Sasha Abramsky at The Nation writes—Trump Just Dynamited the Food Stamp Program. This man’s cruelty is boundless. He also just appointed as his homelessness czar a man who tried to get cities to ban charities from feeding the homeless:
The Signal this Friday is the appalling spectacle of millions of Americans’ being deliberately cast into hunger by the federal government.
This week, the Trump administration formally published its punitive new vision of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The rules, which were first proposed earlier this year, essentially roll back an exception, crafted in the wake of the 2008 crash, that allows able-bodied adults to claim food stamps for more than three months in any three-year period if the area they live in has over 10 percent unemployment, or if their state has decided to issue county-by-county waivers to this requirement.
As of next April, the government won’t permit the granting of waivers to any counties with less than 6 percent unemployment. To continue being eligible for food stamps in these that are losing their waivers, recipients will either have to work or enroll in “work programs,” presumably somewhat akin to the make-work systems created in the wake of welfare reform of 1996.
The US Agriculture Department, which administers the program, estimates that 688,000 people will lose their SNAP benefits as a result. But it gets worse: This is just the first of a series of changes to SNAP the administration is now aggressively pushing. As I wrote in my last column, if all the changes kick in, ultimately many millions of Americans will either lose access to food stamps or end up with extreme reductions in the value of the food stamps they receive.
Ironically, many of
the states that will be hit worst are GOP strongholds in the South: Florida, Georgia, and Texas all stand to see hundreds of thousands of residents losing benefits over the coming years. Maybe Trump was right that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his base wouldn’t abandon him. We’ll see how they react when they realize he’s taking away their ability to feed themselves and their families. [...]
TOP COMMENTS
HIGH IMPACT STORIES • THE WEEK’S HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's full grip on U.S. Society - its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.”
~~Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2009)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—Democratic Radio Address: Mr. President, Where Is The Victory Strategy For Iraq?
It is President Bush whose disastrous policies created the Iraq Debacle, and it is he who has the responsibility to provide a strategy for the Iraq Debacle and the power to implement such a strategy.
Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), West Point graduate and former 82nd Airborne Platoon commander, understands this, and thus asked President Bush to present a strategy for the Iraq Debacle in the Democratic Radio Address this morning. […]
While it is very interesting to hear about Joe Lieberman's plan, and Howard Dean's plan, and John Murtha's plan and General Wesley Clark's plan, and Senator Joe Biden's plan, the ONLY plan that matters NOW is President Bush's plan.
Is it "stay the course"? More of the same? As Senator Reed says, the current Bush strategy is an abject failure. While it may be fun for us and the Media to play the political parlor game of "pin the Iraq Debacle on the donkey" - in the meantime, the critical business of the Bush failures on Iraq are ignored.
An opposition party must provide vigilant oversight to the party in power, especially now where a supine Media has abdicated its responsibilities for at least four years. Instead of playing at President, members of the Democratic Party need to do their jobs as an opposition party - until the 2006 election campaign commences, when it will be their duty to articulate an alternative to offer to the voters.
Senator Jack Reed did that today. Kudos to him.