Trump’s Food Boxes

I used to be on the other side of this issue.

I thought it was a great idea to cut entitlement programs. It would deter illegal aliens from coming here. It would encourage blacks to migrate to other states. I was looking at the issue through a racial lens.

Years later, I realized it wasn’t a racial issue. The biggest beneficiaries of entitlement programs are the White working class. These are the people who we claim to stand for and want to help. Are we helping them by making healthcare more expensive? Are we helping them by making college tuition less affordable? Are we helping them by making their grocery bills more expensive when their wages have stagnated and their average household income has declined?

These people don’t have billions of dollars to invest in puppets and to hire armies of lobbyists to camp out on K-Street to ensure that their interests are advanced in public policy:

“The Trump administration is proposing to save billions in the coming years by giving low-income families a box of government-picked, nonperishable foods every month instead of food stamps.

White House OMB Director Mick Mulvaney on Monday hailed the idea as one that kept up with the modern era, calling it a “Blue Apron-type program” — a nod to the high-end meal kit delivery company that had one of the worst stock debuts in 2017 and has struggled to hold onto customers. Mulvaney said the administration’s plan would not only save the government money, but also provide people with more nutritious food than they have now. …”

Conservatives are not our secret friends.

They don’t care about White people. They’re only cynically dog whistling the racial aspect of these issues to accomplish their ideological goal of rolling back the welfare state. The only reason we have so many Hispanics in our communities is because they come here to work for capitalists who ensure that the borders are kept open by bribing Republican politicians with campaign contributions. They rail against “the welfare state,” but are desperate to bring in more Joses and Pajeets by expanding legal immigration and guest worker programs. They’re working at Trump’s hotels!

Conservatives are motivated by class, not race. This is what unites their neoliberal economic agenda from tax cuts to entitlement spending to deregulation to trade policy to amnesty. It is all about rigging the system in such a way that it benefits the wealthiest people in America. Those people also tend to be Jewish donors who want American soldiers to fight their wars for Israel in the Middle East.

Welfare for Israel is sacrosanct to conservatives. In fact, we are going above and beyond our usual disbursement of welfare to Israel by funding their $705 million dollar missile defense programs. Welfare for the military is also sacrosanct to conservatives. We need $700 billion dollars to finance a military that is used to defend the borders of countless countries across the world other than our own. Those troops are also more likely to be used against us one day than to repel a foreign invasion.

In theory, the benefits of voting for the Republican Party are supposed to outweigh the costs of doing so. It is worth it to cut investment in infrastructure, education and healthcare to pay for tax cuts for billionaires … because, because Trump is going to build a 30 foot border wall, deport millions of illegal aliens, outlaw abortion and do all these the other things to save White Christian America.

What if Trump ends up keeping none of those promises, but succeeds in cutting Medicaid for poor White families in Indiana and Kentucky? Are we really making their lives better? That’s how I think about the issue now after watching this bait-and-switch time and again.