that they’ve faced pushback from leaders in politically conservative municipalities, while others described challenges with implementation in areas with historic under-investment, said  Zuñiga, an assistant professor of urban and community planning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Increasingly, she’s seen more planners across the country take on the task of addressing environmental injustices through local government plans, even without laws such as SB 1000.  

“This work is very important, not only for California, where there is a policy mandate, but for other planners in other areas of the country that are taking on this charge as well,” she said. “Because of the push of the community organizations prioritizing environmental justice, they also are pushing for environmental justice plans.”

When Benavides first began his fellowship in Tulare County in late 2019, he decided to reach out to Sacramento County, which had already approved an environmental justice element in their general plan. He wanted to know how they involved community organizations in the process. He learned that Sacramento opted to create an environmental justice advisory committee, a process that he knew would also reinforce the requirements of SB 1000.  

But first Benavides set out to conduct outreach to understand the issues — from housing and food justice to public utilities and transportation — that residents faced. Benavides, a resident of the more affluent Marin County near San Francisco, was shocked by what he found. 

“I didn’t really realize that there were people that didn’t have potable water; that the conditions which [farmworker advocate] Cesar Chavez was trying to improve or ameliorate are still existing in Tulare County,” said Benavides, who was particularly struck by the stark disparities in wealth between farm owners and the working class residents living in unincorporated areas of the county. 

The geographical distances between the county seat of Visalia and these small communities were further deepened by a lack of regular visits from county officials. One woman Benavides spoke to was initially angry as she described how, despite repeated efforts to share the problems facing her community, living conditions either don’t improve at all or don’t improve fast enough. “I think that this is also an ongoing cycle where planners go out into a community to really try to understand people, and then, the moment a plan is developed those relationships are not maintained, those stories are not valued,” said Benavides.

He knows that often this happens because planning agencies may lack the bandwidth or resources to maintain these relationships. But that day, as he spoke to this resident, he decided that no explanation could excuse what she had gone through.

So rather than offer an excuse, he apologized. The woman was so overcome with emotion that she started crying. “I felt like as a representative of local government, it was my due diligence to say, ‘I’m sorry for everything that you’ve experienced,’” he said. 

But he also explained that there was something he could do to help in that instance, and that was to invite her to participate in the environmental justice advisory committee that was being formed as part of the general plan process to develop an environmental element. 

“There is something that I can do for you, and that is to guarantee that you have a seat at the table,” Benavides told her.

Ultimately, Tulare County did create an Environmental Justice Advisory Committee in 2020 to advise its Resource Management Agency. Key to that is providing feedback on the county’s draft environmental justice element and ensuring that it improves the quality of life for disadvantaged communities throughout the county.

When Benavides ended his fellowship in 2020 and passed the baton to the next AmeriCorps CivicSpark fellow, he was glad to know the committee would continue the relationship-building work. 

It’s that level of engagement, he said, where residents’ experiences are not only valued but are imprinted in the land-use planning documents, that can transform lives for the better.  

Inviting residents to collaborate on land use and development was a first step, he said. Equally as important for real change, he told residents, is that “we continue building a relationship after that is done.”

The post Planning for environmental justice for all appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Luis Alfredo Galindo, a music professor and mariachi from Bogota, Colombia, began looking for ways to immigrate legally to the U.S. in 2019 and find a safe place for his wife and two kids away from the violence of his home country. 

He talked to attorneys and scoured the internet, but he couldn’t find any viable options. He’d almost given up when one of his bandmates told him about a recruiter specializing in employment-based visas for unskilled shortage workers, also known as EB3 other visas.

Badger Bus Lines Inc., of Madison, Wisconsin, was looking to sponsor foreign workers and the recruiter linked the company with Galindo. It cost more than $22,000 and took more than two years for Galindo and his family to go through the process.

“It was not easy but I’m glad we waited,” said Galindo, 51. “It was practically the same money as coming here illegally, but you arrive with all the legal documents to start a life the right way in this country.”

U.S. companies sponsored a record number of unskilled foreign workers like Galindo this past year, but experts and industry leaders say outdated caps, high costs and long wait times push most migrants looking to fill underpaid, physically demanding jobs to immigrate to the U.S. illegally. Despite the increase, many companies in desperate need of workers are still hesitant or unable to participate in these types of visa programs. 

Brian Turmail, spokesman for the Associated General Contractors of America, says visa applications for construction workers are often denied even after companies show the Department of Labor that they advertised a position in a local newspaper for at least 90 days without success.

“We are not allowing enough people to enter the country legally to fill these jobs,” Turmail said.  “So what happens, we get a lot of workers who are undocumented.”

And this puts undocumented workers in an easier position to be exploited and creates an unfair competitive situation that hurts companies with a legal workforce, he said.

The employment-based visa program — created by Congress under the Immigration Act of 1990 — has three main categories, each with a 40,000-worker yearly limit.

The first two are for people with extraordinary qualifications or skills, generally workers with advanced degrees such as software engineers, physicians and veterinarians. The third category is for people in high-demand occupations with at least a bachelor’s degree such as teachers. The U.S. grants about 10,000 “EB3 other” visas that don’t have an educational requirement.

There were nearly 8,900 EB3 other visas issued in fiscal year 2022. That’s more than double the number issued the previous year and more than any prior year since at least 2016, U.S. State Department data show. The agency attributed some of the increase in EB3 and all other visas to pandemic-related office closures that delayed processing on applications put in before 2022, a spokesperson wrote in an email.

Department of Labor data show meatpackers, landscapers and housekeepers had the most unskilled permanent visas issued in 2022. These jobs have always been at the top of the foreign worker visa program. But some of the recent growth is also driven by nurses, home health aides and restaurant workers, occupations that were not as prominent in previous years.

William Kandel, an immigration policy analyst for the Congressional Research Service, a bipartisan public policy research institute that works for the U.S. Congress, said he attributes the increased demand for foreign workers to the pandemic. 

“COVID has had a big impact on the willingness of U.S. workers to accept lower-skilled, low-paid jobs,” Kandel said. “And with jobs already having long-standing labor shortages, like nursing and healthcare, it just worsened things.”

Kandel said the demand for EB3 visas surpassed the supply for nearly two decades. But the number of EB3 visas issued has not reached the 10,000 cap because there is an additional annual cap of 7% per country. 

In China, for example, foreign workers looking to fill unskilled entry-level jobs in the U.S. must wait more than 10 years to receive an EB3 visa. In comparison, the current wait time for a worker like Galindo, the mariachi from Colombia, is about two years.     

These limits have not changed since 1990, when Congress created employment-based visas, which increased legal limits on immigration and created a diversity lottery.

“What we're seeing are the strains of dealing with immigration limitations on an economy that has since doubled in size,” Kandel said. “When people can't use legal means, they use illegal means.” 

Manuel Lievano, co-founder of MCC USA, a foreign worker recruiting company based in Miami, Florida, said one of the biggest problems with finding foreign workers to fill low-paid, so-called unskilled entry-level jobs in the U.S. is that these jobs actually require a high level of skill and training.

An entry-level worker at a factory or in construction requires months of training before being productive, Lievano said. For many employers, this rules out temporary visas such as the H2A and H2B: By the time a sponsored worker gains the skills necessary to do the job, they have to return to their home country.  

The EB3 visa is one of the only choices for employers looking to fill these “unskilled” jobs that require lots of training with permanent workers, Lievano said. But the biggest problem is the cost. 

Foreign workers pay an average of $16,000 in attorney fees, paperwork, travel and consulting for one of these visas. American companies looking to hire meat packers, poultry and construction workers offer yearly salaries ranging from $20,000 to $30,000. 

“Financially, it’s not doable,” Lievano said. “Especially for the type of workers that are willing to take these types of jobs, who are usually poor, uneducated people.”

He said thousands of people from all over the world call his company every month looking to fill the jobs they advertise on their website, but the vast majority never follow through. Those who do are usually professionals who apply for these permanent visas just to obtain permanent residence but would rather work less physically demanding jobs that pay more.

Lievano recruited Galindo, the mariachi singer, in 2019. But he didn’t receive a EB3 visa until 2021, along with a Social Security number and a work permit. Today, Galindo is a school bus driver in Madison, Wisconsin, and is currently attending school to obtain a real estate license. His wife teaches at a local school district. Their son recently got his GED certificate.

Galindo had some English language skills and a college education before arriving in the U.S., but he said the process to obtain an EB3 visa was too cumbersome and costly.

“In the U.S., $20,000 is a lot of money, but in Latin America, this is someone’s life savings,” Galindo said. “Whether it’s legal or not, immigrants put everything on the line when they come to the U.S. It’s not an easy decision to leave it all behind and start again from nothing.”

The post How outdated visa policies drive illegal immigration appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Hundreds of anti-transgender bills proposed in state legislatures are sold as measures to protect minors — such as Idaho’s Vulnerable Child Protection Act and Montana’s Youth Health Protection Act — but advocacy groups and doctors warn that the effect is exactly the opposite.

So far this year, legislators in nearly every state have introduced over 550 anti-transgender bills — more than in the past eight years combined. Almost 30 such bills have been introduced in Congress.

The onslaught includes limits on health care access, removing LGBTQ+ materials from schools and banning trans athletes from sports teams. Seventy-two measures are now law.

“Young people are being harmed, regardless of whether bills pass or not,” said Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides crisis support to LGBTQ youth. 

In a nationwide survey of LGBTQ+ teens and young adults in late 2022, the Trevor Project found that 86% of transgender and nonbinary youth said anti-trans bills negatively impacted their mental health.

“It’s a constant debate on my existence and it just makes me exhausted and frustrated that I have to legitimately just live,” one trans individual responded.

Others said they feared for their life, safety and future.

The survey found other impacts from the legislation, including:

• 45% of transgender respondents experienced online harassment 
• 24% were bullied at school
• 42% stopped speaking to a family member 

“LGBTQ young people are watching, and internalizing the anti-LGBTQ messages they see in the media and from their elected officials,” Kasey Suffredini, vice president of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project, said in a statement. “And so are those that would do our community harm.”

Gender-affirming care

In 20 states, those younger than 18 have lost or will soon lose access to the health care necessary to transition to the gender with which they identify. Legislatures in seven other states are considering similar policies, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Gender-affirming care encompasses a range of social, medical, behavioral and psychological services to support and affirm a person’s gender identity when in conflict with the one they were assigned at birth. Treatment plans vary depending on the needs of the individual. 

It can include puberty blockers, which pause development to give an individual time to decide whether to continue transitioning. They are completely reversible. Puberty blockers also have been used for decades on cisgender children experiencing early-onset puberty.

In later adolescence, a transgender teenager might undergo hormone therapy. The medication can help align a person’s body with their gender identity, including regulating hair growth and vocal pitch. It is partially reversible. 

Despite rhetoric used by prominent Republican politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, gender-affirming surgeries are uncommon in patients under 18. Current medical guidelines say minors should not undergo genital surgery. Chest surgery is recommended only in specific cases — and after a teen has lived as their desired gender for ample time and undergone hormone therapy for at least a year.

More than a dozen studies of trans youth show that access to gender-affirming care is associated with better mental health outcomes. It has also been recognized as a medical necessity by more than 25 major medical organizations.

But new policies in some states eliminate options for those wishing to transition.

“When you have legislation that works to require people to hide or not be in their own identities, it will likely cause substantial damage to their health and wellness,” said Christopher AhnAllen, a clinical psychologist who developed the Gender Diversity Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts.

AhnAllen said some of his own patients have expressed concerns about the recent anti-trans legislation and debates. 

While most legislation applies only to new patients, proposals in some states — including South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Kentucky — require youth currently receiving care to stop, effectively forcing them to detransition.

“Detransitioning is going to exacerbate gender dysphoria and collectively lead to poor health outcomes,” AhnAllen said.

Classroom crackdowns

In 2020, the Idaho legislature passed the country’s first statewide law banning transgender student athletes from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity. Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law was the first enacted in the country in 20 years, restricting school employees from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation. Similar proposals in over a dozen states followed.

The American Civil Liberties Union tallied over 200 anti-LGBTQ+ bills relating to schools and education proposed by state legislators this year.

“Following a year of unprecedented book bans and classroom gag orders, this state legislation is not surprising,” said LGBTQ+ youth activist Cameron Samuels. Now a freshman at Brandeis University, they led a successful effort, along with the ACLU, to reverse book bans and internet censorship at their high school in Katy, Texas.

For years, the Katy Independent School District had blocked online resources like the Trevor Project, the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBTQ+ advocacy groups with a “human sexuality” filter, according to the Houston Chronicle. The school also removed “books upon books” touching on topics like LGBTQ+ identities and race, Samuels said. Classroom censorship bills proposed across the country aim to do the same — but at a statewide level.

“These policies are not just political statements but affect our very lives each and every day,” Samuels said. “It could be a matter of life and death whether a student can access a suicide prevention lifeline like the Trevor Project.” 

LGBTQ+ students’ need for these resources could rise as advocacy groups track an increase in hostile educational environments.

A 2021 study by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network also found negative impacts on trans youth as a result of anti-trans legislation. Its recent research on school climates suggests the nationwide debates over trans rights have created more hostile attitudes toward LGBTQ+ students.

“Trans and nonbinary young people in schools who have been targeted by these athletic bans and medical bans have reported higher rates of things like bullying and harassment,” said Aaron Ridings, GLSEN chief of staff and deputy executive director for public policy and research.

Ridings said GLSEN research shows that four supports are critical for LGBTQ+ students. These include curriculum that represents all students, youth leadership clubs like Gay-Straight Alliances, comprehensive anti-discrimination policies and a network of supportive adults.

“These four supports improve school climate, student health and academic achievement,” Ridings said. 

But those supports would be restricted under numerous bills proposed in state legislatures. 

Some have already passed this year. Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa and Kentucky enacted so-called “bathroom bans,” which prohibit trans students from using restrooms that align with their gender identities. Wyoming and Kentucky banned trans girls from participating in interscholastic girls’ sports. 

New laws in Utah and Arkansas prevent schools from acknowledging trans students’ gender identities, including preferred name and pronouns, without written parental permission. An Indiana bill would require school staff — including school psychologists — to notify a parent if their student requests to use a different name or pronoun.

In late March, the Kentucky General Assembly overrode Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of an omnibus anti-trans bill, which included prohibiting schools from requiring the use of preferred pronouns. The policy also bans lessons “studying or exploring gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation.” 

Samuels, who is studying politics, said the students being affected by these anti-LGBTQ+ policies do not have an equal voice on school boards and in state legislatures. This has led to policy decisions being made “at the expense of students.” 

“If we are proposing legislation that will harm a certain group of people, no matter how large or how small, it’s an attack on all of us, because this could happen to any community,” Samuels said.

The post ‘Young people are being harmed’: the effect of anti-trans legislation appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Maryuri embarked on her three-month journey from Venezuela to the U.S. in July 2022, crossing nine borders on crutches with a broken foot.

She traveled with her son, now 9 years old. Their path included traversing the often deadly Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama. 

She fled an economic crisis that left her unable to afford basic necessities like food and antibiotics, under the shadow of the Venezuelan government’s human rights abuses. Public Integrity is not publishing Maryuri’s full name to protect the safety of her and her family. 

Soon after arriving in Texas in October, Maryuri and her son boarded a bus bound for D.C. where she hoped “to prosper, not just survive.” 

Instead, Maryuri said she has struggled to access quality food, stable and clean housing, work opportunities and affordable health care because of her migrant status.

Maryuri and her son are among at least 9,400 Latin American migrants who have been voluntarily bused to D.C. from Texas and Arizona in the past year. The approximately 12% who stay in the city face similar challenges as Maryuri, according to advocacy groups, which are pushing for more long-term solutions.

“We are being penalized for being poor and this goes against the definition of sanctuary that this city supposedly claims to be,” Maryuri told the D.C. Council on Feb. 23.

Temporary solutions, long-term needs

The Migrant Services and Supports Act passed late last year authorized D.C.’s mayor to establish programs for the arriving migrants, including the Office of Migrant Services. The new division supports bus reception, immediate care of new arrivals, temporary housing and, if desired, transportation to other destinations.

The city should “absolutely” have an office and accompanying legislation that provides services to migrants, said Eli Johnson, executive director of Congregation Action Network, which has been working with the migrants since the first buses arrived. However, the current system “is very focused on short-term emergency services and not long-term resettlement services,” Johnson said. 

The act bars those eligible for aid through the Office of Migrant Services from resources provided to unhoused people in the district under homeless services law. This includes long-term housing and childcare vouchers.

“There should be no immigration-based restrictions on any services in the city,” Johnson said. 

An emergency amendment to the migrant services law was enacted in late April to clarify who is eligible for aid, require written denials and set shelter safety standards. But these policies are set to expire later this summer. A proposed extension is awaiting congressional review.

“We are still evaluating what a permanent support system for migrants coming to D.C. should look like,” said Councilmember Robert White, who introduced the legislation. 

“Dirty and dangerous” housing

After arriving last fall, Maryuri and her son moved into one of the three shelters the city set up for migrants with children. These facilities reached capacity on April 26, with about 1,250 people across 370 families, according to city officials. 

The city is keeping the shelters closed despite having open rooms, said Madhvi Venkatraman, a core organizer with Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, which was formed in response to the buses. MSMAN reported the facilities now house 359 families.

Venkatraman estimated that there are about 20 migrant families in Washington currently without housing. 

“There are definitely a bunch of families sleeping in cars or some that are out in the streets that we don’t know of because not everybody knows [about MSMAN],” she said.

Those who are staying in the family shelters have experienced “dirty and dangerous” conditions like bed bugs and mold, Maryuri said. 

The food is sometimes raw or rotten, she said. Maryuri and her son have experienced stomach aches, diarrhea and hair loss. 

“I live without appetite and without energy due to the malnutrition that we are experiencing in the [shelter] due to the poor quality of the food we receive,” Maryuri told the council in February.

But council members, including White, who visited the shelters in March saw a different picture. He said the rooms he was shown were clean and OMS staff “made it sound like they had responded to issues with food” and other necessities. 

“But the fact that what I saw on my visit contrasts so strongly with what I’ve heard directly from migrants and advocates makes me believe the emergency legislation is even more important to ensure our agencies are clear on the services and resources they are required to provide,” White said. 

Shelter residents told Johnson that the visiting council members were taken to a room that had been cleaned in anticipation of the visit. It was made to look “much better than what the migrants are actually living in,” Johnson said.

Migrants without families rely on short stays at homeless shelters and volunteers’ houses, Venkatraman said. For long-term options, advocacy groups try to find cheap apartments. Venkatraman said MSMAN sometimes pays the first month’s rent, furnishes apartments and even co-signs leases. But that’s not sustainable in a city with housing costs 50% higher than the national average. 

“We can’t put up people indefinitely in housing, we don’t have the resources,” Venkatraman said.

Employment barriers

Finding a job that will cover D.C.’s high cost of living has been a struggle for many migrants, Johnson said. Most lack the permits required to work in the U.S. 

Those who work without authorization are vulnerable to unhealthy conditions and wage theft, which MSMAN has seen “rampant amounts of,” Venkatraman said. 

While the district offers a limited purpose ID for residents who do not have a social security number, Venkatraman said many recent migrants do not have the required documentation. That means they can’t work, open bank accounts, sign leases, apply for health insurance or get married — which can be important for asylum applications. 

“It is truly an uphill battle,” Venkatraman said. 

“There’s upfront issues of conditions and the services [the district is] not providing, but the scarier, bigger issue is there’s no long-term plan for these folks,” she said.

No line item in the D.C. budget accounts for the Office of Migrant Services, Venkatraman said, so the services are being funded on contingency. This offers less transparency and is unreliable — shelters and services could abruptly end, Venkatraman said. The mayor’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year does not include funding for OMS.

In response to requests for comment, a spokesperson from the D.C. Department of Human Services said all statements regarding OMS are currently on hold.

Refugees’ “only option”

While buses continue to arrive in Washington, it is not the only city struggling to accommodate migrants. New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently implemented plans to transport willing migrants to locations outside of the city. On May 23, he announced a court filing seeking to suspend the long-standing “right to shelter” mandate that requires the city to provide temporary accommodations to anyone seeking it. Chicago officials have resorted to using police stations and community centers to temporarily house hundreds of people. 

Despite the recent expiration of Title 42 — a COVID-19 era policy that allowed the U.S. to expel asylum seekers without due process — many migrants will still not qualify for asylum in the U.S. because a new regulation requires anyone who passes through another country to seek refuge there first.

“It’s extra important that local jurisdictions provide services to people even if they’re not here with authorization,” Johnson said. “Because we’re turning away refugees en masse at the border, so this is people’s only option.”

The post As migrant busing continues, advocates push for long-term solutions appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.