Trump would like poor people to starve since he can't get rid of them fast enough with deportations.
This is from Illinois Representative Bill Foster:
If you or someone you know needs food assistance, these resources may be able to help:
This is cruelty in your face.
They are the most despicable people in America.
Ask your MAGA/Trump voter friends and family: Do you understand what they are telling you with this???
Roaring 20s decadence in the 30s people stood in bread lines. Here we go again. I thought the 50s was the great American era they wanted to go back to. So much worse. Next year they can do it in the People's House in the new dance hall while the people stand in breadlines.
More pix of the decadence here.
That was Clay Higgins of Louisiana. Would love to see his household grocery bill. Hope his constituents are listening.Roughly one in eight people in the U.S. relies on the foot stamp program, which had already been scythed back by $186 million under Trump’s spending measures, introduced in July.
Ahead of Saturday’s lapse in funding, one Republican Congressman suggested that his constituents should “stop smoking crack” if they wanted to minimize its impact.
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“Any American who has been receiving $4,200 per year of free groceries and does NOT have at least one month of groceries stocked should never again receive SNAP, because wow, stop smoking crack.”
Yahoo
In case you wonder where those proving data come from, Georgia and Arkansas tried work requirements for Medicaid and found out they don't work. Doesn't mean they aren't still trying. The cruelty is a GOP bonus in any program.SNAP is the current iteration of the Food Stamp program, which first came into being during the Great Depression, was made permanent in 1964, and went nationwide in 1974. Almost ever since, it’s faced attacks—and not just from Republicans. In 1996, neoliberal Bill Clinton announced the “end of welfare as we know it”—which just meant inflicting harsh new work requirements on people in need of government assistance, including food stamps—as he triangulated away the Democratic Party’s soul. Making hungry people performatively dance for their supper is apparently a bipartisan fascination.
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Trump’s changes to the SNAP program are nasty and myriad (yep, he’s cutting off refugees)—but I want to focus on the even stricter “work requirements” he and the well-fed dauphins who run Congress put in place. Among other petty cruelties, veterans, people who are homeless, and young adults transitioning out of foster care are now required to work in exchange for their meager food-stamp allowance. So are older people, younger people with older kids, and more.
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It’s hard to overstate how harmful this is. Over 42 million people receive some form of SNAP assistance. Those living in states that previously had waivers account for 36.5 million of those recipients. All those people could now be at risk of losing their benefits. The (Republican-controlled) Congressional Budget Office estimates that at least 4 million people will lose all or part of their SNAP benefits once the changes go into effect, but we will never know the true numbers, because the Trump administration canceled the annual reporting on food insecurity that we use to track the numbers of people who need assistance.
Whatever the real number is, it’s unconscionable. Many of those people are already about to face the toughest part of their year—winter—and now, suddenly, they will not know where their next meal is coming from.
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Thanks to our long, bipartisan, embarrassing history of cruelty toward the needy, we know one thing about work requirements: They don’t work. First of all, most working-age people on SNAP already work. This is a simple fact that consistently gets lost or ignored every time this issue comes up. Most of the adults work, but they work unstable or part-time or simply poorly paid jobs that cannot cover their food needs.
All work requirements do is increase the paperwork necessary to get the benefit, and that means fewer people will be able to access the assistance they need even though they meet the work requirements. It’s not like people on SNAP are likely to have access to a personal assistant or a stay-at-home spouse or a lawyer or a CPA or anybody at all who is able to help them navigate through all the red tape. And it’s not like they have a lot of extra time on their hands, during business hours, to sit on the phone or show up to the government office because, you know, they’re working.
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Moreover, focusing on the adult working requirements misses the fact that nearly two-thirds of the people who get food through SNAP are children.
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But I also feel compelled to defend what Alfie P. Doolittle would call the “undeserving” poor. Regardless of what you think about any individual person, food assistance should not be predicated on meeting your personal definition of deserving. People shouldn’t have to perform feats of social worth to get food; in our incredibly wealthy society, people should just get food.
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Of course, this country’s war against the poor does not stop at food stamps. In addition to cutting Medicaid and CHIP, the Trump administration is also covertly cutting Social Security Disability Benefits. Over 8 million people receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) checks. SSDI assistance is available to people with disabilities, regardless of age, but Trump is trying to change the eligibility requirements so that a person’s age is not taken into account when assessing their ability to find another job. I don’t think I’m being “ageist” to say that telling a 60-year-old grandpa to “learn to code, lmao” is not really a practical idea, but that’s pretty much where we are.
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SNAP and SSDI make up part of the safety net for the whole economy in times of recession. When people who are out of work can still buy necessities, like groceries, it props up the businesses who sell those goods, even in times when consumer spending is at a premium. Public benefit programs create a floor that keeps local economies going when whatever bubble we happen to be in at the time bursts.
What’s maddening is that neither Trump, MAGA, mainline Republicans, or some Democrats actually want to do what is necessary so that people don’t have to turn to food assistance. They don’t want to address the underlying, structural factors. They don’t want to address food deserts. They don’t want to provide free childcare. They don’t want to raise wages so that people who have jobs can afford food. They just want to kick people and their children off of welfare, and lie in order to blame the hungry for their suffering. Hunger is a solvable problem. It’s a political problem, not a scarcity problem.
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We have facts and figures proving that work requirements result in people who are working being denied the food assistance they need. Yet there are still people in both parties who think they are a good idea.
The Nation
Unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department? Just what then IS the work of the Department?
And, here's another thing: Israel has been targeting people who go to stations where they can get food. Like unethical bear hunters baiting certain stations and waiting for the bears to come to them, Israel is treating Palestinians like wild animals. Wherever pallets are dropped, starving crowds will gather. There are no words to describe the depravity of the Israeli government and its armed forces.
UPDATE 07:55 pm:
UPDATE 08:36 pm:
We need to start presenting Scrooge as Manchin.Hunger is rising this holiday season with the U.S. Census Bureau estimating more than 21 million Americans didn't have enough to eat in early December as pandemic relief payments run out and grocery prices rise.
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Grocery prices in the U.S. are up 6.4% from a year earlier. Food banks are also seeing a rise in demand, and clinics meant to help malnourished and underfed children have seen an increase in patients.
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Low-income families may soon face more pressure with monthly child tax credit payments ending and the Senate deadlocked on legislation to extend the program backed by President Joe Biden.
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The last of the scheduled payments for the expanded child tax credit were sent out on Dec. 15. The Build Back Better Act includes language that would extend payments through 2022. The bill’s status is up in the air, however, after Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, on Sunday said that he would not vote for it.
Bloomberg
