webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

Head Start pre-K

---

9 26 maga hates kids

holistic approach; 4:1 1/3 of food, diagnose learning, biling

Sep 9, 2026 Why, America? with Leeja Miller

| The Trump administration issued new rules last month that would gut Head Start programs across the country. The move is not to empower parents or states, like the regime claims, but instead to eviscerate the only federal program that provides holistic services to impoverished children and their families. Leave your comment before October 6, 2026: https://www.federalregister.gov/docum...

🔗 Sources: https://www.leejamiller.com/episodes/... 🎙️Listen to the podcast version of every episode here: https://www.leejamiller.com/why-america

MAGA Hates Children

---

AN 2 24

A Survey of early childhood educators and caregivers released Sunday shows the post-pandemic collapse of federal funding is fueling a national crisis for young children and their families as centers suffer and out-of-pocket costs soar.

The findings of the survey—titled "We Are NOT OK" and put out by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)—resulted from questions posed to over 10,000 professionals in the early childhood education sector.

Of those polled, more than 50% reported staffing shortages in the various kinds of centers they own or operate, including faith-based programs, family child care homes, Head Start facilities, and childcare centers. Those shortages, according to respondents, stem in part from low wages and burnout from staff who are overloaded but underpaid since federal support dried up.

"Significant public investment in child care is needed urgently to ensure programs can retain qualified educators and remain open to serve children and families."

Rising costs but diminishing support from public subsidies have forced operators to increase tuition which in turn has put pressure on families to withdraw—creating a vicious loop.

"The loss of federal funds that helped the early childhood sector weather the pandemic has exacerbated long-standing challenges like low wages and high operating costs, leading to staff shortages, program closures, and rising family tuition rates," said Michelle Kang, the CEO of NAEYC.

Among other key findings of the 50-state survey:

Such troubling findings, said Kang, make clear that "significant public investment in child care is needed urgently to ensure programs can retain qualified educators and remain open to serve children and families."

Republicans in Congress, joined by too many right-leaning Democrats, have backpedaled on social spending in the wake of the pandemic. Multiple economic analyses and reams of data have shown that public investments in childhood education and poverty reduction had immediate and far-reaching positive impacts, but austerity-guided policies and refusals to raise federal revenues by taxing the rich or corporations have seen those gains erased.

Last fall, Sens. Patty Murray and Bernie Sanders put forward a bill to provide $16 billion in annual childcare funding over five years to prevent what experts predicted would be a childcare disaster.

"We are here today to sound the alarm and put forward a commonsense solution, before childcare providers might have to close their doors, before kids lose their childcare slots, and before parents could face higher costs—or simply be forced to leave their jobs to take care of their kids," warned Murray at a September press conference introducing the legislation.

No Republican in the Senate backed the measure and the bill still languishes in Congress thanks to GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

On Thursday, Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service Danny Werfel toldCNBC in an interview that the U.S. government loses approximately $150 billion annually from tax evasion by the nation's wealthiest individuals.

"When I look at what we call our tax gap, which is the amount of money owed versus what is paid for," said Werfel, "millionaires and billionaires that either don't file or [are] underreporting their income, that's $150 billion of our tax gap."

Earlier this month, the IRS announced that it could collect approximately $560 billion in additional tax revenue over the next decade so long as Republican lawmakers were thwarted in their efforts to claw back large portions of $80 billion in funding the agency was provided as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

As the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) said in response to Werfel's comments on Thursday, a $150 billion annually would amount to $1.5 trillion over the coming decade.

That's enough, ATF added, "to expand the Child Tax Credit for 10 years, lifting millions of kids permanently out of poverty. We can do great things when we crack down on wealthy tax cheats."

That $150 billion figure is also nearly ten times what it would cost to fund the Murray-Sanders childcare bill for one year.

As Sanders said in September, "If we can afford to spend over $1 trillion on tax breaks for the top 1% and large corporations making record-breaking profits, we can afford to provide working class families with the childcare they desperately need."

---

---

jake j commn dr an 1 24

two new reports published Tuesday by the Roosevelt Institute argue that robust corporate taxation is key to creating a strong economy and improving the well-being of families and children—objectives that have been undermined in the decades since the Reagan era by regressive tax cuts enacted on the false premise that benefits would "trickle down" to the rest of society.

The first report, A Mapping of the Full Potential of U.S. Corporate Taxation to Enhance Child and Family Well-Being, examines what the authors describe as the understudied notion that "increasing corporate taxation will necessarily help children and families by providing additional revenue for essential public services."

That perspective runs counter to what the Roosevelt Institute's second report calls "a 'cut-to-grow' mentality" that rose to prominence in the 1970s and was enthusiastically embraced by the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

"Under this view, the thinking went, it was necessary to reduce the corporate tax rate to grow the economy—and that this growth would allow gains to eventually 'trickle down' from the rich shareholders to the middle class," the report states. "During this time, the corporate tax rate was gradually reduced to 35% before it was dramatically cut to 21% in 2017. These cuts resulted in corporate tax revenues falling to less than 10% of total federal revenues."

"Perhaps more than any other, President Ronald Reagan leveraged mounting backlash to taxation and government spending to dramatically reduce both, regardless of the consequences to American families," the report observes.

"Corporate tax policy since Reagan has been driven by the trickle-down economics narrative that cutting the taxes on 'job creators' will benefit less wealthy U.S. taxpayers."

The decades-long decline in corporate tax rates has severely undermined the federal government's ability to finance critical public goods, from education to childcare.

"Since regressive corporate tax cuts don't significantly increase earnings for working families (through either wage or employment increases), but they do reduce the government's ability to fund family income and care supports, childcare costs—which are already rising—can become a relatively more expensive line item in working parents' household budgets," reads the Roosevelt Institute's first report, authored by Emily DiVito and Niko Lusiani.

"When they can't afford childcare," they added, "parents face the difficult choice of having to cut costs in other places—often on the basic necessities that allow children to thrive, like food, clothing, and enrichment activities—or taking on additional caregiving duties themselves."

At the state and local levels, DiVito and Lusiani noted, "corporations' successful efforts to avoid their full property tax liability devastate public school budgets."

DiVito, deputy director for the corporate power program at the Roosevelt Institute, said Tuesday that "we have a false idea in the U.S. that corporate tax policy is unrelated to equitable social reforms."

"However, strong corporate tax policy is vital to all aspects of a thriving economy," she argued. "And the failing to reimagine a more ambitious and comprehensive use of corporate tax policy prevents us from achieving a more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economy and society for all families."

The new reports come a week after a bipartisan pair of House and Senate negotiators announced a deal to expand the child tax credit (CTC) for three years in exchange for a series of corporate tax cuts. The American Prospect's David Dayen estimated that "in the time period when all the tax credits are actually in place, the business tax changes are five times more costly than the CTC changes."

"Who knows if this deal can pass in time to take effect in the upcoming 2023 tax season, if ever. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is already asking for changes to make it even more generous to businesses. That's in part a function of the dissembling that there is 'parity' in the deal. The truth is that this is not an equal trade. And it may extend that inequity well into the future."

That warning is in line with the Roosevelt Institute's new research, which argues that a corporate tax code generous to big business fuels inequality by "benefiting capital interests (i.e., business owners, partners, and shareholders) at the expense of workers and their families."

"When corporations enjoy low taxes on their profits, they face a trade-off for how to otherwise disperse them: make investments in the workforce and productive capacity (e.g., raise wages, hire more workers, and/or upgrade buildings, equipment, or technology) or distribute them to shareholders (i.e., pay out dividends and buy back stock to inflate prices). Data shows that executives typically choose the latter."

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the new report on "cut to grow" ideology, said in a statement that "corporate tax policy since Reagan has been driven by the trickle-down economics narrative that cutting the taxes on 'job creators' will benefit less wealthy U.S. taxpayers."

"Such an idea is often offered in tandem with the notion that this is the only way tax policy can help American families," said Avi-Yonah. "But this just isn't true. In fact, this false 'cut-to-grow' narrative has made it very difficult to argue for a more expansive, progressive vision of corporate tax reform—contributing to a decades-long stalemate in efforts toward real comprehensive corporate tax reform."

"Now is the time," he added, "to reverse this trend with a more historically grounded support of the corporate tax."

---

---

xian provides basis for no fact/info/expert?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/heres-how-christian-nationalism-in-the-us-legislates-evil-and-punishes-the-poor/

On August 26th, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence closed out his acceptance speech with a biblical sleight of hand. Speaking before a crowd at the Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, he exclaimed, "Let's fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let's fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire." In doing so, he essentially rewrote a passage from the New Testament's Book of Hebrews: "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross."

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

There's nothing new, of course, about an American politician melding religion and politics on the campaign trail. Still, Pence's decision to replace Jesus with the Stars and Stripes raised eyebrows across a range of religious and political persuasions. Indeed, the melding of Old Glory and Christ provided the latest evidence of the rising influence of Christian nationalism in the age of Trump.

It's no longer hard to find evidence of just how deeply Christian nationalism influences our politics and policymaking. During the pandemic, the Bible has repeatedly been used (and distorted) to justify Covid-19 denialism and government inaction, not to speak of outright repression. In late March, as cities were locking down and public health officials were recommending strict quarantine measures, one of Donald Trump's first acts was to gather his followers at the White House for what was billed as a "National Day of Prayer" to give Americans the strength to press on through death and difficulty.

Later in the spring, protests against pandemic shutdowns, funded with dark money from the likes of the Koch Brothers, demanded that states reopen for business and social distancing guidelines be loosened. (Forget about masking of any sort.) At them, printed protest signs said things like: "Even Pharaoh Freed Slaves in a Plague" and "Texas will not take the Mark of the Beast." And even as faith communities struggled admirably to adjust tozoom worship services, as well as remote pastoral care and memorials, President Trump continued to fan the flames of religious division, declaring in-person worship "essential," no matter that legal experts questioned his authority to do so.

And speaking of his version of Christian nationalism, no one should forget the June spectacle in Lafayette Square near the White House, when Trump had racial-justice protestors tear-gassed so he could stroll to nearby St. John's Church and pose proudly on its steps displaying a borrowed bible. Though he flashed it to the photographers, who can doubt how little time he's spent within its pages. (Selling those same pages is another matter entirely. After all, a Bible he signed in the wake of that Lafayette Square event is now on sale for nearly $40,000.)

The Battle for the Bible in American History

To understand how power is wielded in America by wealthy politicians and their coteries of extremists in 2020, you have to consider the role of religion in our national life. An epic battle for the Bible is now underway in a country that has been largely ceded to white evangelical Christian nationalists. Through a well-funded network of churches and nonprofits, universities, and think tanks, and with direct lines to the nation's highest political officials, they've had carte-blanche to set the terms of what passes for religious debate in this country and dictate what morality even means in our society.

Under Trump, such religious nationalism has reached a fever pitch as a reactionary movement that includes technocratic billionaires, televangelists, and armed militias has taken root with asimple enough message: God loves white Christian America, favors small government and big business, and rewards individualism and entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the poor, people of color, and immigrants are blamed for society's problemseven as the rich get richer in what's still the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

The dangers posed by today's Christian nationalists are all too real, but the battle for the Bible itself is not new in America. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul's epistles to claim that slavery was ordained by God. They also ripped the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached a "prosperity gospel" that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism.

Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubberstamp Jim Crow practices, while in the late 1970s the Moral Majority helped to mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists into national politics. In my own youth, I remember politicians quoting Thessalonians in the lead up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act as proof that God believes in work-requirements for public assistance programs.

Students of religion and history know that, although such theological battles have often tipped disastrously toward the forces of violence, deprivation, and hate, Christian religious thinking has also been a key ingredient in positive social change in this country. Escaped slave Harriet "Moses" Tubman understood the Underground Railroad as a Christian project of liberation, while escaped slave Frederick Douglass fought for abolition through churches across the north in the pre-Civil War years. A century later, near the end of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained how, to achieve his universal dream of justice, a beloved community of God would be built through a "freedom church of the poor."

After all, in every chapter of American history, abolitionists, workers, labor organizers, civil rights leaders, and other representatives of the oppressed have struggled for a better nation not just in streets and workplaces, but in the pulpit, too. In the wreckage of the present Trumpian moment, with a fascistic, white nationalism increasingly ascendant, people of conscience would do well to follow suit.

The "Psychological Bird" of Bad Religion

In my book Always with Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor, I focus on a reality that has long preoccupied me: how, in this country, the Bible has so often been manipulated to obscure its potentially emancipatory power; in particular, the way in which what theologian Jim Wallis has called themost famous biblical passage on the poor (from the Gospel of Matthew) -- "the poor will be always with us" -- has been misused.

Since I was a young girl, scarcely a week has passed in which I haven't heard someone quoting Matthew as an explanation for why poverty is eternal and its mitigation reserved at best for charity or philanthropy (but certainly not for government). The logic of such thinking runs through so many of our religious institutions including what's now known as "evangelical Christianity," but also our legislatures, courts, military, schools, and more. It hasn't just shaped the minds of young Christians but has helped to spiritualize (and cement in place) poverty, while implicitly oreven explicitly justifying ever greater inequality in this society.

Today, the idea that poverty is the result of bad behavior, laziness, or sin rather than decisions made by those with power is distinctly ascendant in Donald Trump's and Mitch McConnell's Washington. Biblical passages like that one in Matthew have become another ideological tool brandished by reactionaries and the wealthy to deflect attention from this country's systemic failures.

Consider, for example, the historic development of what's often known as the "Bible Belt" (or alternatively the "Poverty Belt"). It sweeps across the South, from North Carolina to Mississippi, Tennessee to Alabama, home to poor people of every race. It represents the deepest, most contiguous area of poverty in the United States made possible in part by heretical theology, biblical misinterpretation, and Christian nationalism.

The convergence of poverty and religion in the Bible Belt has a long history, stretching back to the earliest settler-colonists in the slave era. It echoed through the system of Jim Crow that had the region in its grip until the Civil Rights years and the modern political concept of "the solid South" (once Democratic, now Republican). Within its bounds lies a brutal legacy of divide and conquer that, to this day, politicizes the Bible by claiming that poverty results from sins against God and teaches poor white people in particular that, although they may themselves have little or nothing, they are at least "better" than people of color.

At the end of the bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, Martin Luther King explained the age-old politics of division in the region this way:

"If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow... And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man... And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion."

That "psychological bird" was seasoned and cooked in a volatile mix of racist pseudo-science, economic orthodoxy, and bad religion. In fact, it retained its enormous power in large part by using the Bible and a version of Christianity to validate plunder and human suffering on a staggering scale. De jure Jim Crow may no longer exist, but its history haunts America to this day, and the Bible continues to be weaponized to validate anti-poor, white racist political power.

As jobs and opportunity continue to vanish in twenty-first-century America and churches stand among the last truly functional institutions in many communities, the Bible, however interpreted, still influences daily life for millions. How it's understood and preached affects the political and moral direction of the country. Consider that those Bible Belt states -- where Christian nationalism (which regularly displays its own upside-down version of the Bible) now reigns supreme -- account for more than 193 electoral college votes and so will play a key role in determining the fate of Donald Trump and Mike Pence in November.

I had my own experience with that version of biblical and theological interpretation and its growing role in our national politics in June 2019 during a hearing of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives. Its subject was poverty in America and the economic realities of struggling families.A racially and geographically diverse group of leaders of the Poor People's Campaign (of which I'm the co-chair) were invited to testify on those realities. Alongside us that day were two Black pastors invited by Republican congressmen to stand as examples of how faith and hard work is the only recipe for a good and stable life for the impoverished.

We had come to present what we've called the Poor People's Moral Budget, a study showing that the United States does have the money to end poverty, hunger, homelessness, and more, just not the political will to do so. In response, members of the committee turned to the same tired stereotypes about why so many of us in such a wealthy country are poor. Some cited thesupposed failure of the 1960s War on Poverty as evidence that programs of social uplift just don't work, while ignoring the dramatic way politicians had undercut those initiatives in the years that followed.Like those pastors, others replied with tales of their own success rising out of economic hardship via bootstrap individualism and they plugged Christian charity as the way to alleviate poverty. I listened to them all as they essentially promoted a heretical theology that claimed people suffer from poverty largely because they're estranged from God and lack a deep enough faith in Jesus.

That day, the walls of that House committee room rang with empty words twisting what the Bible actually says about the poor. One Republican representative typically remarked that,although he was familiar with the Bible, he had never found anyplace in it "where Jesus tells Caesar to care for the poor." Another all-too-typically suggested that Christian charity, not government-sponsored programs, is the key to alleviating poverty.

Someone less familiar with the arguments of such politicians might have been surprised to hear so many of them seeking theological cover. As a biblical scholar and a student of the history of social movements, I know well how religious texts actually instruct us to care for the poor and dispossessed. As a long-time organizer, I've learned that those in power now regularly, even desperately, seek to abuse and distort the liberating potential of our religious traditions.

Indeed, in response to that representative, Reverand William Barber, my Poor People's Campaign co-chair, and I pointed out how interesting it was that he identified himself with Caesar (not necessarily the most flattering comparison imaginable, especially as biblical Christianity polemicizes against Caesar and the Roman empire). Then I detailed for him many of the passages and commandments in the Bible that urge us to organize society around the needs of the poor, forgive debts, pay workers a living wage, rather than favoring either the rich or "Caesar." That, of course, is indeed the formula of the Trump era (where, in the last six pandemic months, the 643 wealthiest Americans raked in an extra $845 billion, raising their combined wealth by 29%). I also pointed out that the most effective poverty-reduction programs like Head Start are federally funded, neither philanthropic nor a matter of Christian charity.

Good News from the Poor

In the Poor People's Campaign, we often start our organizing meetings by showing a series of color-coded mapsof the country. The first has the states that have passed voter suppression laws since 2013; the next, those with the highest poverty rates; then, those that have not expanded Medicaid but have passed anti-LGBTQ laws. And so it goes. Our final map displays the states densest with self-identified evangelical Protestants.

I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that those maps overlap almost perfectly, chiefly in the Bible Belt, but also in the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic states, and even in parts of the Northeast and West. The point is to show how inextricably connected the battle for voting rights, healthcare, and other critical resources is to the battle for the Bible.The stakes are measured in the health of the entire nation, because the same politicians who manipulate the Bible and the right to vote to win elections then pass immoral budgets and policies.

When Vice President Pence altered that line from the Book of Hebrews, he was charging headfirst onto that very blood-soaked battlefield with a desecrated Bible in hand. The question is: why should he and other Christian nationalists have the power to define Christianity? If they are so intent on "fixing their eyes on Old Glory," shouldn't they also fix their eyes on what Jesus actually said?

The Greek word evangelia, out of which "evangelical" comes, means bringing good news to those made poor by systems of exploitation. The Bible's good news, also defined as gospel, talks again and again about captives being freed, slaves released, and all who are oppressed being taken care of. It's said that were you to cut out every one of its pages that mentions poverty, the Bible would fall apart. And when you actually read the words on those pages, you see that the gospel doesn't talk about the inevitability of poverty or the need for charity, but the responsibilities of the ruling authorities to all people and the possibility of abundance for all.

At a time when 43.5% of Americans are poor or one fire, storm, health-care crisis, pandemic, eviction, or job loss from poverty, it couldn't be more important for Americans to begin to reckon with this reality and our moral obligation to end it. Instead, politicians pass voter suppression laws, kick kids off food programs, and allow the poisoning of our water, air, and land, while Christian nationalist religious leaders bless such policies and cherry-pick biblical verses to justify them as all-American. Consider such a reality not simply a matter of a religious but a political, economic, and moral crisis that, in the midst of a pandemic, is pushing this country ever closer to the brink of spiritual death.

If America is still worth saving, this is no longer a battle anyone should sit out.

---