Get out your wrenches
We haven’t seen enough starvation lately, let’s have more of that.
The partial government shutdown glided into its third week Saturday with no end in sight. If the government is not reopened before February, millions of Americans who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — the nation’s food stamp program — could have their assistance disrupted.
But they can just make an adjustment. Trump said so.
According to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 42 million Americans received SNAP benefits in 2017. More than 68 percent of participants were in families with children, and more than 44 percent were in working families.
Other programs are in even more immediate danger than SNAP. The Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) are not receiving federal funds at all during the shutdown, but “can continue to operate at the State and local level with any funding and commodity resources that remain available,” according to the USDA.
In the first five months of 2018, around 7 million Americans received WIC benefits each month. WIC is provided for pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding women, infants, and children up to age 5 who fall within the poverty index and are at “nutritional risk.” The WIC program granted nearly $5 billion to every U.S. state and territory in 2018, as of September.
It’s ok. They can make an adjustment.
This is the sort of thing that is calculated to make the Dems cave, because they don’t want to see people starve. There seems to be no good way out of this, save for Trump suddenly getting visited by three spirits and finding out what things are all about. I think that’s a highly speculative (read: impossible) scenario, so…if it’s not possible to get a veto-proof majority in Congress, things are going to just get worse.
Our one hope is probably the stock market. Republicans are so tied to Wall Street they may actually briefly find a conscience if it starts to tank even more than it has.
Starvation might be the least of your worries soon; the buffoon is talking about declaring a national emergency.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/06/donald-trump-government-shutdown-border-wall-concrete-steel
And video https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2019/jan/06/i-may-declare-national-emergency-says-trump-us-mexico-wall-video
I know, I’ve been posting about that since Friday.
About the possibility, yes, and there’s been some comments about the wisdom of tipping Trump the wink about the possibility, but he hadn’t said he was considering it as an option until today. Still and all, once the idea had been touted in the media it was a foregone conclusion that he’d go there.
I think that it’d had already been suggested to him by whoever is pulling his strings under orders from Moscow. All the media did (probably acting on a tip-off from someone in the White House) was ask him if he was considering it, knowing that he is incapable of keeping a secret of that magnitude if asked a direct question.
Especially a secret that demonstrates so much manly manliness and macho machoness and big brain stable geniusness.
Whenever the politicians try to cut food stamps, the grocery industry puts a quick stop to that. All that food stamp money ends up with businesses that sell food. When these businesses have to start dealing with more than the usual number of people stealing food that cuts into the already thin profit margins in grocery business. Would be interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes soon between grocers and politicians.