Wonkette: Trumps Budget Dream: Make America A Dickensian Slum Again, Blue Apron Style Read more a
Trump’s Budget Dream: Make America A Dickensian Slum Again, ‘Blue Apron Style’
Read more at https://wonkette.com/629691/trumps-budget-dream-make-america-a-dickensian-slum-again-blue-apron-style#OtFkpw0IHR3mLJO8.99
The Trump budget proposal, which like all presidential budgets is make-believe because Congress will do what it damn well pleases, is nonetheless full of not only imaginary revenue and spending priorities, but full of some genuinely terrible ideas for slashing the public safety net and replacing it with a nice big bucket of shame, which ought to finally motivate poor people to stop being poor and go out and become rich. Oh, sure, there’s the predictable rightwing wet dream of rolling back the Obamacare Medicaid expansion and converting what’s left of the ACA to a block grant to states (with far less funding), plus slashing billions from housing assistance, and just about everything else. But what’s really getting attention is an insane proposal to cut benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka food stamps) by half and replace the benefits with a monthly delivery of commodity foods from the US Department of Agriculture.
Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney, the genius who assured us last year that Meals on Wheels sounds nice but is actually just wasted on old people, claimed the canned/boxed commodity packages would be a “Blue Apron-type program,” except that instead of having fixin’s for a single meal delivered, poor families would have a big chunk of their monthly menu determined by whatever the government chooses for them every month. States would have “flexibility” in how the food would be delivered, which might mean they’d deliver the boxes by mail, or maybe just tell everyone in Montana, say, to drive to Bozeman to pick up their monthly supplies.
You see, children, it’s evil when the government provides assistance with health care, because that’s telling you which doctor you can go to and a violation of your freedom, like Hitler. But if the government tells poor families their diet will depend on whatever shelf-stable commodities get tossed into a monthly “America’s Harvest Box,” that’s good, because then other Americans will be freed from the anguish of seeing poor folks using an EBT card to buy groceries Tucker Carlson doesn’t approve of. And the poor can suck it, because they should be grateful they get anything, shut up....
The Trumpers don’t say anything about whether the boxes would take into account special dietary needs like kids with food allergies or diabetes (they won’t), and there’s definitely nothing in the proposal about religious dietary restrictions, because can you imagine the screaming about “creeping Sharia” if USDA were talking about delivering halal food boxes? Remember, this isn’t a real proposal, it’s vaporware, an attempt to get rightwing buzz that may eventually result in legislation. It’s an attempt to throw Food Stamp recipients out the Overton Window, because hasn’t every wingnut said “Those people should get a monthly shipment of beans and rice and make do with that”? It’s not going to happen this year, but it’s definitely intended to make boxes of Freedom Food an official part of the discussion about Those People.
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Thanks for this.
