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Trump wants poor people to disappear — so he’s making sure they do marketwatch.com/story/trump-wa…
Trump infamously referred to developing nations as “shithole” countries and Mexican immigrants and asylum seekers are rapists. His budget cuts go after the nation’s most vulnerable populations, including children and the elderly.
That’s apparently not enough. Now the Trump administration is trying to literally define the poor out existence by artificially lowering a poverty threshold already seen as insufficiently stringent to capture the true ranks of America’s poor.
To do so, the White House Office of Management and Budget is relying on a sneaky, seemingly minor statistical tweak that will have major implications for who will be defined as poor—and thus what government benefits they will be able to claim.
“Either alternative measure would result in a lower poverty line, and the gap between the poverty line under the current versus either of the proposed methodologies would widen each year,” write Aviva Aron-Dine and Matt Broadus of the @CenteronBudget. 
“The administration claims that it seeks to make the poverty line more accurate, but ... either change would likely make the poverty line less accurate overall while also increasing the number of people without health insurance and experiencing other forms of hardship.”
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