In an all-too-familiar transfer, Home Republicans are proposing to drastically lower meals help for poor Individuals with a view to give well-heeled Individuals much more cash and to shore up help for President Donald Trump. In different phrases, it’s enterprise as traditional.
The invoice would lower the Supplemental Diet Help Program and different federal diet help applications by a whopping $290 billion over the following decade, in keeping with the draft textual content of the agricultural portion of their reconciliation invoice. That’s how Republicans have determined to satisfy the goal of $230 billion in cuts.
Why are they proposing $290 billion in cuts when solely $230 billion was required? Nicely, as a result of the administration must hold farmers—a few of Trump’s staunchest backers—from fleeing the coop. That additional $60 billion would go towards strengthening the security web for farmers, together with commodity applications and crop insurance coverage.
The proposed cuts are brutal. The work-requirement age for able-bodied adults with out dependents would soar from 54 to 64, that means that individuals needing diet help would want to work effectively into their 60s to get the absurdly meager diet advantages the federal authorities offers.
That’s unhealthy sufficient, however the invoice additionally redefines “dependent child” from kids below 18 to kids below 7. So, as soon as your child is 8, they’re simply effective alone at residence, or one thing? Apparently, youngsters ought to be taught to fend for themselves early, particularly since crimson states hold gutting youngster labor legal guidelines.
The invoice would additionally shift vital SNAP prices to the states based mostly on every state’s cost error fee. Nonetheless, even some elected Republicans, craven as they’re, acknowledge that hefty SNAP cuts would decimate poorer crimson states. Simply gotta determine a means to verify solely blue state residents really feel ache, maybe.
On the similar time, the administration wants to make sure farmers do not obtain an identical share of ache as people who find themselves not rabid Trump followers. However that’s robust when the administration is slashing meals support to colleges and meals banks. These teams obtain funding to purchase meals from native farmers, but when they haven’t any cash, they will’t purchase any native farmers’ meals. However we are able to’t let that GOP-held need to kick poor individuals within the tooth compromise the social gathering’s electoral help amongst farmers.
Thus, we’re seeing a rerun of Trump’s first time period, the place the administration gave farmers $28 billion to assist blunt the consequences of tariffs. To place that into perspective, the Navy spends $22 billion yearly on shipbuilding, and the nation spent $21.8 billion within the 2019 fiscal 12 months to keep up nuclear forces.
Regardless of Trump’s second-term fiddle tariffs and commerce, there’s one throughline: Now firms get to be farmers too, kind of. The place Trump offered tariff aid on the trade degree in his first time period, now particular person firms can keep away from financial ache by personally entreating the president, a very constitutional and good factor, undoubtedly.
That’s doubtless how Nvidia bought the administration to again off from a plan to curb the corporate’s capability to promote its H20 chip to China. The corporate’s CEO ponied up $1 million to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago, after which one way or the other, these proposed curbs simply disappeared. Trump spared Apple’s iPhones from a few of his worst tariff excesses after the corporate’s CEO phoned the White Home.
The administration’s general concept of governance is that financial ache must be directed at individuals who already endure financial ache—all so Trump’s greatest donors and most constant voters can thrive. It’s not a lot of a concept, however they’re operating with it.
