Slash that safety net
The Trump administration wants to make more poor people starve.
The Trump administration wants to change the way states determine who qualifies for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, also known as food stamps. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 3 million people would lose their food assistance as a result.
The administration says it wants to close what it calls a “loophole” that allows states to give benefits to those would not otherwise be eligible by raising or eliminating income and asset limits. Forty states and the Washington, D.C., now take advantage of this option, and have done so for many years.
“This proposal will not only save money, but more importantly it preserves the integrity of the program while ensuring nutrition assistance programs serve those most in need,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in announcing the proposed rule, published in the Federal Register. His agency estimates the change would likely save $2.5 billion a year.
Which is to say, it will withhold $2.5 billion worth of food from poor people. What a goal for a rich country!
But proponents of the current system say it helps low-income families who work, but have huge child care, housing and other expenses that leave them with insufficient money to buy food.
Let’s not forget, Senate Republicans refused to take up a bill to raise the minimum wage passed by the House last week. The minimum wage is far below a living wage, mostly because housing and child care are so expensive. An enormous chunk of the population don’t make a living wage and do have sky-high housing and child care expenses. Trump and his gang want to make them even worse off.
The proposed rule change is one of several the administration has made or is considering that restricts safety net programs for low-income individuals and families.
Because that’s what we need to do: not create programs that lift people out of poverty but tweak the few existing programs to push people down into poverty even more firmly.
Well, but if you give food stamps to poor people, someone has to pay for them, right? And that someone means that the wealthiest might have to cough up a few dollars for people they don’t know and probably wouldn’t like if they did!
Never mind that it’s actually more likely the middle class and working class paying for those; the Trumps of the country pay much lower tax rates in the end than the rest of us, because of loopholes, and constantly reducing taxes on property, on inheritance, etc…so we are bearing the bulk of the burden. Most of the middle class would agree, anyway. “I don’t want my tax dollars going to feed lazy people who won’t work, or who are too stupid to get an education and a better job”.
We are too big, too spread out, and too isolated to fulfill one of the basic principles that makes a democracy work is: caring about your neighbor, and being willing to be part of the system that helps them as much as it does you – and sometimes more, because they may need more help. And now, in the digital world, we are so plugged in to people who always think the way we do that we are unable to care about our neighbor, even our immediate neighbor, because we don’t even know them.
My experience with the white working class (which apparently does not include service industry workers for some reason) is that barring a few they are too stupid and lazy to get an education and actually learn something. They’ve got the money; most of them are solidly in the middle class income bracket.
They just don’t give a shit.
Slashing welfare for the poor is the perfect Republican move because it achieves so many of their goals:
– The average Trump voter will appreciate this because it makes poor people even more poor, so more people to look down upon.
– Furthermore, the people affected will disproportionally be non-white, so it also plays into the image of those lazy black people getting what they deserve. Another bonus for the Trump voter.
– It will force more people to take on more/worse jobs (or several jobs in parallel). This will ensure that cheap labour stays cheap or becomes even cheaper. We would not want to pay the cleaning personnel in a Trump resort reasonable wages, would we?
– It will make it more improbable for poor children to get a good education due to lack of food (which will also affect their achievements in school because hunger makes it difficult to learn), so on the long run, less competition for university / high-paying jobs etc.
– Being overworked, it will be more difficult for poor people to take the trouble to get their voting rights (with the crazy US system where you have to do things like register etc.), so less votes for Democrats.
– Totally exhausted people under existential stress are less likely to organize/unionize/protest.
Actually, the largest group that will be affected by this (besides children), are women. Many of them women of color, absolutely. But women are the number one users of the food stamp program, households led by women.
Another plus for the Trump voter. Women – white, black, Hispanic, poor – being forced to get married to maintain their existences. Maybe we could “redistribute” the women on welfare among the incels…everyone wins.
Yeah. Ugly stuff from an ugly man surrounded by ugly toadies. (And I am not appearance shaming, so no porcupines. Ugly here meaning…wait, this is B&W, not Pharyngula or WHTM, right? So you all will know the many meanings of ugly. Never mind.)