Republicans target social programs to pay for tax cuts for the rich

Having passed a tax law that richly rewards the very rich, the Republicans now want the rest of us to pay the freight. The GOP tax “reform” creates a huge fiscal hole that Republicans intend to plug by picking the pockets of ordinary people. Now that they have taken care of those who can afford a private plane, a second yacht, and more houses than they can count, they want to keep the deficit down by cutting government spending on the necessities of life, like food and medical care. Just when you think that Republican priorities could not be more perverse, they outdo themselves with policies that would have embarrassed Scrooge.

When it comes to human health and survival, you don’t get more essential than food, and the Republicans have food assistance first on their hit list. The creation of the food stamp program more than a quarter century ago didn’t eliminate the shame of malnutrition and hunger in a land of plenty. But food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), were a significant step in the right direction. Now Republicans want to eliminate SNAP and replace it with a program that would cost half as much.

Food stamps, which now are paid with a card that resembles a credit card, allow the beneficiary to buy fresh foods and vegetables and a variety of other foods while prohibiting purchases of items like liquor. Republicans want to replace SNAP with what they are calling the American Harvest box. That’s prepackaged food selected by the government and excluding fresh items that can spoil.

This proposal, being trotted out by the Trump administration, once again exposes the moral misery and cynicism of the GOP. Because so many of those whose nutrition depends on food stamps are children, the Republican grab of food stamp money amounts to taking food out of the mouths of babes to butter the bread of the rich.

Mick Mulvaney, head of the Office of Management and the Budget and one of the most despicable characters in a cabinet of the rich and heartless, is portraying the American Harvest box as akin to Blue Apron, a service that delivers expensive food to an upscale clientele. One of the founders of the Blue Apron service wrote an opinion column which shows what a sick joke Mulvaney’s comparison is. This is the same Mulvaney assigned by Trump as the hit man to take down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created to combat the chicanery by financial institutions that led to the 2008-2009 crisis.

The Republicans went after the food stamp program first because it is low-hanging fruit. The poor and the powerless are its principal clients. There is no AARP advocating for food stamp recipients. It is easy to demonize them as lazy black bums or poor and dumb white trash to rationalize punishing them by taking food off their tables. Dishonest, detestable, self-serving and cynical.

If you are in the vast and heterogenous middle, don’t take any comfort, they are coming for you too. If the Republicans are successful in screwing the poor who get food stamps, next they will come for your Medicaid, your Medicare, and your Social Security. Like bank robbers, the GOP are targeting these, programs because that’s where the money is. The obscenely bloated military budget is the only other place, but it is sacrosanct.

The Republicans will probably succeed in taking some bites out of Medicaid because it is perceived as a program for the poor although many formerly middle-class people depend on it during their last years of life. As for Medicare and Social Security, these are much harder targets. It’s a large group of people who are organized and who vote. They are unlikely to succeed in undoing decades of social progress.

The only good news is that these programs are extremely popular. If they push too hard they risk that a campaign against Medicare and Medicaid may become their Waterloo. Under Trump, the Republicans already have alienated large constituencies—women, Latinos, moderates, and gays, among others. An assault on Medicare and Social Security, however deceptively sold, may cause the Republican Party finally to implode.

The Republicans have shown they lack the slightest nobility by targeting the poor, the sick, the old, and the disabled. To appropriate Steve Bannon’s pseudo-academic language, to be present at the deconstruction of the GOP would be a sweet thing indeed.