More GOP Cruelty to Kids and Old People

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

As a part of it's never-ending quest to ensure that poor people remain unhoused, medically neglected, educationally deprived, clothed in rags, and hungry, the Trump administration has fought tooth-and-nail to deny them access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).  When Congress shut certain aspects of the government down by denying it funding early last month, the evil cabal in the White House was almost gleeful, at least for awhile, in laying off certain groups of employees and not paying to fund particular programs.  One that seemed to bring unbridled pleasure to the White House was stopping SNAP payments.

Even though Congress set up an emergency fund within the Department of Agriculture to keep the funding going for a limited time, the agency and the administration chose not to access that money until they were ultimately forced to do so by the courts.  

(Curses, foiled again!)

But then the crises ended, the government reopened, and full-funding resumed, unimpeded.

Well, not quite.

This month's benefits may be going out, but only in drips and drabs and on a state-by-state basis, and the Trump administration is still hell-bent on keeping food from hungry kids and old people.  The administration has brought out two of its most reliable bogeymen - fraud and waste - and decreed that because of rampant fraud and waste in the system, all SNAP beneficiaries will have to re-apply.  

And we all know how much fun it is to deal with government bureaucracies, especially if you have other demands on your time such as trying to hold down three part-time minimum wage jobs just to pay most of the rent.  Do you want to go to work today, or would it be a better use of your time to keep holding in the hope that somebody from the welfare department will finally quit gossiping and pick up their phone?

The rolls will thin, and some of that may be due to the discovery of fraud and waste, things that are present in every government endeavor including things like weapons procurement contracts and ballroom design and construction.   But the rolls will also thin because many applicants living in dire circumstances will just give up and let their kids go hungry.  Toddlers will stay at home, unsupervised, while Mom is downtown flipping burgers and hoping that her boss will look the other way when she tries to slip a few out at the end of her shift to feed her family.

It's a cycle of savage abuse in which an entire nation is complicit.

Shame on us.  Shame the hell on us for sitting idly by and looking the other way while the oligarch class tightens its grip on our government and  forces those further down on the economic ladder into a lifetime of abject poverty as they toil in desperation to support the lifestyles of the rich and infamous.   We are watching the theft or nation's wealth and the dehumanization of a large segment of the population in real time.

MAGA, my ass.