 Jaiden Emmons, Elizabeth Baker and Suzan Emmons stand in their kitchen in Iola, a small town in southeastern Kansas. (Ana Swanson/The Washington Post) By Ana Swanson and Max Ehrenfreund IOLA, Kans. — Suzan Emmons has done the most she can for the girls. Her small green house has bunnies in the back yard, class pictures proudly displayed on the living room wall, food in the refrigerator. She has scrimped from her annual salary of $14,000 to pay for one dance class each: tap for Elizabeth, jazz for Jaiden. But far-off political decisions have made the haven that Emmons built for them more precarious. Five years ago, she rescued Jaiden, her granddaughter, and Elizabeth, her granddaughter's half sister, from a dangerous home. But her newly expanded household meant she no longer made enough to qualify for federal insurance subsidies. And after the Kansas governor turned down federal funds to expand the state's Medicaid program, Emmons didn't qualify there either, leaving her unable to afford insurance coverage. Meanwhile, dramatic funding cuts at the state levels shuttered the programs that gave the girls a safe place to go when Emmons was at work and that counseled them to overcome their trauma.  Jaiden Emmons points to the location on a map of their town, Iola, Kansas. (Ana Swanson/The Washington Post) The combination of deep tax cuts and austere spending that was supposed to ignite economic growth and reduce dependency have hit hard in the southeastern corner of Kansas, where Emmons lives, a collection of some of the poorest and sickest counties in the state that is sometimes branded the Appalachia of the Midwest. Emmons is an involuntary participant in a conservative program of tax decreases and spending cuts that Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, the policy's main architect, once called a "real-live experiment."
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Number of the day 154. That is the number of mass shootings in the United States so far this year by one definition, including the attack at a ballpark Wednesday in Alexandria, Va. in which Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was wounded. Christopher Ingraham has more. | 
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