The shutdown fight has now devolved into a food fight. The Trump Administration is blocking funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as part of its pressure campaign to force congressional Democrats to the table. Actually, that’s not true. The Trump Administration doesn’t want Democrats to negotiate; it wants them to capitulate. The dynamic is similar to the scene in “Independence Day” when the president asked the captured alien what the invaders wanted.
Democrats seem willing to negotiate, but no negotiations are taking place. In Mike Johnson’s House, no one is home. The House has been adjourned for more than a month after last holding a vote on September 19.
“If I brought the House back, and we passed another CR, it would meet the exact same fate with Chuck Schumer. He would mock it, they would spike it, and they would try to blame it on us. So what’s the point?” Johnson asked at a recent press conference.
The point should be to work towards a compromise that reopens the government.
As federal workers continue to go unpaid, including air traffic controllers who are increasingly not showing up for work and causing air traffic delays, and now SNAP recipients are going without their food benefits, the pressure is mounting on both sides to find a solution. [As an aside, I’d like to salute the controllers who showed up. They are a lot more professional and cheerful than I’d be if I was working for no pay.]
Trump’s solution has been to propose an end to the filibuster while turning up the heat on those who depend on government money. That includes both government workers and the poor.
Thankfully, Republicans rejected the nuclear option, but they have not been as stalwart when it comes to defending those expecting government checks. In fact, I’ve seen a great many MAGA supporters online celebrating the interruption of SNAP payments and decrying the fact that 41 million Americans, more than 12 percent of the population, rely on government food assistance. I’ve seen a lot of “kick them off the dole and make them work” commentary. (As of this writing, the Trump Administration says it will use a contingency fund to pay half benefits, but the payments will be late.)
Well, here are a few statistics regarding SNAP. Per the USDA:
SNAP benefits average $187.20 per participant per month
55 percent of SNAP households with children received earned income, meaning someone is working
20 percent of SNAP households received no earned or unearned (such as entitlement) income
39 percent of SNAP recipients are children
19 percent of SNAP recipients are seniors older than 60
The 42 percent of SNAP recipients who are aged 18-59 include the disabled, caregivers for others, or women who are pregnant. Others have work requirements.
The truth is that a lot of people on SNAP do work but don’t have jobs that pay a lot. A lot of the others are people who can’t work, including children, the disabled, the elderly, and single parents of small children.
One of the biggest disconnects that I have seen in this country is among pro-life advocates who oppose social welfare programs (and I admit that I used to be one of this group). A great many people who oppose abortion seem to think that if abortion is outlawed (or nearly so), people will magically stop having sex and giving birth to out-of-wedlock children or kids that they can’t afford. It doesn’t work that way.
The Kaiser Foundation reports on a JAMA study that found that birth rates in states with strict abortion laws increased, especially among “populations with the greatest structural disadvantages and barriers to obtaining abortion care.” I think that can be read as “poor and minority” populations. Another current study found that child mortality rates were increasing among these same populations.
I have been opposed to the barbaric practice of abortion for as long as I can remember, but unlike many self-proclaimed pro-lifers, I realize that stopping abortions comes with a moral obligation to help struggling families support the children that the government is forcing to bring into the world.
If we ban abortion, we need to realize that there are going to be a lot more poor, at-risk children being born who will need healthcare, food, and education that their families, often headed by a single parent, cannot provide. It isn’t good enough to tell them to go live a happy life when they can’t afford enough to eat or to see a doctor.
When you look at it this way, there is a sharp distinction between being anti-abortion and being pro-life. Anti-abortion stops at birth while pro-life includes food, medical care (including vaccinations and fighting infectious diseases) and other necessities that allow people to live rather than just exist.
The point here is that Republicans under Trump are using these families and children as pawns in the government shutdown not-negotiations. Both Trump’s resistance to funding SNAP, required by law as determined by two judges, and the Republican attempt to slash Obamacare premium subsidies (this, not healthcare for illegals was the key Democrat demand that led to the shutdown) are direct attacks on the low-income families that are bearing the children that pro-life activists demanded be born.
It’s true that the US is oozing its way toward a debt crisis, but claims of being unable to afford food aid and health insurance subsidies fall flat under an Administration that can find money to rescue farmers that are hurt by Trump’s tariffs, grow ICE larger than the Marine Corps, bail out Argentina, and deploy the military to Venezuela’s borders as well as American cities. Despite DOGE’s alleged cuts, the US is accumulating debt under Trump as fast as it did during Trump’s last term, specifically the part during the pandemic with its associated emergency stimulus spending (I’ll stipulate that Biden also gets some blame here), but the accumulation of one trillion dollars in new debt in 82 days with a decent economy and no emergency is pretty clearly not sustainable.
If we are going to spend money - and we are - the $100 billion for SNAP is a drop in the federal budget bucket and at least has the advantage of helping needy Americans and not actively hurting the economy, unlike immigration raids and pointless military deployments. SNAP payments put money back into the economy where removing immigrants (not all of them illegal) is expensive, removes workers and lowers the GDP, as well as removing a large source of sales revenue for many businesses across the country.
Food banks and other charitable organizations are stepping up to help feed the people left hungry and unpaid by the federal cuts. Many of these groups are religious based or are funded through churches following Christ’s commandment to help “the least of these,” but $50 billion or so is not easily replaced.
Trump’s focus on the new White House ballroom and lavish Great Gatsby-style parties at Mar-a-Lago while many Americans are worried about their next meal seems particularly tone deaf. The dichotomy is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, while also serving as a reminder that the excess of the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
And speaking of immigration, detentions and deportations of immigrant parents often mean that children who are US citizens lose their means of financial support. Locking up and deporting parents may well mean that their American-born children now need to be added to programs like SNAP and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Taking productive workers out of the economy and adding more dependency on the federal government is just another unintended consequence of Trump’s war on immigration.
And that’s characteristic of Trump’s policies in his second Administration. Whether by design or out of ignorance and incompetence, Trump is not only hurting America as a whole, he’s hurting his own base. Trump might think that he is turning the screws on Democrats, but the reality is that a lot of Trump’s rural base is on the SNAP rolls as well as receiving Obamacare subsidies. On the other end of the income scale, Trump’s plan to import Argentine beef to help shore up the South American nation has angered American cattle ranchers who have already lost export markets to the trade wars. Trump is attempting to be spiteful towards Democrats, but his own base is getting caught in the crosshairs.
As the saying goes, the leopards are eating faces, and they aren’t done yet.
It has been 288 days since Trump’s inauguration and the Epstein files have still not been released.
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Many who are “pro-life” are in fact simply “pro-birth”, and could not GAF after the first breath.
Feeding people? That’s well down the path of things many/most “pro-lifers” don’t GAF about. Eating is overrated.
I believe Hakeem and Chuck told President Trump exactly what they would settle for which is total capitulation. The President rejected that.
A few more statistics.
There are about 3,500,000 asylum cases backlogged. The asylum rejection rate is about 75%. These scammers are tolerated but they do not have legal immigration status. They are the ones congressional democrats want to provide full benefits for.
About 25% of the population requires assistance to survive because of disability, incompetence, age, addiction, laziness and criminality.
We do not need to turn the USA into a crappy third-world nation just because millions of people around the world already living in crappy countries want to come here. We need to find a way to deal with the unfortunates and misfits we already have who require room and board and medical care from the taxpayers.