Dump-a-rant
I probably can’t write about food stamps/SNAP coherently because I am not all that familiar with the program except for the snippets I hear on the radio. But I’ma gonna try. If nothing else, I gotta get this crapola outta my head.
I was horrified about a lot of the stuff that happened in Trump 1.0. There is so much more that horrifies me about Trump 2.0. Slash and burn and fix the mistakes later. Or not.
The Big Beautiful Bill and ensuing government shutdown are HURTING PEOPLE. They aren’t hurting billionaires. They aren’t even hurting people like meeee and the GG, who are certainly not ultra-wealthy but after years and years of hard work and carefully saving money, and some built-in “bootstraps”, we are pretty darn okay.
I get that the SNAP program that expired today(?) is probably going to be funded thanks to a couple of judges who called out Trump’s bullshit. (I THINK I have that right.)
Okay. I get that people don’t want government assistance programs to be misused. People should be working for a living, not taking food stamps, I agree with that. There are probably a few “welfare queens” sitting around watching TV but I think that’s a very small percentage of the people who are receiving government aid.
More often than not, I think people who are receiving aid want to work but are not able to jump through the hoops required to find and KEEP a job. What hoops? Let me count the ways. Caregiving responsibilities. Children, parents, disabled relatives. Lack of access to things like toilets and showers and presentable clothing. Transportation. Access to the internet! I could go on and on.
Trump and his sycophants have no clue about what poor peoples’ lives are about. How could a billionaire know? If I was a billionaire, I would be a philanthropist. I *am* a philanthropist, just at a small-time level.
A number of years ago, I was at the Plum Market, in line behind a young man who was trying to pay for food ($25 or so) with an out-of-state food card. It wasn’t working. I snuck in behind him and swiped my credit card. I’m not bragging about that wee bit of philanthropy. Just that we have to take care of our fellow citizens when our government goes awry and refuses to fund programs for our most vulnerable citizens.
November 1st, 2025 at 10:03 pm
My younger daughter makes just enough to survive and is barely unqualified for food stamps. I help her out on rent since I’m her landlady and only charge her $1000 when I could ask for double that. I don’t know how young, especially single people, make it or have a place to live. Then to allow families, children, the disabled, the elderly poor to starve? It boggles the mind.
November 2nd, 2025 at 12:58 pm
A significant number of people using SNAP (if not the majority?!) actually DO have jobs, but they are paid so little that they can’t feed their families on what they earn. And it always infuriates me that corporations and the wealthy with their enormous tax breaks, thanks to the GOP, are never accused of being “welfare queens.”