Victoria de Welfare

You Helped Win these Victories!
Your State Representative Listened to You!

2005 Working families Agenda Victories

Health Care:

*Restoring funding for 3500 senior and disabled legal immigrants.
*Prohibiting MassHealth from imposing “sponsor deeming.” This means that a sponsor's income would have been counted in calculating an immigrant's eligibility for MassHealth, even if this income was not available to that individual.
Increasing funding for MassHealth Essential, which will allow over 5,000 new people to get preventative and primary care.
Restoring MassHealth Dental benefits for pregnant women and *mothers of children up to three years old.

Preserving the Welfare Safety Net

Rejecting Governor Romney’s punitive welfare proposal which included: A) the elimination of exemptions from the work requirement and the time limit for families where the parent is disabled, is needed to care for a disabled family member, is a pregnant woman in her third trimester, is a teen in school, or has a child between 1 and 2, B) imposing a 5 year lifetime limit on benefits (applied retroactively), C) eliminating the right for recipients to choose their own work activity including housing search, and education D) Eliminating good cause provisions, which would allow DTA to cut recipients benefits for not participating in work activities even though they didn’t have child care, transportation or were searching for housing while in a shelter.

Affordable Housing

*Increasing funding for Mass Rental Voucher Program (state assistance in paying for private housing) that was cut in past years.
*Increasing funding for (RAFT) which provides help with first and last month’s rent and security deposits for individuals making the transition from shelters to housing.
Increasing funding for public housing subsidies to pay for adequate maintenance.
Stopping the Governor’s proposal to impose work requirements to recipients of the Mass. Rental Voucher Program, as well as imposing time limits of 36 consecutive months and 60 lifetime months for the program.

Revenues

Stopping a rollback of the personal income tax to 5.0% from the current 5.3%. Over 60% of the benefit from these cuts would have gone to the 20% of residents with the highest incomes.
Closing $105-$120 million dollars in unfair tax loopholes, after Governor Romney revoked his original proposal to close $170 million in corporate tax loopholes. This tax bill still needs to go to Conference Committee, where differences between the House ($105 million) and the Senate ($120 million) will be resolved. It will then be submitted to the Governor, who may or may not veto it.
Defeating an initiative by Gov. Romney to give a tax rebate to the wealthiest !% of taxpayers for taxes on capital gains that they paid in May, 2002 – Dec., 2002. This would have cost the state a minimum of $375 million.

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