Congress is starving Black single mothers in Mississippi to fund billionaire tax cuts.
A mother in Jackson who had been pregnant and homeless put her name on a list at her new apartment complex, and when she got the call she cried. She had been working full-time, then part-time, then missing days to care for a sick infant. The thousand dollars a month she started receiving was not aspirational. It was the difference between her children eating and her children not. Amaya Jones, another mother in the cohort, went from full-time to part-time to barely surviving. The thousand dollars didn’t buy her a yacht; it bought her a sigh of relief. It bought her the ability to take her kids out of town. It bought her time.
This is what Aisha Nyandoro’s Magnolia Mother’s Trust has been proving, in cohort after cohort, since 2018. Springboard to Opportunities gives twenty Black mothers in Jackson a thousand dollars a month for twelve months, no strings attached, plus a 529 account for each child. The program is now entering its ninth year, the longest-running guaranteed income program in the country, and the first to target Black mothers specifically. Nyandoro was already running after-school programs, reading circles, and workforce development when a mother in one of her programs told her she could not afford a pizza. Nyandoro came back to her staff and said, “All of this can be stopped with money.” She was right.
Twelve thousand dollars a year. Child Care Aware of America put the national average annual price of full-time child care in 2023 at $11,582, and infant care runs higher. The Magnolia Mother’s Trust costs roughly the price of one child in daycare, per mother, per year, and is doing what decades of workforce development, after-school programming, and reading circles could not. A $2,000 monthly infant care bill will break a dual-income household making six figures in Philadelphia. I am standing on a floor. The mothers in Jackson are standing on a trapdoor, and the federal government is actively pulling the lever.
Then there is the other number. The 2025 reconciliation bill — the one the sponsors call the One Big Beautiful Bill — extended the 2017 tax cuts whose benefits flow overwhelmingly to households at the top of the income distribution. The same Congress that made the 2017 cuts permanent had, four years earlier, allowed the expanded Child Tax Credit passed in the American Rescue Plan to lapse at the end of 2021. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities had estimated that expanded credit was lifting 4.3 million children out of poverty. It was the most effective anti-poverty intervention for children in forty years. Congress let it expire and has not restored it. The pattern is consistent across four years: every time Congress has had to choose between keeping money in the hands of poor mothers and keeping money in the hands of high-income households, it has chosen the high-income households.
So. A nonprofit in Jackson is paying twenty Black mothers a thousand dollars a month and watching them take their kids out of town, save for college, breathe for a year. The federal government has, in 2025 and 2026, taken the same thousand dollars a month, scaled across the mothers who needed it most, and routed it instead to households that already own the country. Both programs are running at the same time. The contrast is not a coincidence. It is the budget.
When the vertical structures fail, the lateral ones hold. Taylor Swift wrote “You’re On Your Own, Kid” as a recognition that the infrastructure you were promised isn’t coming, but the song’s redemptive turn is the friendship bracelets, the lateral net of peers who show up. That is exactly what Amaya Jones is describing when she talks about the MMT cohort finding a sisterhood in her apartment building, a network of women texting each other to offer free time or check on a sick baby. The women in the trust are doing the work of a welfare state that the federal government is actively dismantling, because the lateral net has become the only net left.
This is where the formation has to do some honest work. I grew up in a Roman Catholic working-class household where the corporal works of mercy were the operating system. The Saint Vincent de Paul conference at my parish quietly paid the heating bills and brought the casseroles when a family lost a job. It was beautiful, and it was necessary. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin opened the first Catholic Worker house in 1933, the year more than a third of the banks in the country closed. Day wrote that the works of mercy and the works of justice are continuous, that to feed the hungry and to agitate for the policy that would end hunger are not two different projects but the same project. “We have all known the long loneliness,” she wrote, “and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” Love without money is a feeling. Money without community is a transfer. Day insisted you need both. Charity is a patch on a wound that requires a structural fix. Guaranteed income is the work of justice. It is the refusal to make a mother prove her poverty to a bureaucrat before she can feed her child.
The Magnolia Mother’s Trust is unapologetic about targeting Black mothers, because the data demands it. The financial harm inflicted by generations of policy in Mississippi falls exactly where the trust directs its resources. The editorial pages and the policy wonks will tell you that cash transfers create dependency, that adults need to work, that the system requires moral auditing. But Kenja Patton had to leave a job when her six-year-old asthmatic son was in the hospital. The “choice” the austerity frame demands is a choice between working and keeping her child alive. Annie Lowrey laid this out in Give People Money: poverty in the United States is a policy choice. We are choosing to enforce it.
What works is on the table. A refundable Child Tax Credit paid monthly, not annually, at a level that meets the cost of infant care in the median zip code. A national guaranteed-income pilot, designed for and by the mothers the safety net has most consistently failed, scaled to every county where the birth rate among Black women exceeds the housing-voucher uptake rate. State-level baby bonds, modeled on the 529 accounts the MMT already opens. The federal government could cover that gap with the same $12,000 a year the MMT delivers to each mother. It could fund a refundable child-care tax credit, indexed to the cost of living, paired with universal pre-K, exactly the way the Hamilton Project has modeled it. It could decide that a family’s survival is not a means-tested reward for good behavior, but a baseline of the common good.
Instead, Congress is enforcing scarcity, looking at a program where a mother can take her kids to Disney World and choosing to cut the safety net anyway.
I am not one of the mothers in Jackson. I am a white, two-income, college-educated parent in Philadelphia with a 7% mortgage and a daycare bill I can write a column about and still pay. I cannot speak for the women in the Magnolia trust, and I would not try. But I can read a budget. And what the federal budget says, in 2026, is that the United States has decided the children of Black single mothers in Mississippi are on their own.
That decision is reversible. It has always been reversible. The Magnolia Mother’s Trust is the proof. Congress is the obstacle. The math has been done. The cure is sitting right there. They just prefer the disease.