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. 

Is Some of Trump's Base Waking to the Fact It Has Been Conned

One of the ironies of Donald Trump's base of support - and the Republican Party in general - is that it is made up of aging, uneducated, evangelical Christian whites for whom Trump and the GOP establishment hold nothing but contempt when not speaking into microphones at rallies and political events.  Yet through appeals to racism, religious based ignorance, fears of lost white privilege and appeals for hatred against those deemed "other" Trump and the GOP have induced members of this base to vote against its own best economic interest as GOP policies have looted the nation to benefit the wealthy.  Touring Versailles a week ago I could not help but see parallels between the detachment of the French nobility from the reality of their subjects and today's plutocrat loving GOP.  Sooner or later the masses wake up to the reality that they are being deliberately screwed over.   As a column in the New York Times reviews, at least a few in the Trump/GOP base may be slowly awakening to the fact that they have been conned and callously played for fools.  Here are column excerpts:

Dogs, though known for their loyalty, can take only so much from one abusive human. Alas, the same cannot be said for the aging, white, rural and southern people who make up Trump’s base. He can lie to them, hurt them with tariffs, make a mockery of their values, suck up to freedom-hating dictators they once distrusted, and they’ll stick with him. Cult 45 is thought to be impermeable.

But surprise — a raft of new polls show that some of the most hard-core Trumpsters are starting to get a clue. I know, hold your applause. It’s like discovering that climate change is not a hoax when your town is under water, and all your commander in chief can do is throw you a roll of paper towels. And the woke among the true believers is small.

I think Trump’s base is showing some erosion because his followers feel he finally crossed a line: He’s now insulting them.

It didn’t go over well in Alabama that Trump reportedly called his ’Bama-bred attorney general, Jeff Sessions, “a dumb Southerner” and ridiculed his accent. Trump has denied the account from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear.”

Trump has used the regional dis before, calling the family of another ex-wife, Marla Maples, “dumb Southerners” and “hillbillies,” as one reporter recalled. Last week, the longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone trashed Sessions as an “insubordinate hillbilly” — expressing a double dose of hick hatred. It’s in Trump’s character to deride those without gold-plated bathroom fixtures as inferior. His people, as he said in a North Dakota non sequitur, have the best apartments and the nicest boats. But you don’t need what comes out of his mouth as proof of his class disdain. Look at the two biggest policy initiatives of his presidency. He has tried mightily to destroy Obamacare and all the lives dependent on it. He’s still pushing a repeal plan that would leave upward of 18 million people without health care. And who are those people? His supporters, mostly.

Working-class whites, particularly in the old Rust Belt, were the main beneficiaries of the expansion of health care under President Barack Obama. . . . . And if the president’s party succeeds in choking the last life out of Obamacare, these Trump voters stand to lose the most.

As noted, some of them are catching on. A Quinnipiac poll out this week showed that even among non-college-educated whites — the strongest demographic holdout for Trump — a plurality now say they’d like to see Congress be more of a check on the president. Since his election, he’s down 14 points among the “poorly educated” that Trump once professed to love, a CNN poll found.

In West Virginia, where Trump could shoot the Mountaineer mascot and still walk at the head of a parade, attacks on Obamacare are killing Republican chances of taking down Senator Joe Manchin.

The other signature issue is the tax cut. Remember how Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, another plutocrat who has trouble hiding his contempt for flyover country, described it last year? “Not only will this tax cut pay for itself,” he said, “but it will pay down the debt.”

We’ll soon be running a trillion-dollar deficit, up 32 percent this fiscal year, thanks to the tax cut. . . . .The collapse in revenue will hurt Trump supporters in other ways. One is the paucity of federal dollars for investment — in community colleges, roads, opioid treatment, Pell grants for students, ultimately even Social Security or Medicare. Another is that, by forcing borrowing costs up, the Trump deficit contributes to rising interest rates. That makes it much harder for working families to buy homes.

In truth, economics will probably not move Trump supporters. Their vote for him was more about status anxiety in a changing nation than about financial uncertainty. They’ll stay with him only so long as they allow themselves to be easy marks for the insulting con of this presidency.

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.