The total depravity of the Republican world view

The budget ceiling showdown is centered on the GOP’s insistence on cutting what little federal government aid still exists for the desperately poor, via enforcing work requirements:

House Republicans want to cut spending as a condition for raising the debt ceiling — but they have proven unwilling to make major cuts to the three biggest components of the federal budget: Social Security, Medicare, and the military. And so their just-passed spending plan focuses heavily on what’s left: mostly, programs for the poor.

The Lift, Save, Grow Act, the House GOP’s opening bid in the debt ceiling drama, would add work requirements to Medicaid — the health insurance program for low-income Americans — and expand those in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, often called “cash welfare”).

Note that the best-case scenario for the savings generated by all these cuts, if they were to be adopted, 0.2% (that’s one five-hundredth) of the federal budget over the next decade.

What would the effect be?

Work requirements inevitably leave in their wake a large group — maybe 20 percent, maybe 30 — who do not or cannot work after their implementation. Those people are then left without either wages or support from the government program that’s now kicked them out. Applied to food stamps and Medicaid, that means creating a group of people who have no cash income, no means of buying food, and no health insurance.

It’s a reality of contemporary American society that there are many many millions of people in it that simply can’t function in the work economy in any consistent way, and also have no family network to fall back on for even the most minimal economic support. What are these people supposed to do if they have literally no income, no legal right to ANY government support for food or medical care — we of course already have a society in which they have no legal right to shelter of any sort — and no social network that will keep them from starving on the street?

The Republican answer is a combination of magical thinking, usually captured by the phrase “private charity,” and a level of simple indifference that is sociopathic in at least a metaphorical if not literal sense.

Dylan Matthews tries to put the best possible face on all this:

Work is a good thing. But mercy is a good thing too. There has been a rough consensus, reflected in government policy, in the United States that poor people should not starve, whether or not they work. They should not die for lack of medical care. There should be a (patchwork, imperfect) safety net to prevent the absolute worst possible outcomes.

This isn’t really true. The “rough consensus” has consisted of the Democratic party objecting to the idea that lots of people in the richest country in the history of the world should be allowed to literally starve, and the Republican party embracing this idea, and pushing to implement it with such fervor that it is now threatening to crash the entire economy via the debt ceiling trigger in the pursuit of this policy goal.

This is who these people are. The absurdity of their essentially superstitious beliefs about concepts like “earning your keep” — Ron DeSantis, a man who has barely done a hand’s turn of actual work in his entire life, makes that phrase the centerpiece his new autobiography — is exceeded only by their cruelty.

The sooner kombucha leftists, sensible liberals, and reasonable centrists stop deluding themselves about the actual existence of some “rough consensus” on these matters, the better.