Republicans have not been shy in recent years about wanting to cut the safety net to ribbons, slashing programs like food stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid and Medicare and heating assistance and unemployment and basically everything else that keeps struggling families afloat. But now even that eagerness to hurt poor people may not be enough. The far-far-right House Freedom Caucus is taking its own party’s budget hostage to demand more and deeper cuts. They have a long list of ways to keep people from getting the help they need, like making work requirements harder to fulfill—currently an able-bodied adult without dependents has to work about 20 hours a week to be eligible for SNAP and the Freedom Caucus would increase that—among other ways of cutting the safety net out from under people. They have a trade-off in mind: less assistance for poor people in the form of food, more assistance for rich people in the form of giant tax breaks.
It’s hard to avoid this point, as the Freedom Caucus is literally proposing to tie welfare reform to tax reform. Jordan himself has hinted at it, calling it “reverse-engineering”: whatever you can “save” from cutting these programs can be reallocated to other party priorities. Ideally, he doesn’t want to stop at SNAP and TANF.
“There are tons of different means-tested welfare entitlement programs that we can work at achieving savings in. Obviously Medicaid work requirements — expanding what’s already in the health care bill. There’s real money there,” Jordan told Vox in mid-June, in a revealing moment about how conservatives are approaching poverty-related policy. And this is one of the only ways conservatives will sign on to the budget resolution.
In public, Jordan and his Freedom Caucus buddies like to pretend that they wouldn’t be hurting people.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2s9xv64
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment