The Nuns On A Bus tour that made stops at 10 congressional offices in nine states in July is back on the road protesting the House Republican budget’s damaging cuts to programs that benefit the poor and middle class. The tour, comprised this time of a different set of faith leaders and community action groups, made its second stop in upstate New York today, visiting Syracuse, New York to again draw attention to the “devastating” budget authored by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the GOP’s vice presidential nominee.

The budget came under fire from religious leaders for its substantial cuts to food assistance programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and other safety net programs — overall, 62 percent of its spending cuts come from programs that benefit the poor and middle class. In a release, the religious leaders blasted the budget for “eviscerating…programs that provide pathways out of poverty for millions of families”:

“The proposed cuts of Representative Ryan in the Ryan’s Budget are immoral and unjustifiable and will be putting the burden on the poor,” said Father Fred Daily of All Saints Church. “I think that all people of faith should be in the streets proclaiming the immorality of these proposed cuts.”

The protest also called on Rep. Anne-Marie Buerkle (R), who represents Syracuse and the surrounding area, to repudiate the budget cuts. Buerkle voted for the budget’s passage in April. “I ask you Congresswoman Ann Marie Buerkle, as a graduate of Saint Joseph School of Nursing; whose mission is to follow the gospel message and to be at one with the poor and marginalized, to consider your vote and vote against the Romney/Ryan budget. If this budget does go through many of our friends and neighbors here in Syracuse will have drastic cuts to their services,” Sister Pat Bergan of Saint Lucy’s Church said in the release.

The House budget, which GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney called “marvelous” earlier this year, has been roundly criticized by faith leaders as an “immoral disaster” that contains cuts to food assistance and other programs that, in the words of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, are “unjustified and wrong.” The nuns recently challenged Romney to spend a day with them in order to see what those spending cuts would mean for the poor, but his campaign has yet to respond.

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has flooded the airwaves with advertisements criticizing the Obama administration’s changes to the 1996 welfare reform law, accusing the administration of “gutting welfare reform” and removing the work requirements the law mandates. The ads are blatantly false, a point noted by independent fact-checkers, multiple media outlets, and even the newspaper cited in one of the ads.

This afternoon on CNN, Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer took Romney campaign chairman John Sununu to task over the false ads, reading directly from the Dept. of Health and Human Services directive that outlines the waiver program and the letters from Republican governors who asked for the waivers:

BLITZER: I’ll read to you, governor, the precise language from the Health and Human Services memo outlining what the states who seek this flexibility, and you were once a governor, and I’ll read to you what it says. It says the Department of Health and Human Services will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. The secretary will not approve a waiver for an initiative that substantially likely to reduce access for assistance or employment for needy families.

SUNUNU: That’s correct.

BLITZER: They’re not going to approve anything unless it leads to greater opportunities for moving people from welfare to work.

SUNUNU: Look, to quote the president who signed the bill, it depends on what your definition of access is and expands is and background discussions were. The background discussions talked about broadening it to the point where you soften the hard reality of the work requirement. [...]

BLITZER: I don’t know, governor, if you’ve actually read the letters from the governors’ offices from Utah and Nevada, which I have here in front of me.

SUNUNU: I only heard their comments. I have not read their letters.

BLITZER: You should read the letters. Because I’ve read them in depth. [...]

BLITZER: We’ll make sure we’re precise. on this one, governor, on this — hold on a second. Hold on one second. On this one it’s not just CNN. It’s every major fact checking organization out there says he has not — has not gutted, has not gutted by any means the work requirements.

Watch:

Sununu isn’t the first Republican to struggle to defend the false attacks on television. Last week, MSNBC host Chuck Todd called out Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R) for defending the ads. Todd noted the same directives and letters Blitzer cited to make the case, and Branstand was unable to defend Romney’s stance.

The proposed changes, it bears noting, are being made because the 1996 welfare reform law, which celebrated its 16th birthday today, has failed to help many of the neediest Americans. The law may be an “unprecedented success” in the eyes of the Romney campaign, but the reality is that it achieved much of its reductions to welfare by kicking people out of the program, not by getting them jobs.

34-year-old Felix Trinidad died last month after a battle with cancer that wasn’t diagnosed until it was too late, in part because he lacked the ability to take paid sick leave from the job he depended on.

As his health declined, Trinidad could not afford to take time off from his job at a Golden Farm supermarket in Kensington, NY, because his employers did not provide him with any paid sick leave — and by the time he eventually made it to a hospital emergency room, he was told he had advanced stomach cancer. As he underwent chemotherapy, he was unable to miss as much work as his doctors recommended to help facilitate his recovery.

Trinidad — who was also an activist in a local campaign for better working conditions and paid sick days at Golden Farm — was one of the more than one million New Yorkers who are forced to choose between their health and their job when they come down with an illness, underscoring the need for New York City’s proposed paid sick leave bill. The Paid Sick Days Act would set a minimum for paid sick days for the city’s employees, requiring businesses with 20 or more employees to provide at least nine days of annual paid sick leave, and those with 19 or fewer employees to provide at least five. Despite widespread support for the measure, however, Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D) is blocking it from coming up for a vote in city council.

To honor Trinidad’s memory and pressure Quinn to reconsider her stance on the Paid Sick Days Act, local clergy members and community activists held a prayer vigil on the steps of the City Hall today at noon. Activists hope Quinn will honor Trinidad’s memory by advancing legislation that could help others in his situation. “Félix didn’t take a day off when he needed chemo because he was afraid of being fired,” Lucas Sánchez of New York Communities for Change explained.

Progressive organizations, including the National Domestic Workers Alliance, have partnered on a petition pressuring Quinn to bring the proposed bill to a vote. Local activism has also sprung up in other cities where paid sick leave is under attack, such as Orange County, Florida, where residents are fighting to get paid sick day legislation on the November ballot despite resistance from the big businesses that oppose it.

For weeks, the Romney campaign have used an out-of-context quote from President Obama as the backdrop to their “We Did Build This!” tour, a series of speeches and press conferences featuring a parade of small businesses that have directly benefitted from government loans and contracts.

It’s a theme that will carry over to the Republican National Convention next week, as the event organizers have titled Tuesday evening’s primetime session “We Built This!”

But as with so many of these events before it, the Republican Party will be criticizing Obama for suggesting that small businesses rely on public funding from a building built largely with taxpayer dollars.

The Tampa Bay Times Forum, usually the home to the Tampa Bay Lightning NHL team and other large-scale events, was built in 1996 for $139 million, 62 percent of which was provided by the taxpayers of Florida.

It serves to underscore the point that President Obama was trying to make, that private companies — from professional sports franchises to small businesses alike — rely on government spending to succeed. Businesses don’t buy roads or police departments or even stadiums, at least not without government help.

Nonetheless, Jeff Vinik, the principal owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning, is a big donor to Mitt Romney and the RNC, giving more than $30,000 so far this election season.

The Republican Party spent all day Tuesday debating and drafting the party’s official platform, and by the end of the day, it approved a draft of the “most conservative platform in modern history.” After enshrining its support for radical immigration, abortion, and women’s health laws, the GOP made sure to include support for a provision that would make it virtually impossible for the federal government to raise taxes in the future:

“We call for a Constitutional amendment requiring a super-majority for any tax increase with exceptions for only war and national emergencies, and imposing a cap limiting spending to historical average percentage of GDP so that future Congresses cannot balance the budget by raising taxes.”

Requiring a 60-vote supermajority to raise taxes would make doing so virtually impossible, as the GOP’s repeated use of the filibuster in the Democratic-controlled Senate has made painfully evident. States that require a supermajority to raise taxes, like California, have created a fiscal disaster, and such a plan ignores a broad consensus among economists that tax increases, as well as spending cuts, will be necessary to reduce the nation’s debt and eventually balance its budget.

The supermajority requirement isn’t the only destructive part of the platform proposal, which is similar to the Balanced Budget Amendment the GOP pushed during the debt ceiling debate last year. That plan, according to studies, would have doubled the nation’s unemployment rate, put 15 million people out of work, and required spending cuts that would destroy the social safety net.

As for the idea that the GOP would contemplate raising taxes to pay for war, that too is ludicrous. A decade ago, the GOP took control of both sides of Congress and the White House and inherited a budget surplus. The party promptly passed massive tax cuts immediately before putting two wars on the nation’s credit card, creating the train wreck that is America’s fiscal situation right now.

Republicans have spent the last three years promising to reduce the debt and create jobs. This policy, like the party’s budget and its “job creation” policies, proves the party isn’t capable of addressing either.

Our guest blogger is Melissa Boteach, director of Poverty to Prosperity at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Sixteen years ago today President Clinton signed the law that did away with guaranteed income assistance for poor families with children and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). It was a watershed moment in poverty policy that fundamentally changed the landscape for struggling families.

For too many poor children, this 16th birthday is anything but sweet. As a present they get increased child poverty rates and a campaign from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan that demagogues their families.

When TANF was first enacted, child poverty fell significantly and racial and ethnic disparities closed. Many politicians attributed these positive trends to the law’s new work requirements and time limits on income assistance. While these factors likely pushed more mothers into the labor market, the Clinton-era rates of economic growth and rising wages, along with the president’s policies on increased access to childcare and tax credits for working families, also played a significant role.

When the economy tanked, those gains began to unravel. As a flat-funded block grant, TANF lost the ability to respond to increased need in tough economic times and has lost approximately 30 percent of its value since 1996.. During the Great Recession, several states actually decreased their caseload as poverty rates rose each year. And today, only about 27 percent of poor families with children can access the program as opposed to the two-thirds of poor families with children that did in 1996:

Given that reducing child poverty was never a goal of the original legislation, perhaps this is not surprising. The current design of TANF’s work participation rates encourages states to help the easiest to employ families over those that face serious barriers to work and need more help. Moreover, the incentive structure of the program is focused on caseload reduction as states receive incentives for kicking people off the rolls regardless of whether or not they have found employment.

What states did not receive from the program was an incentive to cut poverty.

One silver lining from welfare reform was that many progressives thought enacting these reforms would take welfare “off the table” as an issue for demagoguery. No more fake welfare queens in Cadillacs used to drive a wedge between voters and foster working-class resentment. The American public would know that people on income assistance were required to work and that assistance was temporary.

Unfortunately, today, on TANF’s 16th birthday, the Romney/Ryan campaign is running false ads about families on income assistance in swing states, claiming the Obama administration wants to “gut work requirements” and “hand people checks.” Those claims are not only blatantly false — the Obama administration is trying to improve employment outcomes for low-income families through a waiver system Romney supported as governor — but a cynical maneuver that threatens to undermine bipartisan consensus that states could innovate with new approaches to improve employment opportunities for vulnerable families.

The pre-1996 welfare system had its flaws and was in need of reform. But record of conservative reform efforts is clear: Today, there are more children poverty, more working poor families, and unfortunately more demagoguery. As we move forward, we need to focus on creating an income assistance program that puts child poverty reduction and not caseload reduction as the central goal and addresses the fundamental barriers that families have to accessing sustainable employment.

One in five Americans have hit a point over the last twelve months when they could not afford to pay for food, according to a new poll from Gallup.

In a survey conducted between January and June of this year, one fifth of the 177,662 people surveyed said that there were times in the last year when they couldn’t pay for groceries or other sustenance. The highest rate of food insecurity was in Mississippi, where 24.9 percent of respondents said they couldn’t afford anything to eat, and in Alabama, where 22.9 percent struggled to buy food.

These statistics are staggering, but the number of Americans struggling to afford food would likely be much higher without the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a food assistance program in which one in seven Americans is currently participating. The program keeps 7 million people out of poverty, and helps those in poverty afford the basics.

If Republican legislators have their way, cuts to food assistance programs will likely render even more people food insecure, raising the number of Americans who can’t afford to eat. The House GOP budget cuts $133 billion out of the food stamp program, and House Republicans’ proposed farm bill would kick 280,000 children off of school meals and cut more than $16 billion in food assistance.