There’s a reason that most people may now associate sequestration with furloughed air traffic controllers: beyond potentially experiencing the flight delays the furloughs causing first hand, they are the leading news story on this topic. An analysis of mainstream news channel coverage by the Huffington Post found that the impact on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was mentioned nearly two and a half times more than the impact on Head Start, more than twice than Medicare patients who got turned away from cancer clinics, and six and a half times more than reductions to Meals on Wheels.

Congress is similarly focused on furloughed air traffic controllers and delayed flights. The GOP launched a campaign on Monday to blame it on President Obama. And yesterday a bipartisan group of Senators, led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Hoeven (R-ND), introduced legislation that would stop the furloughs.

The flight delays are not inconsequential, as they can have a big effect on commerce. A large portion of the population also flies, including policymakers and journalists themselves, so many may have more firsthand experience with this particular impact of sequestration.

But other impacts may be more severe for vulnerable populations and started taking place long before the FAA furloughs. Some low-income children had already been kicked out of Head Start. Thousands of cancer patients have been turned away from clinics. The long-term unemployed are looking at reduced federal checks. Food pantries have closed. Schools on Native American reservations and near military bases have taken an immediate funding cut, as have Native American health services.

Importantly, undoing some pieces of sequestration while leaving others intact will mean those others will have to shoulder even heavier cuts, given the way the sequester was designed. So rather than address it piecemeal, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to introduce legislation that would pay down the budget cuts with unused war savings in the Overseas Contingency Operation fund. Enacting such a plan would ensure that programs that serve the poor, elderly, or unemployed don’t suffer more than their share of the overarching budget cuts.

If your flight is delayed in the coming weeks, Republicans want to make sure you blame President Obama, despite having claimed that these cuts would be good for the economy. GOP lawmakers were also alarmed at the cancellation of White House tours. And now Politico is reporting that negotiations have begun to save some programs from the knife, even though this means the cuts will have to fall harder on others. Some of the programs that may be spared are surely important: public safety like the Transportation Security Administration and FBI agents, meat inspections, funding for the National Institutes of Health, air traffic controllers, and a military tuition program.

But some of the harshest pain is falling outside of the spotlight. In particular, programs that help the poor are already feeling the impact and stand to see more cuts, but they rarely get mentioned in conversations about the effects of sequestration. Low-income children have already been kicked out of Head Start, and 70,000 in total are likely to lose access to preschool. Future impacts on programs that help the poor such as housing and nutrition assistance will also take a toll.

Sequestration will also have a big impact on the long-term unemployed. About 2 million people who exhausted other unemployment benefits will see the meager $300 weekly checks reduced by more than 10 percent. The long-term unemployed already face hugely diminished prospects in a weak job market.

The deal making over what might get spared could help explain why these impacts are getting ignored. Drug companies and medical device manufacturers, for example, are seeking an exemption on the fees they pay to support their Food and Drug Administration reviews. These are large and profitable companies, so they have the resources to make a big push. As Politico reports, “Pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers say they’re unsure whether they’ll get their best chance at an exemption through regular order on appropriations bills or via the authorizing committees, so they’re targeting pretty much all the key lawmakers…” The poor and unemployed have few, if any, resources to make their voices heard in this way on how the sequester may impact their lives.

Past research has also indicated that the needs of the poor in general tend to go unheeded by members of Congress. Research from Larry Bartels and Martin Gilens has found that policymakers are far more likely to vote in line with the policy preferences of the upper middle class and wealthy than with working and low-income people. This is also likely tied to the fact that those with fewer resources have less time and money to make themselves heard.

While undoing the damaging effects of sequestration should get bipartisan attention, if the parts that affect low-income Americans keep getting ignored the most vulnerable could shoulder most of the pain.

President Obama’s latest budget doesn’t just take aim at the tax code by raising $580 billion in new revenues by closing loopholes, limiting deductions for the wealthy, and instituting the Buffett Rule. It also made the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) included in the 2009 stimulus package permanent. This refundable credit is aimed at giving poor and working people more income. But research also shows that the benefits extend beyond the workers to their children.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the children of EITC recipients do better in school, are likelier to go to college, and earn more when they enter the workforce:

As the graphic above illustrates, for every $3,000 in EITC income a family receives, a child goes on to work 135 more hours a year as an adult and to earn 17 percent more. Beyond educational and financial outcomes, the children who live in families that receive EITC credits are likely to avoid the early onset of disabilities and other illnesses that are associated with child poverty. The EITC may also help infants by reducing low-weight and premature births.

Interestingly, the EITC can have similar benefits for parents by boosting their employment rates. Overall, income from the EITC and the Child Tax Credit kept about 10 million people out of poverty in 2011. Many of those people, 1.5 million, owe their eligibility for the credit to the stimulus’ expansion, the one that Obama is seeking to make permanent. Republicans, for their part, have repeatedly tried to roll back that expansion, which could have serious impact on low-income parents and their kids.

The U.S. likes to think that it’s number one, but when it comes to child poverty in the developed world, it’s literally at the bottom of the pile. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) just released a ranking of developed countries by the percent of children who live in poverty, and the U.S. clocks in at number 34 out of 35, only beating out Romania:

More than one in five American children fall below a relative poverty line, which UNICEF defines as living in a household that earns less than half of the national median. The United States ranks 34th of the 35 countries surveyed, above only Romania and below virtually all of Europe plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

[T]he picture looks even worse when you examine just how far below the relative poverty line these children tend to fall. The UNICEF report looks at something it calls the “child poverty gap,” which measures how far the average poor child falls below the relative poverty line. It does this by measuring the gap between the relative poverty line and the average income of poor families.

Alarmingly, the United States also scores second-to-last on this measurement, with the average poor child living in a home that makes 36 percent less than the relative poverty line. Only Italy has a wider gap.

These numbers should raise the alarm about child poverty in America and spark action to reduce poverty. But we’re in the midst of doing just the opposite. Sequestration, the package of across-the-board spending cuts that went into effect in March, will take a big bite out of many programs that help the poor, which experts predict will increase poverty and make it deeper for those already living below the line. Low-income children have already been kicked out of Head Start thanks to sequestration, and other programs such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), public housing and housing vouchers, and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) are also slated to get slashed.

While Obama’s latest budget includes investments in education and job creation, as well as $75 billion to fund universal preschool, it also includes $100 billion in cuts to non-defense discretionary spending, the portion of the budget that funds many programs for the poor. While the numbers on child poverty make an urgent case for investing more in children and low-income families, the political climate only seems poised to keep cutting government spending.

The trial for Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortion doctor charged with murder and who apparently ran a hellish and illegal clinic, has many people wondering why any women would choose to go there for abortion care. The answer for many was likely simple: finances. Abortions are expensive, and they get even more expensive the later into a pregnancy they occur. The average abortion costs $470, and scraping that money together if you’re living in poverty and on a razor thin budget takes time. Seventy percent of women who have had an abortion would have done it earlier in their pregnancy if they hadn’t had to delay to get the money. By the time the funds are raised, the pregnancy can be so far along that few providers will perform an abortion, but Gosnell regularly performed late-term procedures.

On top of this, Gosnell undercut the competition on prices, not having real nurses or equipment at the facility. The grand jury report showed that a first trimester abortion at Gosnell’s clinic cost $330, much less than the average. A procedure at 23-34 weeks was $1,625, at least a thousand dollars less than what the few other facilities in the Northeast charge.

Those discounted prices likely went a long way toward influencing Philadelphia-area women to patronize Gosnell’s illegal clinic, since many poor women are on their own when they pay for an abortion. Although two-thirds of abortion patients have health insurance, 57 percent pay for it out of pocket — and some of them are likely women who receive Medicaid, which is barred from covering abortions under the Hyde Amendment. Thanks to that federal law, the Pennsylvania women on Medicaid would have had to come up with the entire amount on their own.

As social worker Jeff Deeny wrote this week in The Atlantic, he’s seen many Philadelphia-area women living in poverty struggle with this very problem. He recounted the story of Ashley, a young mother on welfare struggling with homelessness and worried that another pregnancy would throw everything she was working toward off track:

Watching Ashley struggle with a decision that on one hand could ruin her own future but on the other ruin her relationship with her mother and her church was heart rending.

What’s worse is that the cost of the abortion, $300, would break Ashley’s budget. There was no such thing as an extra $300 in Ashley’s world. If she was going to go through with it, could she raise the money, and could she do it in time? I was concerned that if she paid for the abortion she would get behind on rent, and wind up back on the streets. If welfare medical assistance provided funds for women to have abortions, she could have very quickly and safely had the procedure done. Instead, the clock was quickly ticking as she explored every avenue for getting the money together. The longer it ticked, the more expensive the procedure would become, until ultimately it would become illegal and she would have to bring the baby to term. Or, if she was that desperate, she might have turned to Kermit Gosnell, who allegedly exploited exactly this scenario of poor women past the term limit for a legal abortion, maybe because while they were struggling to get the money together for it the clock ticked to long, maybe because they were ignorant of other, better resources for the service. […]

[I]f access to safe and legal abortions were expanded, and public funds used to provide them, there wouldn’t have been a Kermit Gosnell. The poor women upon whom Gosnell preyed would not be shunted into the black market if earlier on there had been safe, free services available to everyone in need.

Even after 40 years under Roe v. Wade, the right to access a safe and legal abortion is often far from reality for many women living in poverty. Worse, if a woman fails to obtain an abortion she is even more likely to become poor. A woman of means can access a timely abortion and her private insurance will usually cover it. But a woman on Medicaid just barely getting by will have to go hat in hand, risking having the procedure once it’s more dangerous and costly. Some will end up turning to black market providers like Gosnell who prey on the vulnerable, unless we remove the economic barriers that stand in between women and reproductive care.

The combined punch of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) lifted almost 10 million Americans out of poverty in 2011, according to the latest round up of the numbers by the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities. Last year, the two programs kept almost 5 million women alone out of poverty.

Both credits are built into the income tax code and both were expanded by the stimulus bill passed in 2009. The EITC is fully refundable — if the value of the credit exceeds an individual’s total income tax burden, the remaining balance is paid back to them — and the CTC is partially refundable. This means both credits work as added boosts to the paychecks of low-income and working class families. Put it all together, and CBPP found that 9.4 million people, including 4.9 million children, were kept out of poverty by the two programs in 2011.

As the chart shows, 1.5 million of those Americans owe their eligibility for the credits to the expansion that came with the stimulus — an important point, since the Republicans have made repeated attempts to roll those expansions back.

This is especially galling because both the EITC and CTC have features conservatives should applaud: first, because someone has to earn an income to qualify for them, the credits operate as an economic incentive to find work. Second, eligibility for both credits phases out gradually, minimizing any “welfare trap” effects. And third, because they’re credits rather than deductions, the money they provide is more focused on Americans in need, with less excess spending higher up the income ladder.

Beyond their poverty reducing effects, CBPP also found that families that benefitted from the credits saw their children go on to earn more as adults (when parents are stuck in low-wage work, it has damaging ripple effects for their children) and that the EITC specifically has done far more to increase employment amongst single mothers than either the GOP’s much touted welfare reform in the 1990s.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, expanded rapidly during the Great Recession, when millions of workers lost jobs and entered poverty, forcing them to turn to the government’s social safety net for help. But even as the economy has begun to recover, SNAP “isn’t shrinking back alongside the recovery,” the Wall Street Journal warned today.

States and the federal government both expanded SNAP access before and during the recession in an attempt to extend more aid to struggling Americans. That has led Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) aching to cut the supposedly “unsustainable” program, since its costs and enrollment are both at record levels. In the piece, the Journal admits that “the biggest factor behind the upward march of food stamps is a sluggish job market and a rising poverty rate,” but it then asks whether those expansions have made the program far more costly over the long-run and wonders why SNAP enrollment hasn’t dropped along with unemployment rates:

The food-stamp rolls have swollen since 2008 and are projected to stay that way for years. In 2008, SNAP enrollment was 28.2 million. Unemployment peaked in October 2009 at 10% and was at 7.7% as of February, but SNAP kept growing.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts unemployment will drop to 5.6% by 2017 but that SNAP enrollment will drop slightly to 43.3 million people, down 4.5 million from the current level.

That makes it very different from the other big federal support program, unemployment insurance, which shrinks as the economy improves. Continued jobless claims dropped to 3.1 million in February after peaking at 6.6 million in May 2009.

Unemployment insurance enrollment has dropped because it is based on unemployment. SNAP, however, is based on income, which is why it tracks not with the unemployment rate but with poverty levels, as this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows:

That SNAP isn’t shrinking at the same rate as unemployment insurance isn’t exactly a shocking revelation, especially since 58 percent of the jobs created since the recession are in low-wage sectors that are less likely to pull workers out of poverty and off of food stamps. The poverty rate rose sharply after the recession, and it hasn’t dropped significantly since the recovery began. But for all the concerns about SNAP’s long-term costs, the program is projected to return to its return to its historical spending levels by 2023:

The Journal actually acknowledges that the expansions make little difference in the cost of the program, but not until the second-to-last paragraph. “The Congressional Budget Office said reinstating eligibility limits would save around $4.5 billion over 10 years, a fraction of the program’s total cost over that time,” it writes there, all but admitting that the reason SNAP expanded is not because the government made it easier to enroll but because the economy contracted and plunged millions of people into poverty. That, in short, is exactly what the program is supposed to do.