Off-kilter With Rebecca Vallas

The so-called “able-bodied” are now everywhere among government antipoverty programs, Republican officials claim. But, as Emily Badger and Margot Sanger-Katz write in the New York Times Upshot, this term has long been a political as well as a moral one, dating back centuries to the 1601 Elizabethan poor law, as a proxy for separating the “deserving” from the “undeserving.” To unpack the 400-year history of the term “able-bodied,” Rebecca talks with Emily Badger. Next, on the same day that President Trump releases a budget that is expected to—yet again—slash nearly every program that helps workers and families make ends meet, to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, fast-food workers will be staging a massive walk-out in Memphis, calling for higher wages and union rights. Protesters will be marching along the same route as the sanitation workers' strike that, 50 years ago, brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis, Tennessee, where he was assassinated. Rebecca speaks with Cheri Honkala, an organizer with the Poor