<p>Written by: Sabrina Wilson, Reporter [WVUE]</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">A portion of President Trump&rsquo;s controversial travel ban could be implemented Thursday, and travelers and a local migration expert weighed in on whether it could be effective in keeping Americans more safe.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">&quot;It was great, you know, I felt very safe the whole time I was traveling, flying, airports,&quot; said Donna Maques, who just traveled from Amsterdam.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">She was honest about her own concerns about terrorism.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">&quot;When people are boarding the plane, you find yourself looking around at anyone to see if there&#39;s something about the person that makes you feel not too comfortable, and things like that,&rdquo; said Marques.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">In anticipation of the implementation of a portion of President Trump&rsquo;s revised travel ban, federal agencies did not allow much when contacted Wednesday.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">&ldquo;We continue to work with the Departments of State and Justice on the way forward for implementation of the Executive Order based on the Supreme Court&#39;s ruling. We&rsquo;ll release additional information tomorrow,&rdquo; said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Earlier this week the Supreme Court said the 90-day ban on visitors from six majority Muslim countries, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen entering the U.S. could be enforced, at least for now, unless the travelers have bona fide relationships with a person&nbsp;or entity in the U.S.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Another traveler who flies abroad likes the idea.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">&quot;If they&#39;re coming from a problem country like that, I mean fly a lot so, I don&#39;t want to get blown out of the sky&hellip; so I think it&#39;s a good idea,&rdquo; said Richard Barrera.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">&quot;I don&#39;t think anyone should be profiled, but I think it should be everyone. When I travel to a foreign country I have to prove I&#39;m going over there just for leisure, or whatever,&rdquo; said Marques.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">When the president&#39;s initial travel ban went into effect back in January with little warning, many airports around the country experienced a lot of chaos and confusion.&nbsp;Some think implementing a portion of the ban now will result in the same.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><span class="maroon">&quot;I think there&#39;s definitely going to be some confusion about what a bona fide relationship means,&rdquo; said Dr. Susan Weishar, a Mitigation specialist and Fellow at the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University.</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><span class="maroon">Dr. Weishar has worked to resettle refugees, but she does not think they will be significantly impacted by the part of the travel ban that is to take effect.</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><span class="maroon">&quot;If somebody has a relative in the United States, they could come&nbsp;to accept a job, to attend a university or to deliver a speech at university&hellip;It&#39;s really not clear how this travel ban is going to affect anybody but perhaps a small group of tourists, at this point,&rdquo; said Weishar.</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><span class="maroon">She said refugees normally meet the criteria of having bona-fide relationships.</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><span class="maroon">&quot;The most vetted people to come into our country are refugees&hellip;I don&#39;t think that it makes us safer&nbsp;at all,&rdquo; Weishar stated.</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Trump called the Supreme Court&rsquo;s decision&nbsp;&ldquo;a&nbsp;clear victory for our national security.&rdquo;</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Some travelers agree.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">&quot;Lil safer, yeah, I think it will,&rdquo; said Barrera.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The Supreme Court will not hear oral arguments on the entire travel ban the president wants until October.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 12px; font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><a href="http://www.fox8live.com/story/35773848/travel-ban-could-take-effect-thursday-migration-expert-and-travelers-weigh-in">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

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By Rafael Garcia, S.J.</div>
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Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Tex., last year questioned the morality of the United States deporting refugees seeking asylum, rightly treating their plight as a right-to-life issue. &ldquo;I consider supporting the sending of an adult or child back to a place where he or she is marked for death, where there is lawlessness and societal collapse, to be formal cooperation with an intrinsic evil,&rdquo; Bishop Flores said, &ldquo;not unlike driving someone to an abortion clinic.&rdquo;</div>
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Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico have been experiencing massive violence from gangs, often with the collaboration of law enforcement officials and the military. But according to the American Immigration Council, U.S. immigration courts granted asylum to only 1 percent of applicants from Mexico in 2012, and less than 10 percent of applicants from the three Central American countries mentioned above. These figures contrasted with acceptance rates of over 80 percent for asylum applicants from Egypt, Iran and Somalia.</div>
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<a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2017/06/23/deportation-deadly-countries-evil-we-can-avoid">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></div>

<p><font color="#333333" face="Benton Sans, Arial, sans-serif"><span><b>Opinion by Scott Martin, M.D.</b></span></font></p>
<p><font color="#333333" face="Benton Sans, Arial, sans-serif"><span><b>I had the great misfortune to begin my career as a physician practicing in Louisiana without the initial expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. &nbsp;Although many hundreds of thousands of people would have benefited significantly from the expansion, the gubernatorial politics of the time were firmly set against it.&nbsp;</b></span></font></p>
<p><font color="#333333" face="Benton Sans, Arial, sans-serif"><span><b>Instead I spent my three years of internal medicine residency in a busy, New Orleans hospital system routinely dealing with the uninsured. My patient population ran the spectrum from homeless schizophrenics and shackled prisoners to unemployed pipe-guys and working single mothers. We treated all comers, often dealing with a shocking level of poverty and disenfranchisement.</b></span></font></p>
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<p><a href="http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2017/06/medicaid_expansion.html">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>
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ANYA KAMENETZ, NPR</div>
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<p>Louisiana has become the first state to prohibit all public universities from asking applicants about their criminal history.</p>
<p>By some estimates, as many as 70 to 100 million Americans have some kind of criminal record.</p>
<p>And the proportion is far higher in some minority communities. The so called &quot;ban the box&quot; movement is intended to open opportunities to these Americans by preventing discrimination on the basis of one&#39;s past.</p>
<p>&quot;When you educate yourself you become patient, you become wiser, you get off of welfare and become an asset to your society,&quot; said Karla Garner in public testimony to the Louisiana House of Representatives. &quot;I was humiliated trying to go to computer school.&quot; Garner said she served eight years in prison for the death of her child.</p>
<p>Twenty-four states, Washington, D.C., and the federal government now prohibit asking about a criminal record on public job applications.</p>
<p>In 2016 the U.S. Department of Education asked colleges to voluntarily remove criminal history questions from their applications. So far, large public university systems including California&#39;s and New York&#39;s, as well as some private colleges, have complied.</p>
<p>But Louisiana&#39;s is the first statewide ban. The Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, vetoed a similar law for college applications in May, citing student safety. &quot;Parents have an expectation that the school to which they entrust their child will do everything possible to keep their students safe,&quot; he wrote.</p>
<p>The fact that this policy prevailed in Louisiana may be surprising at first glance. The state has the highest incarceration rate in the country, double the national average.</p>
<p>The fight to &quot;ban the box&quot; in Louisiana, for students and earlier for workers, was bipartisan, led by a coalition of civil rights advocates and Christian groups.</p>
<p>Annie Freitas of the Louisiana Prison Education Coalition, which helped write and advocate for the bill, said that after her group brought in people to testify who had gone from prison to college, or been thwarted in their dreams to do so, &quot;conservative Republican senators who have not voted for any criminal justice reform in the past were crying, were hugging, were asking to testify in favor of the bill.&quot; The bill passed the house floor 90 to 0, Freitas said.</p>
<p>Freitas says that university presidents asked for an exception to inquire if applicants have a history of stalking or aggravated sexual assault. Also, after students are admitted, colleges can ask about criminal history when making determinations about counseling, student aid and campus housing.</p>
<p>LPEC and other groups will be helping create accountability measures and offering resources to colleges to help them comply with the new law.</p>
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<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/06/22/533833428/louisiana-is-first-state-to-ban-public-colleges-from-asking-about-criminal-histo">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p>The&nbsp;<a href="https://jsri.loyno.edu/" target="_self">Jesuit Social Research Institute</a>&nbsp;at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.loyno.edu/" target="_self">Loyola University New Orleans</a>&nbsp;has announced a grant of $263,480 over two years from the&nbsp;<a href="http://wkkf.org/" target="_self">W.K. Kellogg Foundation</a>&nbsp;for a project to improve child and family-centered economic security in Louisiana and Mississippi.</p>
<p>Designed to engage communities and faith-based organizations in the two states in efforts to improve child and family-centered economic security, the Economic Security for Vulnerable Families project will work to expand the reach of JSRI&#39;s research and education efforts around racial equity, including family income, health insurance coverage, housing affordability, school segregation, wage equity, unemployment, education gaps and equity, and food insecurity.</p>
<p>The project also will conduct a comparison of how the educational needs of families in the region, particularly those of color, are being met and will support the development of new hunger-specific research focused on Louisiana, and on educational equity in Louisiana and Mississippi, two states that rank low on social justice measures.</p>
<p>&quot;Poverty, racial injustice, education gaps, and food insecurity continue to be key issues facing families in Louisiana and Mississippi, two of the most economically poor states in the nation, and with better information, our communities can provide better solutions,&quot; said the Rev. Fred Kammer, executive director of JSRI and one of the nation&#39;s leading social justice advocates. &quot;Through the Economic Security for Vulnerable Families project, and with generous support of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, JSRI will further explore these imbalances, providing new data and research to help public officials, faith-based organizations, and residents better serve our nation&#39;s most vulnerable.&quot;</p>
<p><a href="http://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/wkkf-funds-project-to-improve-family-economic-security-in-gulf-south">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p>by Al&iacute; Bustamante, PhD</p>
<p>Retirement savers lose $17 billion annually from conflicted investment advice.[1] In the Gulf South, conflicted financial advice costs retirement savers from $54 million in Mississippi to $1 billion in Texas. However, retirement savers may get a reprieve if the Trump administration supports the &ldquo;fiduciary rule,&rdquo; also known as the &ldquo;conflict of interest rule,&rdquo; from the U.S. Department of Labor.</p>
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<p><img alt="" src="https://jsri.loyno.edu/sites/loyno.edu.jsri/files/b0fba650de04f974b8e13e65_900x354.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 200px;" /></p>
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<p><em>Source: Shierholz, Heidi and Ben Zipper. 2017. Here Is What&rsquo;s At Stake With The Conflict of Interest (&ldquo;Fiduciary&rdquo;) Rule. Economic Policy Institute. Note: Based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau: Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) 2008.</em></p>
<p>Currently, financial advisors need only to recommend &ldquo;suitable&rdquo; investment options that fit their clients&rsquo; defined needs. When financial advisers are paid through fees and commissions, they are incentivized to recommend more expensive and potentially riskier investment options. All too often, financial advisors sell investment products that benefit themselves at the expense of their clients. However, most consumers are largely unaware of this conflict of interest and of the cost that these conflicts impose.The fiduciary rule is a common-sense consumer protection requiring that financial advisors (brokers, planners, and insurance agents) put their clients&#39; interests ahead of their own when working on retirement plans and accounts such as 401(k) plans, pensions, and individual retirement accounts (IRAs). This rule would penalize financial advisors that recommend products that bring them the most money but that may not be best for their clients.</p>
<p>Introduced by President Obama&rsquo;s administration in 2015, the fiduciary rule was subject to several months of public comment, four days of public hearings, and several court challenges brought by the financial services industry. [2] &nbsp;After nearly two years, the rule was set to take effect in April. However, in March, the Trump administration issued a 60-day delay to the rule. Despite the severe financial losses that retirement savers face when acting on advice from financial advisers who have conflicts of interest, the Trump administration has stood with the financial services and insurance industries in opposition to the fiduciary rule.</p>
<p>Catholic Social Thought tells us that private wealth becomes illegitimate when it is the result of exploitation or at the expense of the wealth of society. [3] &nbsp;Furthermore, it is the responsibility of men and women to prescribe economic policies that solve the vast and complex problems connected with work &ndash; as is retirement &ndash; and further the common good while &ldquo;leaving behind concerns imposed by special or personal interests.&rdquo;[4]&nbsp;</p>
<p>It is important to protect retirement savers from harm by the financial industry and support the fiduciary rule. The Trump administration should stand with retirement savers and abandon its efforts to delay enforcement and rescind consumer protections. The fiduciary rule is a just policy that serves the common good. It is time to protect retirement savers and not special or personal interests.</p>
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<p><a href="https://t.e2ma.net/message/vfjnp/vr8mje">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>
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<p>[BY BRYN STOLE, &nbsp;JUNE 11, 2017]</p>
<p>Thousands of tourists stream down the winding roads of West Feliciana Parish each spring and fall for the prison rodeo at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.</p>
<p>Alongside the raucous rodeo events, the crowds are drawn to the outdoor crafts fair set up outside the ring, where prisoners sell artwork, leather goods and furniture while mixing with relatives and customers. All the inmates allowed to take part have records of good behavior. Many have earned degrees &mdash; high school equivalency diplomas, vocational certifications, even advanced seminary degrees.</p>
<p>Most are serving life sentences. Nearly all of those inmates will die behind prison walls, barring a major change in Louisiana law. And the number of men and women serving life without parole in Louisiana prisons keeps growing, now approaching 5,000.</p>
<p>Even after the total number of prisoners serving sentences in Louisiana&#39;s sprawling and infamously swollen prison system peaked in 2012, the number sentenced to live out the remainder of their time incarcerated has continued to climb.</p>
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<p><a href="http://www.theadvocate.com/article_b24f3d18-4b1f-11e7-8d3c-ab34cf4c3d51.html">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></p>
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<font color="#663300" size="5">Holy Father&rsquo;s Message for the First World Day of the Poor, 13.06.2017</font></center>
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<p style="font-size: 11pt;">The following is the full text of the Message of the Holy Father Francis for the First World Day of the Poor, to be held on the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time &ndash; this year on 19 November 2017 &ndash; on the theme,&nbsp;<i>Let us love, not with words but with deeds:</i></p>
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<p style="font-size: 11pt;"><b><u>Message of the Holy Father</u></b></p>
<p style="font-size: 11pt;"><b><i>Let us love, not with words but with deeds</i></b></p>
<p style="font-size: 11pt;">1. &ldquo;Little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in deed and in truth&rdquo; (<i>1 Jn</i>&nbsp;3:18). These words of the Apostle John voice an imperative that no Christian may disregard. The seriousness with which the &ldquo;beloved disciple&rdquo; hands down Jesus&rsquo; command to our own day is made even clearer by the contrast between the&nbsp;<i>empty words</i>&nbsp;so frequently on our lips and the&nbsp;<i>concrete deeds</i>&nbsp;against which we are called to measure ourselves. Love has no alibi. Whenever we set out to love as Jesus loved, we have to take the Lord as our example; especially when it comes to loving the poor. The Son of God&rsquo;s way of loving is well-known, and John spells it out clearly. It stands on two pillars: God loved us first (cf.&nbsp;<i>1 Jn</i>&nbsp;4:10.19), and he loved us by giving completely of himself, even to laying down his life (cf.&nbsp;<i>1 Jn</i>&nbsp;3:16).</p>
<p style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2017/06/13/170613c.html">FULL MESSAGE&gt;&gt;</a></p>
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<a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1603675" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(31, 123, 223);" target="_blank" title="View other papers by this author">Tim Lyman</a></h2>
<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">Northeastern University, Institute for Security and Public Policy at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice</p>
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<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; font-family: NexusSansWebPro; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; color: rgb(80, 80, 80);">Date Written: May 23, 2017</p>
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<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: 22px;">This analysis of race and the death penalty in Louisiana looks at death-eligible cases, half of which were reduced to non-murder final charges, in addition to death penalty cases. It finds that black-on-black cases are under-represented in every category of outcome, and black-on white cases over-represented, leading all variances, at every outcome; whereas white defendant cases are mixed, over or under depending on outcome severity. Odds of a death sentence for a black defendant are eleven times greater if the victim is white rather than black.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />
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Death-eligible cases in five jurisdictions that are disparate in race mix and population density are found to have these same race category traits of variance in each, traits also shared by the death penalty cases. The hypothesis of race neutrality must be rejected in every jurisdiction, and a new hypothesis of uniformity of variance patterns, even with the death penalty group, is found viable.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />
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Felony aggravator homicide data is gathered inconsistently by jurisdictions, and the only sure aggravators, the 41% of aggravators coming from a coroner, show white-on-white over-representation leading the variance. Thus, race-of-victim analysis masks extreme differences between white victim cases, such as the fact that 31% of black-on-white homicides result in overcharged cases (death eligible cases finishing with non-murder charges), whereas only 11% of white-on-white cases do.</p>
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<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; font-family: NexusSansWebPro; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; color: rgb(80, 80, 80);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Keywords:</span>&nbsp;Race, Death Penalty, Race and the Death Penalty, Louisiana, Risk Analysis, Death Eligible, Race Neutrality, Felony Aggravator, Race-Of-Victim, Overcharging, Aggravators</p>
<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; font-family: NexusSansWebPro; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; color: rgb(80, 80, 80);">&nbsp;</p>
<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; font-family: NexusSansWebPro; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px; color: rgb(80, 80, 80);"><a href="https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=676067083085098081124026070115070078034050019023060074029023104088102018030127090099032060018032059046053102102093020018119014126023030041068069029117099025069003004063087010025077082109120073025066003065101027127029086016082086025107007004073126067087&amp;EXT=pdf">FULL ARTICLE&gt;&gt;</a></p>

<p>By Tracy Jan</p>
<p>How much cash welfare assistance families in poverty receive largely depends on where they live, with welfare eroding in every state except Oregon during the past 20 years, according to a new study by the Urban Institute.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The study, released Tuesday, unveils wide racial and geographic disparities in how states distribute cash welfare, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).</p>
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<p>Two decades after President Bill Clinton carried out the welfare overhaul that created TANF, states with a larger share of African Americans tend to have less generous welfare benefits and more restrictive policies, the study found.</p>
<p>These states also have shorter periods of eligibility for assistance, stricter requirements to maintain benefits and more severe sanctions for people who don&rsquo;t abide by state welfare rules.</p>
<p>The findings should serve as a cautionary flag as congressional Republicans propose overhauling other federal poverty programs, said Heather Hahn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and one of the study&rsquo;s authors. She warns that such changes are likely to exacerbate existing racial disparities.</p>
<p>&ldquo;I would predict, based on TANF&rsquo;s history, that if we were to block grant other programs, we would see similar results, with racial differences and fewer families receiving assistance,&rdquo; Hahn said in an interview with The Washington Post.</p>
<p>TANF is funded by the federal government in the form of state &ldquo;block grants,&rdquo; enabling states to establish their own eligibility rules and giving them flexibility to determine how the federal money is used.</p>
<p>President Trump, in his budget released last month, and Republicans in Congress want to turn other federal assistance to the poor into state block grants, ending the federal guarantee of assistance.</p>
<p>The proposals echo the Clinton-era 1996 welfare reforms that required those receiving cash welfare to work or look for work and imposed the first federal government caps on how long families could receive the benefit.</p>
<p>It capped benefits at 60 months in one&#39;s adult lifetime, but some states instituted shorter limits while other states continue to provide cash assistance for children even after adults household members are cut off.</p>
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<p>The Urban Institute researchers say that many poor families are worse off under this system than they were 20 years ago. The amount states receive in TANF block grants has not changed in that time &mdash; not even to account for inflation.</p>
<p>Today, for every 100 poor families in America, just 24 families receive cash assistance, compared with 64 in 1996. Only a quarter of TANF money now goes toward cash payments, down from 71 percent in 1997. Instead, states increased their TANF spending on promoting work activities, providing child care and preschool education, and offering other services not limited to low-income families.</p>
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<p>State welfare policies subject all families, regardless of their race, to the same rules.</p>
<p>But the majority of black people live in states with the lowest proportion of families receiving cash assistance. African Americans are at a practical disadvantage as a result of that population distribution, Hahn said.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The effects of these policies are not race neutral, because we aren&rsquo;t geographically dispersed evenly by race,&rdquo; she said.</p>
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<p><strong>A poor family in Vermont, where 94 percent of residents are white and only 1 percent are black, is 20 times as likely to receive welfare as compared with if that same family lived in Louisiana, where 61 percent are white and nearly a third of residents are black, according to a previous analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Vermont has the most generous welfare benefits of all 50 states, with 78 out of every 100 families in poverty receiving cash assistance. In comparison, Louisiana, the least generous state, gives welfare cash assistance to only four out of every 100 poor families.&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong>The disparity does not end there. Vermont offers a maximum monthly benefit of $640 to a family of three, and allows families earning up to $1,053 to qualify for cash assistance. Louisiana only offers a maximum cash benefit of just $240 a month, and families must make less than $360 a month to qualify.</strong></p>
<p><strong>In other words, a family must be the poorest of the poor to qualify for cash assistance in Louisiana, and even then, they would only receive less than half of what Americans living in Vermont would get.</strong></p>
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<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/06/states-with-more-black-people-have-less-generous-welfare-benefits-study-says/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_welfare-720a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&amp;utm_term=.eb0f29952005">MORE&gt;&gt;</a></div>
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