The Cruelty of the GOP’s Food Stamp Policy

Increasingly, the Republican Party has had to rely on "conservative" Christians as part of its core base. These are people who claim to support Christ's message yet seemingly ignore his exhortations to care for the less fortunate, including feeding the poor and hungry. These claims are exposed, in fact lies, if one looks at the policies of the political party these self-proclaimed Christians support: slashing the social safety net to give tax breaks to the wealthy.  Nowadays, the only things that matter to these people - other than foolishly thinking they will benefit with lower taxes themselves - is seeking to harm LGBT individuals, obsessing over abortion (while caring nothing for children once they are born) and demonizing non-white immigrants.  The disconnect from Christ's message could hardly be more complete. Now, Trump is about to make the GOP war on the poor even more extreme and evangelicals seemingly are cheering on his agenda.  Here are highlights from a piece in the New York Times: 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced proposed rules that would cut more than three million people off food assistance. This latest plan confirms what many have long suspected: The only thing unifying its policies on poverty is cruelty. Prior right-ring assaults on the poor at least claimed some semblance of a coherent theme. In contrast, this proposal, and earlier ones, are a grab-bag of mutually inconsistent ideas seemingly selected only to maximize harm.

When President Ronald Reagan attacked anti-poverty programs, he claimed to be limiting assistance to the poorest of the poor. He insisted he was protecting a “safety net” for the “truly needy.” To do this, he denied aid to millions of working families. Under the rules he pushed through Congress, almost any wages were enough to disqualify a family from cash assistance and Medicaid within a few months. Working families had their food assistance cut and their paperwork requirements increased.

Of course, his concern for the extremely poor went only so far: The savings from these cuts paid for his massive tax cut for the rich, not for helping the poorest families afford food or housing.

A decade later, another Republican, Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the House, carried out even deeper cuts to anti-poverty programs, contending he was addressing a failure of recipients of public benefits to work. . . . Most welfare recipients did in fact seek and find work — but they were promptly thrown off the assistance rolls when they did.

Here again, the supposed concern was more rhetorical than real: The savings from cutting off recipients without current employment did not go into supports for the working poor but rather more tax cuts for the rich.

But at least Mr. Gingrich had a story. The Trump administration does not.

Last winter, it claimed to be picking up the Gingrich “pro-work” baton when it proposed to end food assistance to almost a million people unable to find work in areas with high unemployment. Nothing in the plan would give job training, help people find work or even do community service in exchange for continued assistance while seeking paid employment.

This spring, the administration released a murky plan to lower the federal poverty line, perhaps sharply. If the administration follows through and lowers the income thresholds that federal and state agencies apply — a change that it probably lacks legal authority to do — millions, possibly tens of millions, of people will be purged from programs that base eligibility on income. Those include Medicaid, school meals, energy assistance and much more. A disproportionately large fraction of these people are members of low-wage working families.

The Trump administration’s initiatives, by contrast, are federal power grabs. Current rules allow childless workers to receive more than three months of food assistance while they seek jobs only when their state certifies that they live in areas with insufficient jobs. The administration would strip states of that power.

The one constant is helping to pay for huge, unaffordable upper-income tax cuts. Mr. Trump pushed through a $2 trillion tax cut in December 2017. This reversed years of declining federal deficits. Most of the benefits went to extremely affluent individuals and corporate shareholders, many of them foreign.

And the day after persuading the congressional leadership to increase the debt limit to accommodate those deficits, the Trump administration announced that, yet again, the burden should fall on those least able to afford it.

How one can claim to be a true Christian and remain a Republican nowadays is mind numbing.  The two are mutually exclusive.

Rural Whites Are Now The Largest Users of Food Stamps

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Almost a year ago the Trump/GOP tax bill gave a $1.5 trillion tax break give away to the extremely wealthy and large corporations.  As everyone except Republicans predicted, the federal budget deficit ballooned - just as has occurred with every GOP tax cut since Reagan launched the trickle down voodoo economics so loved by the GOP.  In almost no time, the GOP mantra became that it was necessary to cut social safety net programs to address the budget deficit they deliberately created.  Despite this, in the 2018 midterm elections rural whites voted overwhelmingly for the GOP thanks to their embrace of the GOP's racist and religiously extreme messaging. The irony, of course, is that the largest number of social safety net programs, especially food stamps, are rural whites.  Talk about voting against one's own economic interest.  A piece in Iowa Public Radio looks at the statistics:

On a busy football Saturday, fans on both sides of the Iowa-Nebraska line streamed into a tiny grocery store to pick up hamburger, soda and chips.

More than 38,000 people in this congressional district receive assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, what used to be called food stamps. Most are white and 40 percent live under the poverty level.

Since the late 1970s, congressional leaders have placed food programs in the farm bill to attract votes from cities, where food stamp use was highest. The hope was that rural and urban lawmakers would come together to get the big bill passed.

But the SNAP map has shifted. U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows that since 2012, SNAP participation is highest among households in rural areas and small towns under 2,500 people.

“It wasn't shocking or surprising,” said Ellen Vollinger, legal director of the Food Research & Action Center, or FRAC, “when you think about the degree to which SNAP is related to people being poor.”

FRAC analyzed the USDA data and found that nationally, 16 percent of households in rural areas use SNAP versus 13 percent in urban areas. The population of older people is larger in rural areas, which Vollinger said is driving the increase.

Other people in rural areas who need SNAP are low-wage workers who just don’t make enough or don’t get enough hours at work, Vollinger said, and many recipients are families with children.

About a fifth of Johnson’s store’s annual revenue comes from SNAP, he said, which is about average.

“We get different percentages from different owners,” he said, “but anywhere from say 10 percent up to about 25 percent of their sales they tell us come from those federal food assistance programs.”

The revenue that federal food aid provides for grocery stores is also helping fuel small town economies, Procter said, providing work for the electricians, carpenters and refrigerator repairers the groceries use.

USDA data shows that every dollar spent in SNAP generates up to $1.80 in economic activity in that area.

The other big winner from SNAP dollars: chain stores that cater to rural areas, like Dollar General. The USDA reports that in 2017, big-box stores like Walmart took in more than half of the $63 billion set aside for SNAP.

If the GOP were to have its way, poverty and hunger would be much worse.  Thankfully, a Democrat controlled House will protect these rural whites who stupidly vote Republican. 

The Trump/"Conservative" War on the Poor

In addition to pushing policies that will cause many poor Americans to lose health care coverage, Trumpenführer, his boot licker, Mike Pence - who pretends to be a devout Christian - and much of the conservative establishment also seeks to gut the the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a/k/a the food stamps program.   To justify attacks on the needy, the mythology that the program takes away incentives to work and that blacks disproportionately are recipients - neither is true - is continually put out by hypocrisy filled politicians like Paul Ryan and right wing pundits and leaders of "family values groups, both of which constitute a class of societal parasites. in my view.  That Trump backs cuts and restrictions is particularly obscene given his great wealth, and his large inheritance that launched his con-man like career.  The phenomenon underscores my growing belief that one cannot be a moral person and remain a Republican much less at Trump supporter.  A column in the New York Times debunks the myths peddled by the political right and looks at the true motivation: simple cruelty and contempt for those less fortunate.  That evangelicals remain the strongest supporters of this agenda demonstrates their true moral bankruptcy despite feigned religiosity and sexual prudishness. Here are column excerpts:

In general, Donald Trump is notoriously uninterested in policy details. It has long been obvious, for example, that he never bothered to find out what his one major legislative victory, the 2017 tax cut, actually did. Similarly, it’s pretty clear that he had no idea what was actually in the Iran agreement he just repudiated.

In each case, it was about ego rather than substance: scoring a “win,” undoing his predecessor’s achievement.

But there are some policy issues he really does care about. By all accounts, he really hates the idea of people receiving “welfare,” by which he means any government program that helps people with low income, and he wants to eliminate such programs wherever possible.

Most recently, he has reportedly threatened to veto the upcoming farm bill unless it imposes stringent new work requirements on recipients of SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, still commonly referred to as food stamps.

Let me be upfront here: There’s something fundamentally obscene about this spectacle. Here we have a man who inherited great wealth, then built a business career largely around duping the gullible — whether they were naïve investors in his business ventures left holding the bag when those ventures went bankrupt, or students who wasted time and money on worthless degrees from Trump University. Yet he’s determined to snatch food from the mouths of the truly desperate, because he’s sure that somehow or other they’re getting away with something, having it too easy.

But however petty Trump’s motives, this is a big deal from the other side. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that new work requirements plus other restrictions proposed by House Republicans would end up denying or reducing nutritional aid to around two million people, mostly in families with children.

Why would anyone want to do that? The thing is, it’s not just Trump: Conservative hatred for food stamps is pervasive. What’s behind it?

The more respectable, supposedly intellectual side of conservative opinion portrays food stamps as reducing incentives by making life too pleasant for the poor. As Paul Ryan put it, SNAP and other programs create a “hammock” that “lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”

But this is a problem that exists only in the right’s imagination. Able-bodied SNAP recipients who should be working but aren’t are very hard to find: A vast majority of the program’s beneficiaries either are working — but at unstable jobs that pay low wages — or are children, elderly, disabled or essential family caregivers.

Is it about the money? The enactment of the budget-busting 2017 tax cut proved once and for all, for anyone who had doubts, that Republicans don’t actually care about deficits.

But even if they did care about deficits, the C.B.O. estimates that the proposed cuts to food stamps would save less than one percent, that’s right, one percent, of the revenue lost due to that tax cut. In fact, over the next decade the entire SNAP program, which helps 40 million Americans, will cost only about a third as much as the tax cut. No, it’s not about the money.

What about racism? Historically, attacks on food stamps have often involved a barely disguised racial element . . . . I suspect that Trump himself still thinks of food stamps as a program for urban black people.

Nationally, significantly more whites than blacks receive food stamps, and participation in SNAP is higher in rural than in urban counties. Food stamps are especially important in depressed regions like Appalachia that have lost jobs in coal and other traditional sectors.

And yes, this means that some of the biggest victims of Trump’s obsession with cutting “welfare” will be the very people who put him in office.

Consider Owsley County, Ky., at the epicenter of Appalachia’s regional crisis. More than half the county’s population receives food stamps; 84 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2016. Did they know what they were voting for?

In the end, I don’t believe there’s any policy justification for the attack on food stamps: It’s not about the incentives, and it’s not about the money. And even the racial animus that traditionally underlies attacks on U.S. social programs has receded partially into the background.

No, this is about petty cruelty turned into a principle of government. It’s about privileged people who look at the less fortunate and don’t think, “There but for the grace of God go I”; they just see a bunch of losers. They don’t want to help the less fortunate; in fact, they get angry at the very idea of public aid that makes those losers a bit less miserable.

I feel sadness for the children who will be harmed - evangelicals, of course, only care about children prior to birth - but the adults who voted for Trump and Republicans truly deserve to suffer since they allowed racism and bigotry to sway them to vote against their own best interests.  Am I being cruel?  Perhaps, but far less so than your Trump supporters and typical Republican.

The Republican Party's War on the Poor

The Republican Party and its most reliable base, evangelical Christians, bloviate endlessly about their supposed support for "Christian values" and worship of the Bible and its admonitions.  Yet the policies they pursue and support are diametrically opposed to Christ's principles and values as laid out in the Gospels.  Indeed, Matthew 25:41-46 states as follows:  

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ ⁴⁴ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ ⁴⁵ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

The dishonesty and hypocrisy of these Republicans and evangelical Christians is truly mind numbing.  A column in the New York Times underscores just how far apart the Gospel message and the evangelical Christian/Republican agenda have become.  Here are column highlights: 

America hasn’t always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the brightest; over the years, presidents have employed plenty of knaves and fools. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like the collection of petty grifters and miscreants surrounding Donald Trump. Price, Pruitt, Zinke, Carson and now Ronny Jackson: At this point, our default assumption should be that there’s something seriously wrong with anyone this president wants on his team.

Still, we need to keep our eye on the ball. The perks many Trump officials demand — the gratuitous first-class travel, the double super-secret soundproof phone booths, and so on — are outrageous, and they tell you a lot about the kind of people they are. But what really matters are their policy decisions. Ben Carson’s insistence on spending taxpayer funds on a $31,000 dining set is ridiculous; his proposal to sharply raise housing costs for hundreds of thousands of needy American families, tripling rents for some of the poorest households, is vicious.

And this viciousness is part of a broader pattern. Last year, Trump and his allies in Congress devoted most of their efforts to coddling the rich; this was obviously true of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but even the assault on Obamacare was largely about securing hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the wealthy. This year, however, the G.O.P.’s main priority seems to be making war on the poor.

That war is being fought on multiple fronts. The move to slash housing subsidies follows moves to sharply increase work requirements for those seeking food stamps. Meanwhile, the administration has been granting Republican-controlled states waivers allowing them to impose onerous new work requirements for recipients of Medicaid — requirements whose main effect would probably be not more work, but simply fewer people getting essential health care.

The interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question, instead, is why.

Is it about saving money? Conservatives do complain about the cost of safety net programs, but it’s hard to take those complaints seriously coming from people who just voted to explode the budget deficit with huge tax cuts. Moreover, there’s good evidence that some of the programs under attack actually do what tax cuts don’t: eventually pay back a significant part of their upfront costs by promoting better economic performance.

For example, the creation of the food stamp program didn’t just make the lives of recipients a bit easier. It also had major positive impacts on the long-term health of children from poor families, which made them more productive as adults — more likely to pay taxes, less likely to need further public assistance.

The same goes for Medicaid, where new studies suggest that more than half of each dollar spent on health care for children eventually comes back as higher tax receipts from healthier adults.

So what’s really behind the war on the poor? Pretty clearly, the pain this war will inflict is a feature, not a bug. Trump and his friends aren’t punishing the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be cruel to be kind. They just want to be cruel.

Glenn Thrush of The New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump, aides said, refers to nearly every program that provides benefits to poor people as welfare, a term he regards as derogatory.” And I guess you can see where that comes from. After all, he’s a self-made man who can’t attribute any of his own success to, say, inherited wealth. Oh, wait.

Seriously, a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no empathy for the poor. Some of that lack of empathy surely reflects racial animus. But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?

The Republican Attack on Feeding the Hungry

If Republicans succeed in their effort to provide massive tax cuts to the very wealthy and huge corporations, not only will the federal deficit explode, but the GOP will push for severe cuts in social programs for the poor, spending on public education, infrastructure and a host of other programs  that benefit the majority of Americans.  One of the programs the Congressional Republicans salivate over cutting is the Food Stamp program which helps feed poor children and the impoverished elderly.  It goes without saying that the majority of Christofascists support such cuts - never mind the Gospel message of feeding the hungry - because in their minds those receiving aid from the program are "other" - non-whites, especially blacks, and others targeted for hatred by the "godly folks."    A piece in The Atlantic looks at this ugly agenda that needs to be blocked.  Here are article highlights:

The end of September marked the 40th anniversary of the Food Stamp Act, the program that institutionalized the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Its passage was a model of how to make constructive and important legislation, finding common ground by making tradeoffs across all the usual boundaries. In this case, the key players included George McGovern and Bob Dole, Tom Foley and Shirley Chisholm, among others. 

The McGovern-Dole alliance was a striking one. When I came to Washington in 1969-70, I witnessed the near-nuclear conflict between the two men. . . . . But the two men built a different relationship around the issue of food. McGovern cared deeply about hunger in America. Dole cared deeply about the plight of farmers, who were whipsawed by the commodity markets and prices that sank when there was too much surplus food. That was the basis for a partnership that turned into a legendary friendship spanning four decades, until McGovern’s death in 2012. They used the relationship, and their overlapping interests, to build the broad coalition for the Food Stamp Act, . . . SNAP has been an enormous success story, feeding hungry, poor people. Forget the outrageous anecdotes about food stamp recipients feasting on lobster; consider instead a story I wrote about when I last addressed this issue four years ago, from a column by Katy Waldman in Slate, based on a conversation she had with Debra, a single mother in Washington whose food stamp allotment had been cut from $203 a month to $130. This is what Debra said about getting by on $203 a month:

It’s me and my daughter at home. She’s 21. It was bad enough before the cuts. We were eating lunch meat all week, and we only had enough for a can of vegetables a day. Divide $203 by 30 days, and then by three meals, and then halve it for each person. It’s not a lot.

According to Feeding America, 42 million Americans suffer from what the experts call food insecurity—for many, it is simply hunger, period; for others, it is like Debra, rarely if ever getting a full and nutritious meal, often finding near the end of the month that there is nothing left to buy food until the next allotment of food stamps, and perhaps getting by with food banks. According to the Department of Agriculture, 80 percent of SNAP benefits are used within the first half of the month. The consequences of food insecurity are bad; trouble concentrating, more vulnerable to illness. Another longitudinal study found that poor children with access to SNAP benefits, years later had lower rates of heart disease and obesity, along with better high school performance, than kids who did not. Leaving people hungry hurts not just them, but the entire society, adding to health costs and reducing productivity. 81 percent of SNAP benefits go to those who are working or to those we do not expect to work—children, the elderly, the disabled. [Y]et again, Republicans, including the Trump administration, are going after SNAP with a meat ax. President Trump’s budget calls for a cut of more than 25 percent over five years, massively shifting the burden to states, cutting eligibility, and hammering the benefits now going to millions of children, elderly and the disabled. Even as they shift the burden to states that are not prepared to jack up their own budgets, the president and his budget crew want to allow the states to pare basic benefits way below a marginally healthy diet that will make Debra’s situation look great by comparison. For kids, we also have the school lunch program—from which Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue wants to remove the nutrition requirements for healthy food put in place at the urging of Michelle Obama. There is Meals on Wheels for seniors—and the Trump budget blows up community block grants that provide a sizable share of the funding for that program. So if Trump, his Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, and congressional Republicans get their way, the hungry will grow a lot more hungry and a lot less healthy. [T]his is a time for all of us to reflect on what kind of society we want to live in. Let’s keep in mind Hubert Humphrey’s eloquent appeal: The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Our government met that test 40 years ago. We are on the verge of failing it, miserably, now.

The GOP Rush to Humiliate the Poor

"Don't feed them and they will just go away . . ."

If there was any doubt that the Republican Party has become the party of the rich and modern day Pharisees, for further proof look no farther than the rush by GOP legislators to trash and humiliate the poor through laws that impose draconian provisions and fan the worse untrue stereotypes of the poor living off the largess of the rest of us.  These ugly laws are claimed to be needed to stop food stamps from being used for everything from aboard cruise ships - a total lie - and to stop the poor from buying "surf and turf" while on SNAP.  Some of the claims would make Ronald Reagan who liked to bash "welfare queens" blush.  And who is cheering all of this on?  "Christian conservatives" of course. A column in the Washington Post looks at the ugliness.  Here are highlights:

Rick Brattin, a young Republican state representative in Missouri, has come up with an innovative new way to humiliate the poor in his state. Call it the surf-and-turf law. 

Brattin has introduced House Bill 813, making it illegal for food-stamp recipients to use their benefits “to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.”

“I have seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs” with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, the legislator explained, according to The Post’s Roberto A. Ferdman. “When I can’t afford it on my pay, I don’t want people on the taxpayer’s dime to afford those kinds of foods either.”

Never mind that few can afford filet mignon on a less-than-$7/day food-stamp allotment; they’re more likely to be buying chuck steak or canned tuna. This is less about public policy than about demeaning public-benefit recipients.

The surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor as the country deals with the high-poverty hangover of the Great Recession.

Last week, the Kansas legislature passed House Bill 2258, punishing the poor by limiting their cash withdrawals of welfare benefits to $25 per day and forbidding them to use their benefits “in any retail liquor store, casino, gaming establishment, jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor, spa, nail salon, lingerie shop, tobacco paraphernalia store, vapor cigarette store, psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade, movie theater, swimming pool, cruise ship, theme park, dog or horse racing facility, pari-mutuel facility, or sexually oriented business . . . or in any business or retail establishment where minors under age 18 are not permitted.” . . .  . it also bans all out-of-state spending of welfare dollars — so the inclusion of a cruise-ship ban is redundant in landlocked Kansas.

A profusion of such laws has bubbled up in states across the country in the last few years, imposing punitive new conditions on the poor. Many of these are from Republican states opposed to big government,  . . . . In their budget plans in Congress, Republicans propose “devolving” food stamps and other programs to state control by awarding block grants with few strings attached. The states, the thinking goes, are closer to the people and have better ideas about how to reduce caseloads. But recent experience suggests that one strategy for reducing caseloads is to harass recipients . .

12 states, most in the South, have passed legislation in the last three years requiring drug testing for public-assistance applicants. Florida’s law, struck down in court, required applicants to pay for the drug test, reimbursing them if they tested negative.

And what if all these new costs for the poor put them out on the street? The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty last year reported a 60 percent increase since 2011 in city-wide bans on public camping and a 43 percent increase in prohibitions on sitting or lying down in public places.

What is also notable about this trend is that while their "conservative" fellow Christians are supporting these attacks on the poor, the "good Christian"  are largely silent and invisible from the fray.  All of which makes me conclude that no deference should be given to religious belief whatsoever.  Both groups of believers are a problem.

Republican Governed Red States Are Economic Parasites

We constantly hear Republicans and the Christofascists and Tea Party crowd (most of whom are Christofascists hiding behind a different label) maligning the poor and attacking the "takers" versus the "creators" as in Mitt Romney's infamous 47% statement.  Yet the biggest parasites of all are red states governed by Republicans.  These states receive far more at the government money trough than their liberal blue state rivals.  Among these ironies is that while the Republicans want to slash food stamps and other benefits, the highest per capita usage of these programs is in red states where moronic voters are duped into voting Republican due to the GOP cynically playing on racism, homophobia and anti-immigrant bigotry.  Politicususa has details on  the findings of a new report.  Here are excerpts:

[Y]et another report reveals that those same red state Republican voters who want the federal government cut to shreds are leeching substantially more assets from the federal government they want destroyed at the expense of blue states that are supporting them. 

 This time the report is not from a liberal-leaning think tank, or any government agency; it is from a commercial organization with no political or economic stake in the study’s results. If this were the first report of its kind showing red state economies would wither and die, and the people would starve, without leaching federal funding from blue states, one may be inclined to dismiss it as an aberration.

However, study after study has consistently  exposed anti-federal government Republican states as being incredibly dependent on the federal government they hate with religious passion and just voted for Republicans to fulfill their wishes and decimate it. Never, never ever, underestimate the power of stupid Republican voters in red states who are a Presidential veto away from seeing their evil dream reach fruition.

The categories were; the return in federal dollars on taxpayer investment, or how many federal dollars a state receives as opposed to what the residents pay in.  The percentage of state revenue from federal funding that keeps the state from declaring bankruptcy and its residents from starving or dying from lack of medical care. The number of non-defense (civilian) federal employees in a state, as opposed to states supported by large military installations. And last, the per capita federal employee rate in the state such as federal marshals, park rangers, federal highway workers, and federal regulators keeping air, water, and food safe.

Republican states have benefitted greatly from federal healthcare such as Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act, and it is relatively common knowledge that the largest percentage of SNAP (food stamp) recipients are poor white Republicans in red states; likely because red state legislators enacted Draconian ‘right to work’ laws keeping wages at or below poverty levels. What informs the epic stupidity of red state Republican voters is that they are the morons who consistently send Republicans to Washington to rein in the federal budget and cut the federal government down to size.

Congress  . . . just passed a seriously Draconian budget that does precisely what red state voters yearned for; ended “federal interference” in their lives. If the Republican budget stands, red state voters will get their wish and can finally stop bemoaning the horrid ‘federal interference’ in their lives; the interference that kept food on their tables, their families in relatively decent health, and their state economies from going bankrupt. It is likely that the same morons and racists are too stupid to comprehend that the damage their state legislatures have been wreaking on them is about to be magnified a hundred fold due to less federal interference (funding) in their poverty-stricken lives. In fact, it may seem inhumane, but one almost wishes President Obama was not inclined to veto the Republican budget proposals just to let the real Americans, those patriotic “rugged individuals” comprehend just how much worse their pathetic existence would be without the federal government, blue states’ largesse, and humanitarian Democrats unwilling to allow their fellow citizens, no matter how stupid, suffer so the rich get richer.

Some of the poorest states, all red states, are dependent on federal funding for 30 to 45% of their total revenue and the GOP’s budget will slash that revenue and make dire revenue shortfalls already decimating red states seem like an economic bonanza.

There is no accounting for stupid people who, as equally stupid Sarah Palin claims, are the real Americans sitting on their porches holding their guns, their god, and their Constitution while supporting Republicans who promised to ravage the federal government they are convinced is stealing their liberty. 

What is noteworthy is that the blue states that receive 20, 30, or 40 cents in return for every dollar they invest in the federal government are not revolting and threatening to secede. But that is the difference between blue state residents and hateful red state Republicans; they accept that Americans assist their fellow citizens no matter how stupid they are for voting against their own best interests . . . 

Yes, the author is brutal in the manner red state voters are described, but sadly, the assessment is 100% on point. These morons are being cynically played for suckers yet are too stupid to realize it.    As the author notes, it might almost be fun to see the GOP budget pass and then watch the red states' economies crash and burn. 

The Consequences of GOP Policies: Racism, Religious Extremism, Poverty, Obesity and Incarceration

While the Republican Party holds itself out as the guardian of "American values" - as do the Christofascists who control much of the GOP's policies - when one looks at the consequences of the GOP's policies and agenda, the picture is pretty ugly.  Among the consequences/fruits are racism, religious extremism and bigotry, poverty, obesity and incarceration (this latter one is tied to the first, racism).  Yes, some of these problems are historic ones, but over all decent Americans over time have sought to lessen their impact and poisonous consequences.  That changed when the Christofascists hijacked the GOP.  A piece in the Daily Kos looks at these ill fruits.  Here are excerpts:

Evangelical Christians and their willingness to force their beliefs on the rest of us through vociferous political activism and promotion of Biblically based public policies are a huge problem for the future of the planet. . . . . They believe all other religions are false; that science is only good so long as it doesn't contradict a literal interpretation of the Bible, that the Constitution is a Christian document and all non-believers are going to hell. Therefore they vote faithfully for candidates who will govern accordingly. Republicans and even some Republican-lite Democrats, are only too willing to pander to this constituency.

The GOP's leveraging of white evangelicals into Republican votes fits right in to the divide and conquer playbook of the Southern Strategy, which was designed and implemented 40 years ago by Richard Nixon. This strategy of stoking the fires of ignorance and racism has delivered the southern states to the Republicans ever since. 

An internet search of pretty much any demographic data regarding the South, quickly reveals the harm this Southern Strategy has inflicted upon the region. In addition to being highly religious, racist and Republican, the region also suffers the blight of poverty, obesity, incarceration, and almost any other social malady you care to type into your browser. Of course these maladies exist in the other states, some in high ratios, but none rival the depth and intensity of the southern infection.

Evangelicals and racists have walked hand-in-hand for over two centuries. The region has had a strongly entrenched evangelical movement since the nation's founding, long before being referred to as the Bible Belt by American journalist and social commentator H L Mencken in 1924.

While the practice of Christianity, unlike racism, has redeeming qualities the evangelical practitioners have often been complicit in the holy blessing of slavery, lynching and institutional discrimination. Slaveholders justified slavery by citing the Bible: "slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling" (Ephesians 6:5), or "tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect" (Titus 2:9).

The former Party of Lincoln has had its grips on the South since 1968 and no doubt owns the abject misery of the region. The maps and graphs below the fold reveal in stunning visual relief the desperate circumstances in which many of the citizens of the former Confederacy find themselves.

1. Southern states are the most religious: Earlier this month, Gallup released a survey based on more than 175,000 interviews that asked residents of each state how often they attend a weekly religious service. What they found was that the most religious states were in the South, which was home to all but one of the top 12.

2. Southern states are the most evangelical: Evangelical Christians are the base of the Republican party and of that group the Southern Baptists are the dominant sect in the region. 

3. Southern states have the most racist residents: Analysts at Floating Sheep, a website run by a group of independent cyber-geography researchers, found there was a spike of racist tweets on Twitter during and after President Obama’s 2012 re-election.

4. Southern states are controlled by Republicans: The Republican Party is the chef that stirs the pot of racism and evangelical religiosity in the south, and as you can see, where those ingredients are strong so is the GOP. This is no accident. This is the insidious result of "The Southern Strategy". 

5. Southern states have the lowest wages:  In 2010, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas had the largest share of people earning sub-povery wages, EPI [Economic Policy Institute] found.

6.  Southern states are the most impoverished: This is an obvious side effect of low wages.

7.  Southern states have the highest food stamp usage of any region: An obvious side effect of poverty. In fact, contrary to what Republicans would like you to think, of the 32 states that receive more federal dollars than they contribute, 27 of them are controlled by Republicans, which includes 15 southern states. (Ref:AATTP) 

8.  Southern states have the highest rates of teen pregnancy:  Also contrary to what the teen-mother-shaming Republicans want you to believe, teen pregnancies do not cause poverty, rather poverty causes teen pregnancy.  Teens who get pregnant tend to come from more disadvantaged families than those who do not become pregnant. Moreover, among pregnant teens, those who choose abortion tend to be more advantaged than those who opt to carry the baby to term.

9.  Southern states have the highest rates of obesity: Obesity is a risk for all groups of Americans, but is especially high among Americans with the lowest levels of education and the highest poverty rates

10.  Southern states have higher rates of heart disease and stroke:  Studies have consistently shown that people with low incomes and less education generally have higher rates of heart disease than their more-educated, higher-income counterparts.

11.  Southern states have higher rates of cancer mortality:  According to Dr. Samuel Broder, former director of the National Cancer Institute, "Poverty is a carcinogen". Research cited in the annual Cancer Facts and Figures 2011 released by the American Cancer Society, showed that poverty rivals both tobacco and obesity as a carcinogen.

14.  Southern states have the highest rates of incarceration:  Since the 1980s the attitude of many law and order types has been lock 'em up and throw away the key, "three strikes and you're out" that will solve the problem. But actually this policy of increased incarceration has actually exacerbated the problem of poverty, which has been shown to be the root of so many other miserable statistics.
The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime. But now that America’s incarceration rate has risen to be the world’s highest, many social scientists find the social benefits to be far outweighed by the costs to those communities. 

“Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society.”

Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.

There are non-southern states that pop in and out of the list of misery to be sure, some even controlled at least in part by Democrats. But the pattern is clear. This is no coincidence. These are the states that consistently show up either at the top of a bad category or at the bottom of a good one. These are the consequences of sustained Republican control.

Democratic leaders have not forcefully called out the GOP for their Southern Strategy and faith-based idiocy, possibly fearing offending moderate Christians. Well it is time to start offending people. Democrats need to put Republicans on the defensive by pounding on the disastrous results of Republican policies over and over and over again, instead of getting drawn into false equivalency debates on Sunday morning talk shows.

The GP and evangelical Christians are toxic to the nation's future.  Their dominance and any deference they receive needs to end.

GOP: Poor People Aren't Real Americans

Click image to enlarge

Another piece in the Daily Beast caught my eye because it sums up the agenda of today's Republican party and its war on the poor - even as GOP elected officials such as Paul Ryan disingenuously claim to honor and live by "Christian values."  They hypocrisy of such individuals and the party as a whole is breath taking.  And at the state level, things are no better.  Here in Virginia, Virginia Republicans are threatening a state government shut down rather than accept federal money and provided health care access to roughly 400,000 working class Virginians.  Apparently, these cretins and hypocrites have forgotten that the GOP forced federal shutdown did not exactly turn out well for the GOP.  In any event, here are article highlights:

It’s not about the budget, and it has nothing to do with concern about drugs—it’s about harassing a particular class of Americans who need help.

Looks like its time for another season of America’s favorite political sport: demonizing folks on welfare. 

Last month, the RNC announced that welfare would be one of the top issues they want to hammer home in the 2014 midterms. And on the local level, this isn’t just bumper-sticker campaign slogans, its being put into place as policy.

Here’s the deal: Beginning July 1 in Mississippi, anyone applying for welfare will be subjected to a questionnaire asking whether they use drugs. If their answers reveal possible drug use, they will have to pee in the cup. If they fail, they will have to undergo treatment in order to get paid.

Mississippi’s bill was signed into law after a federal judge in Florida ruled the state's drug testing plan for welfare recipients was unconstitutional. But that hasn't stopped other Republican lawmakers for going the tried and true route of demonizing those on welfare. It’s as if no other class of people in America does drugs.

The Michigan Senate passed a bill similar to Mississippi: if you are deemed suspicious of drug use, you must take the test. If you refuse, no assistance.

[I]n America, there is no greater political sport than to demonize those on welfare.

Politicians, largely Republicans, are good at playing up the class warfare by castigating the poor as being the reason why everything is bad in America. . . . .  Because it is easier to beat up on the helpless. And that's what such bills are about.

The Real "Takers" in America

The Republican Party and conservative pundits blather incessantly that welfare and social safety net programs breed a culture of dependence and distort the work ethic of the poor.  But they have no problem with welfare for the very wealthy which, they no doubt justify as stimulating the economy - as if spending by the poor on food and clothing and other necessities doesn't stimulate the economy.  An op-ed in the New York Times looks at the hypocrisy of the GOP and they "welfare programs" with which they have no problem.  Here are column excerpts:

In the debate about poverty, critics argue that government assistance saps initiative and is unaffordable. After exploring the issue, I must concede that the critics have a point. Here are five public welfare programs that are wasteful and turning us into a nation of “takers.”

 

First, welfare subsidies for private planes. The United States offers three kinds of subsidies to tycoons with private jets: accelerated tax write-offs, avoidance of personal taxes on the benefit by claiming that private aircraft are for security, and use of air traffic control paid for by chumps flying commercial.  As the leftists in the George W. Bush administration put it when they tried unsuccessfully to end this last boondoggle: “The family of four taking a budget vacation is subsidizing the C.E.O.’s flying on a corporate jet.”

Second, welfare subsidies for yachts. The mortgage-interest deduction was meant to encourage a home-owning middle class. But it has been extended to provide subsidies for beach homes and even yachts.  In the meantime, money was slashed last year from the public housing program for America’s neediest. Hmm. How about if we house the homeless in these publicly supported yachts?

 

Third, welfare subsidies for hedge funds and private equity. The single most outrageous tax loophole in America is for “carried interest,” allowing people with the highest earnings to pay paltry taxes. They can magically reclassify their earned income as capital gains, because that carries a lower tax rate (a maximum of 23.8 percent this year, compared with a maximum of 39.6 percent for earned income).

Fourth, welfare subsidies for America’s biggest banks. The too-big-to-fail banks in the United States borrow money unusually cheaply because of an implicit government promise to rescue them. Bloomberg View calculated last year that this amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion to our 10 biggest banks annually.  President Obama has proposed a bank tax to curb this subsidy, and this year a top Republican lawmaker, Dave Camp, endorsed the idea as well. Big banks are lobbying like crazy to keep their subsidy.

Fifth, large welfare subsidies for American corporations from cities, counties and states. A bit more than a year ago, Louise Story of The New York Times tallied more than $80 billion a year in subsidies to companies, mostly as incentives to operate locally.

You see where I’m going. We talk about the unsustainability of government benefit programs and the deleterious effects these can have on human behavior, and these are real issues. Well-meaning programs for supporting single moms can create perverse incentives not to marry, or aid meant for a needy child may be misused to buy drugs. Let’s acknowledge that helping people is a complex, uncertain and imperfect struggle.

But, perhaps because we now have the wealthiest Congress in history, the first in which a majority of members are millionaires, we have a one-sided discussion demanding cuts only in public assistance to the poor, while ignoring public assistance to the rich. And a one-sided discussion leads to a one-sided and myopic policy.

We’re cutting one kind of subsidized food — food stamps — at a time when Gallup finds that almost one-fifth of American families struggled in 2013 to afford food. Meanwhile, we ignore more than $12 billion annually in tax subsidies for corporate meals and entertainment.

Every time an executive wines and dines a hot date on the corporate dime, the average taxpayer helps foot the bill.  So let’s get real. To stem abuses, the first target shouldn’t be those avaricious infants in nutrition programs but tycoons in their subsidized Gulfstreams.

However imperfectly, subsidies for the poor do actually reduce hunger, ease suffering and create opportunity, while subsidies for the rich result in more private jets and yachts. Would we rather subsidize opportunity or yachts? Which kind of subsidies deserve more scrutiny?

Paul Ryan - An Utter Douche Bag and Liar

Paul Ryan - douche bag and liar

If readers haven't previously figured it out, I view Paul Ryan (R-WI) as an utter douche bag.  In fact, this asshole who was born into a wealthy family and who has never had to worry about money or where his next meal would come from has taken his hypocrisy to new levels speaking a CPAC - a coven like gathering of racists, religious fanatics and bigots that now passes as a mirror the GOP base - where he recounted basically a made up story that when traced back to its origin has a message 180 degrees the opposite of Ryan's agenda to slash social programs for the poor and relegate the less fortunate to the trash heap.  The man truly makes the Pharisees of the Bible look like pillars of integrity and decency.  And people wonder why I cannot be a Republican nowadays.  The Raw Story looks at the roots of Ryan's dishonesty at CPAC .  Here are excerpts:

Tea Party Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) anecdote criticizing government school lunch programs was apparently lifted from a book about an encounter between a student and a private benefactor.

Wonkette reported on Thursday that Ryan’s remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday regarding a “young boy from a very poor family” relying on “a government program” for his lunches was strikingly similar to the premise of the book An Invisible Thread, which recounted author Laura Schroff’s 1986 meeting with an 11-year-old “homeless panhandler” named Maurice, who was receiving lunches through a school program.

Schroff wrote that she offered Maurice a choice between giving him enough money for a week, or taking him to a supermarket to buy him enough food to cover the same amount of time. The book then detailed this exchange:

If you make me lunch,” he said, “will you put it in a brown paper bag?”  I didn’t really understand the question. “Do you want it in a brown paper bag?” I asked. “Or how would you prefer it?”

“Miss Laura,” he said, “I don’t want your money. I want my lunch in a brown paper bag.” “Okay, sure. But why do you want it in a bag?”  “Because when I see kids come to school with their lunch in a paper bag, that means someone cares about them. Miss Laura, can I please have my lunch in a paper bag?”

On Thursday, Ryan recounted nearly the exact same story, attributing it to Wisconsin Department of Children and Families Director Eloise Anderson, who was appointed by Gov. Scott Walker (R). But Ryan said it was Anderson who met a young student who told her he did not want a lunch from a government program, but one served in a brown paper bag.

“He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown paper bag had someone who cared for him,” Ryan said. “This is what the left does not understand.”

At the time of their appearance on Huckabee’s show, Schrock and Maurice promoted the Share Our Strength No Kid Hungry campaign. Two months later, the campaign released a statement opposing Ryan’s House budget proposal, which included cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) Program by $125 million.

Note two things: (i) Either way Laura Schroff was going to make sure the boy did not go hungry.   The only issue was as to how she would accomplish this goal; unlike Ryan's budget proposals, she was not going to leave the boy with no way to secure food; and (ii) Schroff and Maurice appeared on behalf of a program that actively opposes Ryan's budget cuts.   Try as I might, my take away conclusion is that Ryan is not a decent person and that he's a liar.  A slippery and canny liar perhaps, but a deliberate liar nonetheless. Sadly, Ryan now represents what the greed driven, racist and homophobic GOP is all about. It's beyond ugly and the fact that Ryan and his allies dress themselves in the cloak of religiosity makes Christianity itself repugnant to more and more Americans.  It will be the "godly folk" not the liberals who kill Christianity.

 

The Republican Culture of Death

We constantly hear Republicans and far right talking heads making outrageous claims about Obama death panels and the liberal left supporting a culture of death.  Truth be told, however, it is the Republican Party and its Christofacist/Tea Party base that is the real force behind a culture of death.  Why? Because many aspects of the GOP platform lead to unnecessary and otherwise avoidable deaths.  All the sanctimonious claims of "respecting life" will not wash away the blood on the hands of these people as they oppose health care expansion for the poor and unfortunate, seek horrific cuts to food stamps, throw unemployed workers to the gutter, and push for unrestricted gun ownership that results in avoidable gun related deaths virtually every single day.  A piece in the Loudoun Progress looks at this reality.  Here are highlights:

When is it okay to start talking about the fact that Republican policies actually kill people?
The most obvious example is Republican support for our government killing people, explicitly and in cold blood. That’s what the death penalty is. State sanctioned killing of a citizen in cold blood. Regardless of your position on the morality or constitutionality of the death penalty, it is, quite simply, support for state-sanctioned death. And as an example of the bedrock principle for Republicans that the state should be allowed to kill its citizens, there is no better example.

How about Republican’s opposition to reasonable gun safety legislation? To the point of actively repealing gun safety legislation already in place when they take control of a state? Did you know that Missouri repealed background checks for gun purchases recently? And when it did, gun murders went up 25%?  “Hey, this legislation will cause more people to be violently murdered!”  “Great, let’s do it!”

Or the 17,000 women who will die because Republican-controlled states refuse to expand Medicaid?

“We calculated the number and characteristics of people who will remain uninsured as a result of their state’s opting out of the Medicaid expansion, and applied these figures to the known effects of insurance expansion from prior studies,” lead author Samuel Dickman said. “The results were sobering. Political decisions have consequences, some of them lethal.”

So again I ask, when can we start talking about the fact that Republican policy positions seem to revel in a culture of death?

Sadly, much of the mainstream media is too lazy to challenge members of the GOP on such issues and instead mere repeats their talking points as if they were true.  

The GOP: Enemies of the Poor

I get accused of being too hard on Republicans many of whom try to retreat behind claims of "belief in limited government" as an excuse to turn a blind eye to the GOP's raging homophobia and out right hostility to the poor.  I'm sorry, but limited government beliefs do not absolve one from the rest of the baggage that goes with being a Republican nowadays.  Indeed, those who think that it does are to my mind are either hypocrites or downright greedy.  A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP's track record and why the GOP is the enemy of the poor and less fortunate.  Here are excerpts:

Suddenly it’s O.K., even mandatory, for politicians with national ambitions to talk about helping the poor. This is easy for Democrats, who can go back to being the party of F.D.R. and L.B.J. It’s much more difficult for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it’s justified. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor, and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election.  Moreover, G.O.P. harshness toward the less fortunate isn’t just a matter of spite (although that’s part of it); it’s deeply rooted in the party’s ideology . . .

Let’s start with the recent Republican track record.

The most important current policy development in America is the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. Most Republican-controlled states are, however, refusing to implement a key part of the act, the expansion of Medicaid, thereby denying health coverage to almost five million low-income Americans.

Meanwhile, those Republican-controlled states are slashing unemployment benefits, education financing and more. As I said, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the G.O.P. is hurting the poor as much as it can.

[E]very budget the G.O.P. has offered since it took over the House in 2010 involves savage cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other antipoverty programs. 

The notion that unemployment is high because we’re “paying people not to work” is a fallacy (no matter how desperate you make the unemployed, their desperation does nothing to create more jobs) wrapped in a falsehood (very few people are choosing to remain unemployed and keep collecting benefit checks). 

The point is that a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor.

Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren’t always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs — Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit — used to have bipartisan support. And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P.

For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America’s poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise. 

What brought about this change?  In my view, the rise of the Christofascists within the GOP.  These people are mean spirited and often racists, believing that most of the poor are non-whites and, therefore, disposable.  They may congratulate themselves each Sunday in the pews on their supposed piety, but they are nothing more than foul modern day Pharisees.