He calls all of them “welfare”
The usual. Reward the rich and punish the poor. Pass a huge tax cut for the rich, blow up the deficit, then go to even greater lengths to make sure poor people starve and freeze and die when they get sick.
President Trump quietly signed a long-anticipated executive order on Tuesday intended to force low-income recipients of food assistance, Medicaid and low-income housing subsidies to join the work force or face the loss of their benefits.
The order, in the works since last year, has an ambitious title — “Reducing Poverty in America” — and is directed at “any program that provides means-tested assistance or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households or families that have low incomes,” according to the order’s text.
As if Trump had the slightest interest in reducing poverty in the US.
The order gave all cabinet departments 90 days to produce plans that impose work requirements on able-bodied aid recipients and block ineligible immigrants from receiving aid, while drafting “a list of recommended regulatory and policy changes” to push recipients off the rolls and into jobs.
“President Trump has directed his administration to study policies that are failing Americans,” said Andrew Bremberg, the president’s domestic policy chief, who briefed reporters on the order’s contents in a telephone call late Tuesday. Journalists were not provided with copies of the document beforehand.
The aim, Trump aides said on the call, is to prod federal and state officials to take a tougher stance with aid recipients — millions of whom currently receive exemptions from existing work requirements because they are in training programs, provide care for relatives or volunteer their labor.
Get tough with those bastards! Meanwhile, get cuddly with polluters, frauds, exploiters, crooks.
The order — signed in private on a frenzied news day dominated by congressional testimony from Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, a potential military response in Syria and the president’s rage at the raid on Monday on his personal lawyer’s office — tries to redefine “welfare” to fit the catchall term Mr. Trump used in campaign speeches.
The word “welfare” — politically loaded and often pejorative, especially among the president’s conservative supporters — has historically been used to describe cash assistance programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
The Trump administration wants to change the lexicon. On Tuesday, Mr. Bremberg sought to stretch the term to encompass food aid and Medicaid — programs even many conservative lawmakers view as a necessary safety net for families and individuals on the economic margins through no fault of their own.
“Our country suffers from nearly record high welfare enrollments,” Mr. Bremberg said. But Temporary Assistance for Needy Families payments to poor people are approaching record lows.
Mr. Trump, several aides said, is unconcerned — or perhaps even unaware — of the distinction between cash assistance and other safety-net programs.
He calls all of them “welfare,” they said.
What does he call all the money we spend on his trips to Florida and his sons’ trips all over the globe to market his businesses?
Of course, it isn’t just conservatives who refer to that all as welfare; I see the same pattern in my liberal (or so-called liberal) friends who often describe situations of people being “on welfare” for life, even though welfare benefits are only available for 5 years under the Clinton-era “reforms”.
And the way they do the work requirement under TANF is disgusting and counterproductive. When I was unemployed, having just come off an extended period of disability (complete with Social Security, so I was recognized by the government as disabled), I tried to apply for TANF to help support myself and my teenage son until I could find work. It was…an eye-opener.
This was right after the new laws were passed, in the mid-late 90s. I was told I was eligible for $75/month, but could not receive that unless I applied for and interviewed for 10 jobs a week…and I could not tell them that there were any hours I could not work. I had to take any job that was offered, regardless of pay or schedule, or I would lose any benefits. I asked if they were saying I needed to drop out of college; they said, well, it doesn’t always come to that, but…yes. Job training was an integral part of that “reform”, but…they got to select what sort of jobs you could be trained for. And I wasn’t eligible for that, anyway, since I already had a bachelor’s degree and was working on my masters – which was my hope for lifting myself out of the poverty we were living in.
In the end, I turned down the $75. I struggled for a few months, and nearly lost my home, but managed to find a job at the eleventh hour. It wasn’t a great job, but it was decent pay, above minimum, and I was still eligible for food stamps, so that worked for me. But a lot of people wouldn’t be so lucky. I was fortunate to have the requisite skills to look for, and find, a job that would pay me a below-poverty level wage that was just enough to keep us from drowning. And it gave me just enough to talk to a lawyer and file papers on my ex to get him to start paying child support, which gave us a little breathing room once the checks started arriving.
The goal of these programs isn’t to end poverty, it is to maintain it by forcing people into ever lower-paying jobs. It feeds the job pool with desperate applicants who won’t say much about working conditions or salaries because they have too much to lose. It stigmatizes poverty, a condition in many ways created by those who support these obnoxious views. It generates a permanent class of citizens who are unable to enjoy the full rights of citizenship because they are unable to participate significantly in the market economy that serves as the God to which our country genuflects. They are (I was) disposable humans, not worth giving any thought to, and seen as a suck on the money that the corporate leaders believe rightfully belongs in the pockets of the already wealthy.
The entire system is a disgrace. In the richest country in the world, no one should be going to bed hungry at night. And no one should be callously covering the world with cheap, tacky gold while refusing to give even a crumb of food to the starving people that go largely unnoticed in our world.
Have I said today that I hate these people? If not, it’s time to rectify that. I hate him. I hate them. I want to see them pushed out of office, and preferably thrown onto the tender mercies of the programs that they have gutted, while their assets are redistributed among those who once populated those programs.
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