Bye-bye, Categorical Eligibility?

Trump’s latest regulatory attack on food assistance, explained — PLUS: “Redefining Rural America.” Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week on Off-Kilter… President Trump dealt a scathing blow to the working class last week, announcing another massive regulatory attack on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — commonly referred to as food stamps — which the administration boasts would strip more than 3 million people of food assistance. What makes Trump’s most recent attempt to slash the safety net not just cruel but also boneheaded is that it’s a blueprint for trapping workers and families in poverty. Rebecca sits down with Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, for a look at what the rule would do.

But wait, there’s more! Trump’s regulatory attack on SNAP is also a backdoor attack on the school lunch program — and would jeopardize school meals for more than half a million kids if his proposed rule goes into effect. To unpack the second level of pain this rule would cause, Rebecca talks with s.e. smith, deputy editor of TalkPoverty.org, who recently reported on the consequences the rule would have for school meals.

Later in the show… Despite the importance of rural communities to the health of the nation overall — and the fact that 1 in 5 Americans live in rural areas — federal policy has left many rural communities behind. Though some are thriving, rural areas overall have yet to match pre-recession employment levels, and deep poverty persists in many rural communities. Beyond barriers to jobs and economic opportunity, some rural areas also lack access to crucial services such as health care or the internet.

Though some policymakers may be eager to tackle the challenges facing rural areas, discussions on this topic tend to make sweeping generalizations about the dynamics at work in these communities, painting rural America as a homogenous — and lily white — monolith. Rebecca sits down with Gbenga Ajilore and Zoe Willingham, two researchers at the Center for American Progress, to discuss their recent report, “Redefining Rural America,” which argues that rural America is far from homogenous and should not be discussed or treated as such.

This week’s guests:

• Joel Berg, CEO, Hunger Free America (@joelsberg)
• s.e. smith, deputy editor, TalkPoverty.org (@sesmith)
• Gbenga Ajilore, senior economist, Center for American Progress (@gbenga_ajilore)
• Zoe Willingham, researcher, Center for American Progress (@willingham_zoe)

For more on this week’s topics:

• Read Rebecca’s take for Rewire on how the latest attack on SNAP will trap workers in poverty
• s.e. smith’s post for TalkPoverty goes deep on how the rule will take free school lunches from half a million children
• Learn more and submit a public comment at HandsOffSNAP.org (it takes less than 2 minutes, and yes your comments really do matter!)
• Check out Gbenga and Zoe’s full report on “Redefining Rural America”

This week’s transcript:

♪ I work and get paid like minimum wage

sights to hit the class by the end of the day

hot from downtown into the hood where I stay

the only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t saved

I spend most of my time working, trying to bring in…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off-Kilter, President Trump dealt a scathing blow to the working class last week announcing yet another massive regulatory attack on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, commonly referred to as food stamps. The administration boasts this rule would strip more than 3 million people of food assistance. What makes Trump’s most recent attempt to slash the safety net not just cruel but also particularly boneheaded is it’s a blueprint for trapping low-wage workers and families in poverty and a backdoor attack on the school lunch program to boot. I talk with Joel Berg of Hunger Free America as well as TalkPoverty’s s.e. smith. Stick around.

Later in the show, I talk with two researchers from the Center for American Progress, Gbenga Ajilore and Zoe Willingham, both of the Economic Policy Program, about their new report on the need to redefine rural America. Spoiler: it’s more than just a bunch of white farmers.

But first, let’s dig into Trump’s latest attack on SNAP with Joel Berg. Joel, thanks so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

JOE BERG: Oh, my pleasure. Unfortunately, we’re brought together by the most heinous of developments. I can’t wait till we finally get progressive leaders, we end hunger, and then we can have our final show celebrating that.

VALLAS: Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that horrible circumstances brought us together, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that that was true with respect to specifically the food stamp program. It feels like that’s what I have you on every time to talk about. So, sorry, but also, thank you for your service as I ask you in my first question to explain what would this rule do.

BERG: Well, as you said, they were boasting about taking food away from 3 million people. Without getting too deep in the weeds, right now under federal law — and this isn’t federal regulation, which is created by the bureaucracy. This is federal law, which is passed by Congress and signed into law by Presidents — under federal law, states have the flexibility to allow some people to be able to have marginally higher than poverty income, still very low incomes, and still get SNAP benefits, the correct name for the food stamp benefits, or to have just a little, little money in the bank and still get those food benefits. The Trump rule would take away that flexibility from states and thereby prevent millions of low-income, working families from getting this extra help to fill their grocery cart and would take away the ability of low-income families to save to possibly pay for a down payment on a first home, to possibly send their kids to college. It would take away their ability to save and still get these benefits.

VALLAS: And you’re getting right into the very reasons that I described this proposed policy.

BERG: Oh, I can go back and beat around the bush if you like.

VALLAS: [laughs]

BERG: I should add if we are — and I know you’re discussing this elsewhere as well — but this rule would take away school lunches and breakfasts from half a million American children. Because when you lose SNAP eligibility, you also the school meals eligibility. But go on.

VALLAS: No, that’s right. And we are going to get into that in just a little bit with our colleague and friend s.e. smith from TalkPoverty. But you’re laying out, and you’re doing a great job laying out, exactly why I was describing this particular policy as boneheaded. Because it isn’t just about hurting people. It’s also actively undermining the very upward mobility that this administration, and conservatives generally, often like to tout as the reason that they don’t like safety net programs like SNAP. And that’s the reason, Joel, that I really wanted to have you on the show is to get into the nitty gritty about how this proposed policy would work, and why it’s so actively counter to the goals that we all claim to be espousing when it comes to helping low-income people be a little less low income.

So, before we get into any more of the kind of big picture impacts here when it comes to income, when it comes to assets, I want to get into all of that. The term that folks need to have in their brains to — and I’m going to get a little wonky here — but to have a baseline of information about this proposal is broad-based categorical eligibility. We’re going to call that categorical eligibility. That is the provision that this particular proposed rule from the Trump administration has in its crosshairs and would gut, would effectively nuke. And Joel, so you were just explaining what categorical eligibility means to states. It’s been around for about two decades and change; not a new thing. Something states have been using for a long time to do the things you were describing that help workers get ahead. And I really want to get into the nitty gritty of how that works. So, let’s start on them —

BERG: Including many Republican- run states.

VALLAS: That’s exactly right.

BERG: Republican governors and Republican legislatures.

VALLAS: And if we’re getting basic facts out there, we’re talking about 43 states that have taken up categorical eligibility in some way, shape, or form over the past couple of decades: red, blue, purple states alike. What a great point. And all in the spirit of states as sort of laboratories of innovation and you know, getting to use that flexibility conservatives so love to tout. So, Joel, I want to start with one of the reasons that this rule is so particularly boneheaded. And you started to get into it with what it would mean for folks who maybe get a small raise at work. So, help us understand what eliminating categorical eligibility, like this rule would do, would mean for folks who are trying to get ahead in the workforce on the income side.

BERG: So, right now, the income is generally pegged to the poverty line. And when we say 130 percent of the poverty line or 150 percent of the poverty line, other than the 20 people with America including us two making the remaining 18 people who work on this full-time don’t quite understand, what that means is the poverty rate plus a little number. And people don’t even understand what the poverty rate is. But it’s around $18,000 for a family of three. And so, if the eligibility for SNAP (food stamps) is about 130 percent of the poverty line, that might be about let’s say oh, $22,000 a year for a family of three, certainly very, very low-income, struggling, very likely to be food insecure. What states are able to have the flexibility to do under this is to raise the limit to maybe 150 or 185 percent of the poverty line, which basically means some families making maybe $25,000 or $28,000 a year — still very, very, very poor — are able to get these benefits. And therefore, what the Trump administration is trying to do is take away the flexibility of states to do that.

So, as you said, if someone’s in a state where this is taken away, they could actually get a slight increase, if they get a raise or if the state raises the minimum wage. And if they go from let’s say $8 an hour to $11 dollars an hour, if they don’t have any children and thus don’t get the real benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Child Tax Credits, then they will probably lose more in benefits than they gained in wages. Let me repeat that. If they get a raise, they will lose more in benefits than they gained in wages. And I think most of us believe — I certainly do, and I know Franklin Roosevelt, and did my old boss Bill Clinton did — that the centerpiece of social policy should be having work pay and that people should be able to support their families through a full-time job. And so, this is flying right in the face of that. And again, forget for a second, pretend that you’re not a progressive advocate like you or I, that you don’t necessarily even care about whether people get this extra government help to feed their families, or even if you’re a conservative who thinks that people should get this help for shorter periods of time, then even if you’re a conservative, why in the world would you put a disincentive to getting a raise, disincentive to working more hours? It makes no sense from either a compassionate wanting people to get food point of view or even a conservative wanting to remove the need of people to have this help for a long period of time. That’s number one.

Number two, it takes away the ability of people to save. It would say states can no longer allow people to have a little money in the bank or —

VALLAS: And Joel, I’m going to stop you there because I want to get into the savings penalties piece too, and there’s a ton there. But I want to stay with you on the raises piece because that’s just such an important point for folks to understand. So, as you were laying out, you can end up getting a really just modest raise. You were talking about an extra three bucks an hour. I want to give a nod to our colleagues at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They actually painted a picture of a hypothetical worker in one of their kind of wonky fact sheets that I found really useful because it’s a worker earning$12.50 an hour raising two kids, and they get a 50 cent raise per hour. Mom gets a 50 cent raise per hour, which is an additional 86 bucks a month in earnings. And boom. If categorical eligibility were not in place, that family would lose their food benefits overnight because all of a sudden, they’re over that magic number, like you were describing. And so, even they, with that 50 cent raise, would magically be worse off under Trump’s rule. So important for folks to understand.

BERG: Really, really phenomenal how backwards this is. And I must point out that many of the states would be hurt most are states that voted for Donald Trump for president because those are the states that are, per capita, most dependent on or are most utilizing SNAP because they’re states that often have the highest poverty rate.

VALLAS: And people might be wondering OK ,well, how widespread is this going to be if this rule takes effect? Well, we mentioned 43 states have categorical eligibility in place in some way, shape, or form. When we’re talking about this particular catch 22, this benefit cliff some people call it that people would get pushed off if Trump’s rule takes effect, more than 30 states currently take advantage of the option to smooth those benefit cliffs in that way. And because of those 30 states doing that, about a million people in this country are able to get food assistance every month, low-wage workers primarily, who otherwise wouldn’t be. So, and huge, huge, huge to remember who the people are who are most likely to be getting SNAP, and that’s, as you said, a lot of Trump’s own base who doesn’t realize that that’s what’s coming down the pike if this rule takes effect.

You were actually on — and we’ll get into the savings penalties in just a minute — but you were actually on MSNBC just the other day, Joel, talking about this, and you actually made some really important connections to Trump’s racism. What connection did you draw?

BERG: Yeah, I was on the Ari Melber show. I thought he had me on to discuss Staten Island versus Queens hip-hop, but apparently, it was to discuss poverty, so, great. No, no. All seriousness. It made the point we were talking about Trump’s racist attacks against the people of Baltimore and building on racist attacks against other localities that have primarily people of color in them. And it’s clear when he uses the phrase “inner city” he covers up the fact that — and “inner city” interchangeably with “poverty” — he covers up the fact that many of the poorest parts of the United States are white and rural. And the fact of the matter is that racism is not putting food on the table for the people he represents, and he does represent Baltimore and Detroit and New York and Cleveland and San Francisco, all the places he derides. You have us forget he’s been president for two and a half years, and president of all states, not just the ones who voted for him or not just the rural areas that voted for him. And this directly ties to hunger and the SNAP program.

And there’s a long history to this. He wasn’t the first person to race bait on food stamps. Ronald Reagan famously referred to “young bucks” who received food stamps. And by the way, there’s a new tape out just released by the Nixon Library with Reagan on tape with Nixon referring to the heads of African nations or the U.N. ambassadors to African nations as “monkeys.” So, this idea that Trump was the first person in the Republican Party to be overtly racist is a bit of selective amnesia by the NeverTrumpers. And one of the things they’ve been race baiting on for a long, long time is the SNAP program, the food stamp program. And so, they want to give the impression that most of the people getting help are non-white, when it’s true that people of color are disproportionately poor due mostly to structural racism and disproportionately getting these benefits. But it’s also to the largest number of people getting SNAP, the largest number of people in America who are hungry, the largest number of people in America who are poor are white. But that’s not what Trump and the right want us to think.

VALLAS: And it’s certainly not the kind of rhetoric that we hear when Trump himself, or even his ambassadors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture or other aspects of the federal government, talking about this policy and other attacks on the safety net. You know, it’s all in this kind of racialized and myth of the welfare queen kind of frame, just kind of dressed up for 2019.

You were going to talk again, Joel, I want to go back to where you were headed with the savings penalties piece of this because there’s another huge way that this proposed rule — if it takes effect — would actively trap low-wage workers and their families in poverty. And that has to do with how much money they have in the bank. So, help explain that second piece where this is just truly an affront to upward mobility.

BERG: So, if this rule goes into effect — and it could be many, many months to see if they propose a final rule. This could be subject to court challenges, could be subject to challenge by members of Congress — but if it were to go into effect, it would basically say for most people, most families you could not have more than $2,000 in the bank and still get SNAP (food stamp benefits). If you had a household with an elderly person in it or a person with a disability, it would be the grand total of $3,000. So, let’s say you’re a family without an elderly person in it and without a person with a disability in it, that would mean your asset limit — and that’s a fancy way of saying “the money you have” — couldn’t be more than $2,000.

So, let’s say there are two families, working poor families, receiving SNAP benefits: Family A and Family B. Both of them get the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a refund for working poor families. And let’s say the amount is $2,500. Now, Family A spends that $2,500 on a big screen TV. Now, I don’t begrudge any low-income person for however they spend their money, and they probably don’t have a safe public park in their neighborhood. They probably don’t even have movie theaters if it’s a low-income neighborhood. That big screen TV maybe essentially the daycare for their children because they can’t afford daycare. May be the only entertainment they have. But that being said, they spend their money, Family A on a big screen TV. And family B saves that money, saves the $2,500 and puts in the bank to save to put their kids through college.

And so, under this policy, Family A would spend the money, would get to keep their SNAP benefits. Family B that saved the money would lose their SNAP benefits. And again, I’m not making a value judgment of which family behaved more responsibly or not. But if you’re a conservative, [chuckles] you would surely say you want to reward the family that saves the money. And so, what a [bleep] backwards policy to say, “Oh my god. We’re going to take away the benefits from people who save.”

And to add one more wrinkle to this how this isn’t even in line with conservative principles no less progressive principles: The only thing it’s in line with is shafting poor people for the sport of shafting poor people and the politics of race baiting. But as you know Rebecca, the Republicans have said forever, “State State State State State State State State State State and State State State, save some more.”

VALLAS: I think you missed a few there.

BERG: OK! Yes. They’ve always made this claim under so-called federalism: that states run programs better than the federal governments, and that a bureaucrat in D.C. couldn’t possibly understand what a state needs. Now, aside from whether that’s true or not — and I don’t think that’s true — how a public servant in a government bureaucracy in Washington would be less in touch, let’s say, than a state public servant in Sacramento would be with someone a few hundred miles away in California when phone and text and email and Skype is all instantaneous, forget that for a second. But let’s assume that the argument is correct, that states are more in touch with the needs of the populous than the federal government. And by the way, it’s not just their rhetoric. Every time they’ve tried to do something big about SNAP, they’ve tried to block grant the SNAP program, the food stamps program, to basically give the power to the states to make a wide range of decisions over the program. So, how friggin’ ridiculous it is that when it comes to SNAP now, all they want to do is take flexibility away from states. And this is from duly elected governors and state legislatures, not the deep state, not bureaucracies. These decisions are made by elected governors, elected legislatures in 43 states, including many run by Republicans. And so, they’re not about empowering states.

And yeah, as you know, Rebecca, there’ve been other things like a city has passed a minimum wage increase, and the state legislature run by Republicans has overruled the city. So, this isn’t about empowering voters. This isn’t about federalism. This isn’t about states having more understanding than the federal government. The only consistent thing is shafting low-income people. And so, this is bad politics. This is bad policy. This is cruel. This can increase long-term poverty because it’s going to make it harder for people to earn and save their way out of poverty. This makes no sense whatsoever. It is cruelness — Is that the word?

VALLAS: Cruelty.

BERG: Cruelty! Cruelty! There is no word “cruelness.” But hey, I can invent the word. Cruelty combined with just incompetence and just lashing out at people.

Now, I can’t read people’s minds. I know they’ve been working on this for a long time. But if I was a cynical person — I’m not — if I was a cynical person, I would think that they purposely released this the day before Robert Mueller testified before Congress in order to distract the American people. Now, I’m not a cynical person, and I’m not a mind reader. So, I’d never say such a thing. But if I was, I would say that.

VALLAS: Well, Joel, as your lawyer — which we’ve revealed in past episodes — I appreciate those very important caveats that you’ve provided. But I have to say it smells a heck of a lot like that considering the incredibly negative press that the administration has received for boasting that their plan for SNAP — at least this week’s, as it comes on the heels of lots of other attacks on the program — is just to take food away from 3.1 million people and to steal school lunch from about half a million kids.

I want to dig in to the savings piece of this just to make sure that folks were following what you were describing because that piece gets a little bit wonky too, especially when you use terms like asset tests”” etc. as we kind of have to when we explain this policy. But basically, what you were describing is that if a family manages to save just a little bit of cash, even a couple of thousand dollars, hard-earned and scraped and put aside just in case say the car breaks down or to have a modest cushion in case the family breadwinner’s hours get cut or maybe the water heater has broken a couple of times — And these are the kinds of things that we know families across this country don’t have the savings to be able to weather. That statistic that we always repeat and that people trot out all the time because of how much it says about who this economy is and isn’t working for, but about half this country, 4 in 10 Americans, don’t have even $400 in the bank and would have to borrow if they were faced with this kind of an unexpected surprise expense. And so, back to what this rule would do: Basically, what you’re describing is if the family is able to get out of that 4 in 10 place and put a little bit of money aside so that they’re not going to be pushed deeper into poverty if that unexpected expense crops up, boom. Bye bye, food assistance. There goes your next month’s food budget overnight because your bank balance exceeded a certain level by even $1. That is what the Trump administration is proposing to do if this rule takes effect.

Now they say — and it’s a really good thing you’re not a cynical person, Joel, because a cynical person might have something to say in response to this — but the Trump administration says that this particular part of the rule is, it’s about stopping millionaires from gaming the system. They’ve trotted out there their new face of the food stamp program to try to make it look unsympathetic and like it’s going to people who don’t truly need it and blah blah blah, all those talking points, who’s a millionaire! Someone who had all kinds of money in the bank and yet had no income and therefore was able to qualify for food stamps. And boom: the jig is up. This program is broken. That’s their message. But what we know is that the real problem is how few families in this country have anything in the way of savings at all to protect themselves from financial ruin and poverty, like I was just describing. And I want to throw in one piece of research here that is so to the point.

BERG: [laughing] Research? Facts?

VALLAS: Say that again.

BERG: Facts? I thought you worked in D.C.

VALLAS: Facts still somehow have a place in my mind and in my heart despite this political climate. It is true.

But a study that I want to bring in here, which comes to us from the Urban Institute, which just so clearly demonstrates the perverse nature of this policy, should it move forward, is that families in states that have done the things you were talking about — taking advantage of this flexibility to do commonsense things like allow families to save and plan for the future without losing their food assistance overnight — states that have done that, families in states that have done that are more likely to have a bank account and to have at least $500 in it compared to about one in four Americans at this point are actually unbanked, are unbanked. Those are the people without bank accounts. Those are the people who turn to predatory alternative financial services like payday loans etc. to stay afloat many of them because they’re frankly — and for good reason — scared to even have a bank account because of what it could mean for their family’s food budget. That’s why this kind of policy just makes no sense. And to your point about cruelty, Joel, if I were a cynical person I think I would say it seems like — to give our friend Adam Serwer his credit where it’s due, the cruelty is the point.

BERG: You know, I’m going to respond in two ways. First of all, as you well know through much of your work, the biggest difference between low-income people and wealthy people and even the upper middle class isn’t income. The difference in income is vast, but the biggest difference is in assets: what people own versus what they don’t own. I can tell you early in my career, when I went from making garbage to making it OK with a salary, when I went from having credit card debt to getting interest, it changed everything. And that’s the biggest difference between low-income people and middle and upper-income people is they just have no money to fall back on in an emergency, no money to invest in their own housing, no money to invest in education, you know, etc. That’s number one.

Number two, I’ll just tell a quick story from the Jewish tradition. And then for those of your listeners who aren’t really aware of this I will, as one quick bit of background, say that traditionally, among the old-time European Jews, the rabbi was not only a spiritual leader but also helped settle civil disputes. So, there’s a story of there was someone claiming to be a panhandler from another town who turned out to be really rich and was lying and claiming to be poor and collecting money. And so, the town wanted to ban poor people begging. And so, they go to the rabbi, “Rabbi, you know this story. We want to ban poor people begging.” And the rabbi goes, “Well, was the person begging rich or poor?” And they go, “Well, Rabbi, the guy, the person begging was rich.” He goes, “Then why don’t you ban rich people from begging?”.

And so, I tell this story is this push from the Trump administration is based on one wealthy person gaming the system out of tens of millions of people on the program. Meanwhile, they’re giving farm subsidies — and really, not farm subsidies — agribusiness landowner subsidies in billions of dollars, over $10 billion to people harmed by Trump’s boneheaded trade policies without any concern whatsoever about their income. And so, because one person [chuckles] out of tens of millions of people game the system. And this is a program where the average person gets a $1.37 per meal, the vast majority of whom are working, children, senior citizens, people disabilities, or veterans. They’re taking food away from 3 million people because they’re pissed off at one fraudster. Again, just insane.

VALLAS: And Joel, to your earlier point, this isn’t just a story of hypocrisy when it comes to rhetoric not matching up with the reality of policies. That is absolutely true for all the reasons we’ve described. But notably, and for reasons that you I think laid out well up top, this is also an effort to circumvent not just what progressives in Congress have said they believe to be the purpose of the SNAP program, the way it should operate, etc., but also what Republicans have said and have actually done through their actions as recently as December. So, let me make that clear because this, to me, is the final important point for people to be aware of as Trump continues to try to dismantle this program brick by brick. But as recently as December when — and I was having you back on then a couple of times a month it seems to talk about the updates with the debate over SNAP because it was a legislative debate in Congress with the farm bill — but as recently as December, back then, the Congress, on a bipartisan basis, rejected this exact change. Just like with the previous rule that we saw out of the Trump administration that would take food away from people who can’t get enough hours at work or find themselves without a job through no fault of their own. This rule, just like that previous rule from earlier this year, is an explicit effort to circumvent Congress, to go around the stated will of our elected officials in this country, and to try to dismantle the food stamp program by fiat. And that’s why, Joel, you’re exactly right. I hope that what we see is legal challenge to this rule. We know we’re going to see, and we already have started to see, tremendous outrage from the public, from policymakers. We’re going to talk more about that in the next segment in the context of school lunch where boy, has there been some serious backlash in response to this rule.

But I want to just not lose the moment to remind people that there is still something we can do. And you guys are well-practiced in this, and you’ve done this now several times with different proposed rule makings coming out of this administration, that is, I suppose, the silver lining of having to do this many times. We all know the drill. But HandsOffSnap.org is back online accepting comments. That is the place to go to learn more, to get involved, and to raise your voice in telling Trump, “Hands off SNAP.”

In the last minute that I have with you, Joel, what do you expect to see in the coming days and weeks? And what more do people need to know about how terrible this rule is?

BERG: I think it’s also, as you hinted at, it’s illegal. When Congress and the law is silent on a matter, that’s where you can step in with a regulation. Or when Congress says, “This will be decided by a regulation,” that’s where regulation can step in. Here, federal law is absolutely clear that states have the authority to do this. The Trump administration tried to limit this in the farm bill. Broad bipartisan coalitions in both houses rejected it. You can’t just go around Congress and do something you want to do when you don’t like it. When President Obama wanted to do some mild things through administrative fiat, you know, the right went [bleep], like he was some sort of dictator. This is a massive, massive contradiction of federal law. And so, I hope it never goes to a final rule, but if it is, we’ll see ya in court, so to speak.

VALLAS: Yep. And it’s exactly like health care. It’s just like with health care: when you can’t get it done through Congress, Trump has learned, go around them and try and do it by fiat. I’m with you in hoping that this one doesn’t move forward because of all the pain it would cause for all the reasons we’ve described and the number of people that it would trap in poverty for the sheer reason of causing mass cruelty and pain.

I’ve been talking with Joel Berg. He’s the CEO of Hunger Free America and our regular SNAP and food stamp expert. Hope that someday I’ll get to have him on to talk about good news. But in the meantime, he keeps us abreast of all the attacks on this program. Joel, thanks so much for taking the time to come back on the show. It’s always a pleasure.

BERG: Thank you for the shared misery.

VALLAS: [chuckles]

BERG: But we shall overcome.

VALLAS: We shall overcome indeed. Don’t go away more. Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[hip-hop music break]

You’re listening to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. But wait, there’s more! Because there always is. Trump’s regulatory attack on SNAP (or food stamps) is also a backdoor attack on the school lunch program and specifically would jeopardize school meals for more than half a million kids if his proposed rule goes into effect. So, joining me next to unpack the second level of pain this rule would cause if it takes effect is s.e. smith, TalkPoverty’s deputy editor, who recently reported on this and the consequences that the rule would have for school meals in a piece for TalkPoverty. s.e., thanks so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

s.e. SMITH: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So, start now with the bottom line. I said it. Let’s say it again. It bears repeating: if this rule takes effect, according to the Trump administration’s own estimates, more than half a million kids could lose automatic eligibility for free school meals. We were just talking to Joel Berg about all the different wonkiness of categorical eligibility and how that works. But help us understand how that connects to school meals.

SMITH: So, speaking as a former free lunch kid who always threw my lunch out because it was disgusting, this is an interesting situation because the school lunch program tries really hard to get kids that and recognizes that administrative barriers to accessing free and reduced, not just lunch, but breakfast can be a huge issue for kids who are getting more calories at school than they are at home. So, there are a couple of ways to qualify for the school lunch program. One is filling out an application, and the other is direct certification, which is mandated by federal law. The school has to check with local benefits databases to see, you know, is Mary Sue receiving some form of government benefits that would qualify her for school lunch? SNAP is the most common way to check for that. So, if a kid’s family is getting SNAP, the school will find their name on the database and say, OK, they are eligible for free or reduced lunch. They get that kid set up. Everything is cool and groovy. The kid gets free lunch. Everything is spectacular.

By booting families off of SNAP, they’re going to set up a situation where when schools do direct certification, there are 500,000 kids who will not show up. They might have been getting school lunch before. Now, they are not going to be getting school lunch. And what the USDA says is, well, those kids can just reapply with a school lunch application. There’s a system for that. And there are a couple of problems with this logic, one of which is that those kids may not actually qualify for school lunch anymore, which means that the application will get rejected. And two is that this sets up a bureaucratic barrier. The kid has to bring the application home for their parents to fill out. You’ve got working parents who don’t have time for this or can’t pull together the supporting materials, or paperwork gets lost. And suddenly, a kid has not been getting free or reduced lunch or breakfast for three months.

So, the USDA is being really sneaky with the “those kids won’t actually be effected” line because all of these kids are going to be affected. It’s just a question of how many can navigate the system to get back onto these benefits. And paying full price for school lunch may not sound like a super big deal. It’s usually less than $3. But that adds up super-fast, speaking as someone who grew up poor, who spent a good chunk of my adult life poor. $3 a day was not necessarily a thing that I had in my budget. And that’s where the USDA is leaving children and families with this.

VALLAS: So, to recap: there’s this response — and you really sort of predicted my next question — there’s this response from the Trump administration when people ask or say, “Oh, these kids are going to lose school lunch.” “No, no, no. No, no, no,” they say. “They’re not going to lose school lunch. They’re just going to lose their automatic eligibility. Everybody can reapply, and these kids are still going to be eligible.” But you’re pointing out, for starters, there’s going to be some swath of kids who aren’t actually eligible income-wise for free school lunch. They’re now going to need to pay something, and small amounts of money can really add up. But more broadly, and this is likely to be even more kids, there’s kids who are going to end up falling between the cracks because of the power when it comes to take up rates and getting closer to 100 percent, which is the sort of gold standard of getting a benefit to eligible people that this categorical eligibility direct certification provides. And that’s what we can expect if this rule takes effect. So, s.e., for people who aren’t familiar with the school lunch program, and you were talking a little bit about direct certification and the routes that kids can move through in order to receive school lunch, what do we know about the kids that it helps? What do we know about who they are and what getting that kind of nutrition in school means for them?

SMITH: I mean obviously, we know that these kids are low income. A lot of them are coming from working families. A lot of them, as discussed previously, are coming from SNAP households. And we have a lot of research showing that, for kids coming from food-insecure households, a lot of them are getting more calories at school than they are at home. And it’s notable that 41 percent of children in the United States are low income and have difficulty paying for food. So, in the 2018–2019 school year, 22 million students a day ate free and reduced lunch across the U.S. The importance of the school nutrition program is so significant that USDA and a growing number of school districts are also exploring things like backpack programs where low-income kids are sent home with food, because otherwise they go hungry over the weekend, and also summer nutrition programs. There are a lot happening this summer in particular where kids who are living in districts where people are getting universal lunch, which is also known as community eligibility, which means every kid gets free lunch, can pick up snack backpacks at various locations around city parks and schools and libraries.

So, the school nutrition program, for all that we dunk on how terrible school lunch is, really plays a vital role in early childhood development in the United States. And we know that people who are hungry have difficulty focusing, they have “behavioral outbursts,” which is otherwise known as hanger. They don’t perform as well in school. But also you have developmental problems, and the longer kids are going without adequate nutrition, the more significant these can be. So, you’re looking at developmental delays that can have lasting physical, cognitive, neurological, and psychological effects. So, childhood hunger has a huge impact on who people grow up to become and the kind of potential that people can live up to.

VALLAS: Now your piece for TalkPoverty draws a really important connection that I actually haven’t seen other people necessarily talking about in the context of this proposed rule and this attack by Trump on SNAP and on school lunch. And that’s a connection to lunch debt and lunch shaming, a horrible trend that we’ve seen picking up by school districts across the country over the past few years. It actually made news again last week and was featured on NPR and in a number of national outlets when Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley West School District literally threatened families in a whole set of letters that they sent out to households owning lunch debt, literally threatened to put kids owing debts as low as $10 on school lunch debt into foster care if their parents didn’t pay what they owed. So, a big sort of swirling national conversation that happens periodically when these stories crop up around so-called lunch shaming by school districts. But you make the point that if this rule takes effect, that could actually send that problem hurtling into really even worse straits.

SMITH: For sure. So, one of the things that’s interesting about the lunch debt problem, and the reason that it feels like you just started hearing about it, was that it actually wasn’t until 2017 that USDA actually started requiring schools to chase this money. And school districts operate the nutrition programs on very, very, very thin margins. And so, when people talk about school lunch debt, in a big district like the Los Angeles County district or Chicago, that number can approach a million dollars by the end of the year, which is a big chunk of budget. In smaller districts, then you’re talking $250. Or I think there was one last year where the grand total was $25. So, school lunch debt is a problem for schools, and it’s also obviously a problem for kids because you heard about the foster care thing. But kids with lunch debt might be denied opportunities to participate in school sports. They might not be allowed to graduate. They might have to stand there while cafeteria staff throw their food away or give them alternative meals like a cold sandwich or stamp their hands or sort of use other tactics to shame kids for not being able to pay for lunch. Which is nonsense because school lunch and breakfast should just be free.

We have the money. We know it is possible. It would radically reduce administrative burden. We could just give everybody free food and not have this problem. But because we have chosen to make students pay a token amount for lunch as some sort of weird bootstrapping capitalism good citizen modeling, we have a situation where kids who can’t afford food or who don’t realize that they’re being charged for food are getting penalized for it. You’re seeing in a lot of districts, schools will sell milk or various sides, and so kids may not realize you could get a lunch tray with your potato and tofu block and broccoli, but you also want to get the side of peaches, the school is charging you 50 cents for that. And that is actually how a lot of the school lunch debt is racking up. If you have a situation where kids are kicked out of the lunch programs, and schools are trying to get them food, clearly, you’re going to have a billing mismatch.

VALLAS: Now the Trump administration may actually realize, for once, just how unpopular one of its proposals is. And I’m reading the tea leaves here when I say that because in its rollout of this rule — So, it was the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as we were just hearing from Joel Berg that issued this rulemaking last week as a proposed rulemaking. It was published in the Federal Register. There’s all kinds of rules, as we were discussing, that go into what you have to put into that type of a rollout. And it’s all governed by federal administrative law stuff that brings back all kinds of memories I’d rather block out from law school. And one of the things you have to do is to include all relevant scientific and technical analysis that might actually bear directly on the rule and what would happen in the world if it took effect. It makes sense that that’s the kind of thing we would have as a policy. We’d like to know before we move forward with massive changes what’s going to happen, especially if those changes are being pushed through the administrative rulemaking process, and Congress never has an opportunity to weigh in.

So, bring us back to last week and USDA issuing this rule. Something that did not show up in their rollout around this rulemaking was their own analysis that, as you noted, as I noted, finds that more than half a million kids would lose automatic eligibility for school meals if this rule takes effect. That was an analysis by the Trump administration, by its U.S. Department of Agriculture, but it didn’t show up in their issuance of this rule. And the way that this got found out and the story was broken by NBC News was because eagle-eyed staff in Congressman Bobby Scott’s office, a Democrat from Virginia who’s the Chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, an outspoken critic of this rule, they noticed that they had heard the number said in a kind of off-the-record congressional briefing call, but they hadn’t seen it anywhere else. Put the question to the administration, and boom, it comes out. They actually buried or tried to bury this number from the initial rollout of the rule. Talk a little bit about where things go from here and also just the scale of the impact here. What do you think that that tells you about the Trump administration’s motives here in trying to launch this kind of a backdoor attack rather than something that’s a little more full frontal?

SMITH: Yeah, this was a super sleazy move on USDA’s part. I was on the press call when USDA formally announced this rule, and multiple reporters asked about the school lunch program, clearly signaling that both the news outlets and the American public really cares about this issue. And there were a lot of very kind of cagey answers, so it was not entirely surprising to discover that the USDA is trying to bury this number. And I think clearly, one reason why, as you note, is that the Trump administration is aware that attacks on kids are a real bad look. But also because kind of concealing that number hides the real goal of policy proposals like this, which is to punish people for being poor.

There are a lot of conservatives in this country who think that low-income people shouldn’t have children. And if they do, that they shouldn’t be allowed to suck off the government teat. And so, concealing this number sort of belies what we know about Republicans, which is that of course they like punishing children of low-income parents because they like punishing low-income people in general. And you see this as a systematic theme through so many regulatory proposals from the administration and legislation proposed by the GOP. We see again and again and again attempts at punishing people for being poor and the argument that we need to deny people benefits because they should have to work for them, which is an interesting stance to take when you consider the fact that wealthy people don’t pay any taxes on their wealth that they didn’t work for. So, they’re getting a nice benefit that they didn’t work for that goes unacknowledged. And when we’re not collecting taxes from major corporations that could fund programs like the National School Lunch Program so that schools can afford to pay their cafeteria staff more than minimum wage and can provide kids with more nutritious food options. So, to me, it’s just kind of part of a larger plan to literally starve the United States to death, honestly.

VALLAS: And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this is not the first time that the Trump administration has been caught burying evidence that would be directly relevant to one of its proposed rulemakings. Actually, last year, they put out a proposed rule that would have allowed employers to basically pocket their workers’ tips from tipped workers. It ended up getting the name, and a well-deserved name, “the tip stealing rule” is what people started to call it. It came out that the administration, through its Department of Labor, had done analysis showing that workers would lose billions of dollars in tips, that this is what would happen under this proposed rule. And the rule was later withdrawn in part, not solely, but in part because of that massive omission of important relevant evidence that that really did spark significant outrage. So, kudos to Bobby Scott’s office and to our former colleague Rachel West who was one of the staff who uncovered this really important omission. And we’ll see in the coming weeks what that brings to bear in terms of whether the administration needs to reissue the rule or whether they decide that they think they did everything they needed to, to tell the public about the consequences of this rule.

s.e., thank you so much for taking the time to join the show, for this fantastic piece. People can find it at our nerdy syllabus page, of course, as well as at TalkPoverty.org. It’s called “A New Trump Rule Could Threaten School Lunch For 500,000 Students,” even more than that. And of course, just another reminder that if this makes you angry, there’s something you can and should do within the next a little bit under 60 days. And that is to go to HandsOffSnap.org and leave a public comment. s.e. smith is the deputy editor of TalkPoverty.org, and as I mentioned, the author of this piece, “A New Trump Rule Could Threaten School Lunch For 500,000 Students.” s.e., thanks so much. Always great to have you on the show.

SMITH: Of course. Always a pleasure.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. More Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. Despite the importance of rural communities to the health of the nation overall and the fact that one in five Americans live in rural areas, federal policy has left many rural communities behind. Though some policymakers are eager to tackle the challenges facing rural areas, discussions on the topic tend to make sweeping generalizations about the dynamics of work in these communities, painting rural America as a homogenous and lily-white monolith. But as Gbenga Ajilore and Zoe Willingham, two economic researchers at the Center for American Progress, argue in a recent report titled “Redefining Rural America,” rural America is far from homogenous and should not be discussed or treated as such. I sat down with them for a look inside their new report. Let’s take a listen.

VALLAS: And I’m so thrilled to have you both joining us. Thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

GBENGA AJILORE: Thanks for the invitation.

ZOE WILLINGHAM: Thank you for having us.

VALLAS: So, before we get into what’s in this report — and there’s a lot in there — I want to back up and sort of ask the question, why did you guys write this report? And I think I know the answer, which is actually really kind of clearly written in sort of the conclusion of the report. Which is that there’s a lot out there when the mainstream media and others talk about rural America that looks one very specific way. And the report is quite charitable. It describes that dominant narrative is lacking diversity. Gbenga, I’m going to start with you. Talk a little bit about what is it that we see and hear when we hear the mainstream media and other voices out there talking about rural America? What does that look like?

AJILORE: So, the way people talk about rural America and what kind of image that comes up is that American Gothic image of that older white couple who live on a farm somewhere in the Midwest. And one of the problems with that is that it totally misses who actually lives there and who actually thrives there and lives there. And one of the reasons why we wrote about this is that we wanted to kind of say this is what it looks like. But instead of just saying, “You have it wrong,” we wanted to show that and actually document and categorize and look at it in terms of by regions and who is included. And so, a lot of the problems that when we have this binary dichotomy between rural and urban, a lot of it is to kind of divide people. And so, we talk about rural = white, urban = black, and you just see that in so many different ways. And it’s harmful. It’s harmful to the individuals. It’s harmful in terms of to people who actually want to get the policy right, is that they think about it incorrectly.

VALLAS: And Zoe, the report actually describes a particular segment on “The Today Show” that took place in Iowa, in Storm Lake, Iowa, a rural community. And you guys actually lift up that “Today Show” segment as sort of a poster child of how the media usually treats rural America. Talk a little bit about that piece and how it portrayed rural America.

WILLINGHAM: Yes. We picked it out because we do think it’s really emblematic of the larger narrative about rural communities. It spent a lot of time talking about the farm economy. It interviewed several white farmers. What it didn’t show was the fact that Storm Lake has a lot, a very large immigrant population. It didn’t showcase them at all, and that’s something that’s very concerning to us. I’m glad that there’s a lot of concern and focus on rural America. A large portion of the U.S. population lives in rural areas, about 20 percent, depending on how you define it. And there are higher rates of poverty. In many ways, the rural economy has not recovered from the Great Recession. But if we’re going to talk seriously about policy solutions, everyone has to be at the table.

VALLAS: So, let’s get concrete about this. People might be hearing the term “rural,” thinking they know what it means. And actually, your report makes very clear we probably all, as sort of lay people, have no idea what a rural area technically is. These are all kind of technical terms. Gbenga, this is a lot of what you do as an economist at the Center for American Progress, is actually think about how we measure areas of space and what that means for policy purposes. So, what is a rural area, and why does it matter how we define it?

AJILORE: So, there’s many different definitions. A technical definition is going to be based off of population, and you have different categories of population. And so, usually you think of a rural area as having population probably anywhere from like 10,000 to 50,000. That’s actually called a micropolitan area. Non-metropolitan areas are anything around that gamut. One of the issues with actually defining “rural” is that when you think about rural America, it’s almost a feel. And so, a lot of scholars have gone around with different types of definitions. So, we think about population density. And also, you look at kind of people who live in larger areas, but then they feel rural. And in one of the issues, and it’s actually, there was a Washington Post article recently that talked about people talk about how rural America is suffering from population loss, and it’s not doing well. But if you think about it, that’s actually not a significant problem because if a rural area gains a lot of population, by definition, it changes from rural to urban. So, it’s not about increasing population, but it’s more about the distribution of population.

So, when we think about rural America, we have technical definitions, and in our report, we talk about the technical definition. But we also say it’s more of a spectrum that a lot of places are not completely urban or even wholly rural. So, it’s all about the spectrum, and so there’s what’s called in our report the rural-urban continuum code, but it’s more of a spectrum that it’s somewhat rural, somewhat urban. And a lot of the definitions depend on proximity to metropolitan statistical areas. So, we have rural areas that are close to metropolitan statistical areas and then rural areas that are far away. And the kind of the composition of those are going to be different. And that’s kind of very important and kind of gives us a better understanding of what rural America looks like.

VALLAS: So, it’s not just what a particular area looks like in a silo. It’s also its proximity to other areas of different sizes and urban-ness or rural-ness, right, to oversimplify. Because how remote an area is matters a lot too.

AJILORE: Very much so. And how remote an area is also depends on the industry. So, you have places that are remote that are going to be very heavily agriculturally-dependent, and you can have other places that are close to metro that are more manufacturing or service sector. And so, understanding those differences, understanding those nuances then leads to what are the sort of policies that we need to do to uplift these areas?

VALLAS: So Zoe, you started to get into this before. But one of the dominant myths about the rural-urban kind of dichotomy that Gbenga was just talking about is that rural America is full of a whole bunch of white folk, and that that’s the only people who live there. That is something your report takes on head on and really kind of walks through the tremendous and underappreciated diversity that does exist in many rural communities. Talk a little bit about who lives in rural America.

WILLINGHAM: So, there are some subsets of the rural-urban continuum code that have as large of a proportion of African Americans as metro subcategories. And we think that’s something that’s very important to highlight because those communities are not discussed or portrayed commonly in the dominant narrative, but have additional structural barriers to economic opportunity. But they’re just completely overlooked. Of course, Native American populations are concentrated in rural America. The more remote and smaller counties tend to have larger Native American populations, are proportionately more Native Americans. And that’s something that we wanted to lift up.

We also wanted to acknowledge that there are higher rates of disability in rural America, which has a lot of important implications, especially because access to health care has been critical to rural America. We’re seeing hospital closures at an alarming rate. Folks have to drive maybe an hour and a half or more for certain kinds of care.

VALLAS: Something we’ve actually talked about fairly recently on this show and which, importantly, isn’t just happening in rural America but is also happening in poor urban areas too: another commonality.

WILLINGHAM: Absolutely, absolutely. We also touch on the importance of recent immigrants to rural counties. The Immigration Team here at Center for American Progress has done some wonderful research about how immigrant communities have really turned the tide for some counties and really contributed greatly to the economic and social well-being of those areas. There’s a case study about two towns in Nebraska that benefited immensely from an effort both from city leaders and other community leaders to welcome and support incoming immigrants and have seen a lot of growth from that.

Finally, we touch on LGBTQ communities in rural America as well because unsurprisingly, young rural Americans are just as likely to identify as LGBTQ as the rest of the country. But again, access to health care is pretty critical because even in a city, it can be hard to find health care providers who are going to be able to provide appropriate health information or services. And in rural areas where you have clinics more spread out, if your nearest hospital doesn’t respect your identity and doesn’t provide the care that you need, your second-best option may be miles and miles away, completely out of reach.

VALLAS: So, if that’s something of a thumbnail sketch of who lives in a lot of these different rural areas and the much more diverse picture of the population fabric in those areas, Gbenga, your report also delves into the myth, and really throws into the trash can, the myth that another area of sort of perceived homogeneity in rural America is that it’s all manufacturing and farming and mining. Those are definitely the industries that are always sort of front and center in the imagery including in that Today Show piece that he was just talking about, where farmers were, of course, the only people interviewed for the piece. What does the breakdown look like, and what is the sort of greater, if somewhat hidden, diversity of industry look like in rural communities?

AJILORE: So, when we think about rural America, we think about the Midwest, we think about the images that we see on TV. So, that’s white farmers on tractors. You look at the “blue collar” worker in Ohio, rust belt states. And one of the things that we find in our research is that the highest percentage of employment is in the service sector. And then especially, you look at health care services. So, we talked about hospitals. We talked about doctors and also food services. So, what that means is that we think about it on the Econ Policy team here at Center for American Progress. We really talk about worker power and strengthening worker power. And so, that’s very instrumental in the service sector. So, what that means is that a lot of the policies that we talk about — so we think about 5 for 15, we talk about strengthening unions, non-compete, making it more better for employees — those things are not just big city policies. Those are not coastal, liberal policies. These are policies that are going to work throughout the rural area. And in fact, because of the other issues that we see in rural America, these policies are actually even more important.

And so, we think about in southern areas, rural southern. We talked about African Americans in the south. There’s Latinx people in the southwest. Native Americans in the Great Plains areas. These are places that would benefit from stronger unions, $15 minimum wage, things like that. And so, if we have a better understanding that it’s not just farming and manufacturing and mining, that it’s actually service sector, then these policies are going to resonate a lot better than what people in the media think.

WILLINGHAM: If I might expand on that, I think it’s also important to remember that about one in five rural counties is agriculture-dependent. We don’t want to downplay the importance of the agriculture sector. What we want to really bring home with this issue brief is the fact that a policy just focused on the agriculture sector or the manufacturing sector, while good, is not going to take us all the way home and is still going to leave people behind.

VALLAS: Sort of a necessary but not sufficient kind of thing.

WILLINGHAM: Exactly. Exactly.

VALLAS: A really important point.

So, in the last few minutes that I have with you both, you’ve intimated a couple of times in the course of this conversation why this matters, why we need to be doing a better job of telling the right story and identifying the right problems and the right demographic makeup before we jump to policy conclusions. But your report really very clearly lays out some food for thought for policymakers as well as for those in the media who really could do a much better and more diverse job of painting this picture. Gbenga, and then I’ll bring you in as well to close out, Zoe, what are your takeaways that you hope people get from, and particularly policymakers get from, this report as they think about redefining rural America in their minds?

AJILORE: I think the simplest takeaway is that rural America is complex and complex in a vibrant and beautiful way. And that what you see on TV, what’s being portrayed, is not the case. That there’s a lot of African Americans, Native Americans, Latinx people, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities who live in rural America but also who actually enjoy living in rural America. We have this kind of bias that people don’t want to be in rural America anymore, that your goal is to get out and get out to the big city. And while for a lot of cases, that is not the truth anymore. You’re not going to do better. But also there’s a lot there. And more importantly, and this is stuff that we have a lot of future work coming up that’s going to focus on this, is that there’s a lot of people in rural America who are actually providing solutions, who are doing well, who are thriving, who are looking at the problems that they have and then say, “Oh, this is what we need to do,” and are doing it and are being successful.

Zoe had brought up the work that our Immigration Team has been doing. They just actually this week came out with a piece on doctors moving to rural areas, immigrant doctors, and their success stories. And then just kind of giving a policy of what needs to be done. So, not only is rural America complex and diverse, but they actually know what needs to be done. And just we need to lift up their stories and help them continue to succeed.

VALLAS: So, let me stay with you there just for a second because you raise — and I think people are wondering, oh, I’d love to know more about what is working — what are the types of models that you guys are lifting up that we need to be thinking more about, giving more visibility to, in terms of what’s working and the policy solutions that rural America is screaming out for?

AJILORE: So, we are still working on developing the solutions, but there’s a number of what I call development hubs of law non-profits who are working on specific issues. Another issue that’s been working is that a number of cooperatives have been developing broadband for rural areas to help get that going. So, those are kind of just two small examples that we are trying to lift up.

VALLAS: And Zoe, bringing you in as well on the same question.

WILLINGHAM: Yeah. One thing that I would like to tie in as we’re sort of closing out and summarizing is that I think we should remember the connection between civil rights and economic justice. By acknowledging the diversity of rural communities, you are necessarily bringing in a discussion of the structural barriers facing a lot of communities in rural America. So, African Americans, Native Americans, LGBTQ Americans, folks with disabilities, we’re not going to truly serve all of rural America unless we address these barriers, unless we guarantee that LGBTQ Americans are free from discrimination in hiring, unless we address the legacy of Jim Crow inside the Deep South and the structural racism that persists to this day. Without addressing those structural barriers and the discrimination and the lack of access, rural communities are still going to be left behind.

VALLAS: And that’s a great note to end on. I can’t think of a better one. I’ve been speaking with Zoe Willingham, a researcher at the Center for American Progress on the Economic Policy Team as well as Gbenga Ajilore, a senior economist on that same team at the Center for American Progress. They’re both the co-authors of the report we’ve been talking about, which you can find on our nerdy syllabus page, because of course you can. It’s called “Redefining Rural America.” And there’s a lot more in there where this all came from. Thanks to you both so much for this fantastic work and for taking the time to come on and talk about it.

AJILORE: Thank you Rebecca.

WILLINGHAM: Thank you.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart and David Ballard. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow, and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back

I feel my spirit is revealing,

And now we just trynta get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪