Republican depravity, Democratic fecklessness

The Covid epidemic demonstrated that giving poor people a little money and slightly more generous in-kind benefits was both extremely effective and extremely popular. Of course it wasn’t popular with the financial oligarchy and its running dogs in the Republican party. And it isn’t an instantiation of Murc’s famous law to point out that the Biden administration and the Democratic congressional leadership haven’t fought very hard to preserve these modest enhancements to our disgracefully inadequate social safety net:

It’s no secret that slashing SNAP is yet again on the GOP’s wishlist. SNAP has also come up as a potential hostage in the debt limit fight. After the party’s vocal pledge during Biden’s State of the Union not to cut Social Security or Medicare—and the party’s quasi-religious respect for the largest possible military budget—SNAP remains one of the only major social services that might be cut in the name of a “balanced budget.”

For President Biden, the quiet expiration of enhanced SNAP marks yet another disappearing act in his once vaunted welfare state. The Child Tax Credit, a signature Biden policy in the American Rescue Plan Act, halved child poverty. But it expired with relatively little pushback at the end of 2021. Enhanced unemployment benefits expired three months before that.

Now, Medicaid is next. The continuous enrollment provision that was added to Medicaid during COVID, which has allowed Americans to remain enrolled in the program without constant eligibility reassessments, is set to expire on March 31. It is estimated that between 5 million and 14 million people will promptly lose Medicaid coverage once that change is effectuated. And despite the fact that these programs are effective and popular, there has been shockingly little vocal opposition from Democrats to the expiration of these benefits.

In the first two years of the Biden administration, some very good progress was made in the so-called war on poverty. But those gains are being given back quickly.

It’s important to keep in mind that the USA is an immensely wealthier country than it was in 1964, when the federal Food Stamps program began (the program is now called SNAP). Specifically, GDP per capita is three times higher, meaning the spending necessary to continue to maintain the federal government’s slightly enhanced efforts to keep tens of millions of adults and children from going hungry in the midst of increasingly obscene wealth is little more than rounding error in the federal budget.

But since the Confederate Beatitudes include such observations as “Let the poor starve, lest they become slothful in the sight of the Lord,” we can’t have that.

I’m well aware that the right wing scum who are busily trying to destroy this country are threatening to blow up the financial system via default if their demands to let children go to bed hungry aren’t met. My view is that it doesn’t pay in the long run to negotiate with terrorists, which is what these people are.

When I was a small boy at school a lecturer used to come once a term and deliver excellent lectures on famous battles of the past, such as Blenheim, Austerlitz, etc. He was fond of quoting Napoleon's maxim 'An army marches on its stomach', and at the end of his lecture he would suddenly turn to us and demand, 'What's the most important thing in the world?' We were expected to shout 'Food!' and if we did not do so he was disappointed.

Obviously he was right in a way. A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1936)