Here are a few things you might want to know about food stamps: 42 million Americans receive them. 2.9 million of them are your Florida neighbors. In Flagler County, 10 percent of the population, about 13,000 people, is on food stamps.
Nearly 70 percent are children, elderly or disabled. Only 31 percent of recipients are able, working-age adults. The overwhelming majority of those work, because $41 a week to feed someone doesn’t go much past a little bread, butter, pasta and maybe a couple of greens, unless you shop at Aldi. Then you can add a little high-fat burger meat.
So J.D. Vance bitching in his fictional memoir about “those living off government largesse” while they speak on their cell phones is, like most disdainful talking points about those who need a little help to get by, a deduction fabricated out of the shallowest observation in a neighborhood checkout line. But it is Vance’s fabrications that fuel cruelty enabling the ballroom president to shrug off negotiations with Democrats to end the shutdown in the wake of a $5 trillion tax cut primarily benefiting the rich.
There’s no question that Democrats provoked the shutdown. Unlike previous ones caused by Republicans, it’s not about an ideological Alamo no one has cared about since Reagan, like the national debt. It’s about tens of millions of Americans being able to afford health insurance so they don’t go broke when they get sick. Trump and his Republican harem in Congress refuse to extend subsidies to the Affordable Care Act to keep it affordable. They want it killed, and with it boot off its 25 million enrollees. They’re willing to let Americans go hungry over it.
The federal website for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program blares its blame of the shutdown on Democrats and claims that “They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.” Vance must be freelancing for the site.
The administration’s extrapolated mendacity aside, there is no healthcare for undocumented immigrants. (Emergency care is an exception: if you’re willing to let an undocumented Mexican child die from a ruptured appendix while the hospital receptionist checks her parents’ status with ICE, raise your hand.) The Supreme Court last June approved banning gender-affirming care for minors, to which no federal dollars are going anyway. As always, lacking moral standing, Republicans lie.
The stalemate is about to cause what may be this country’s most serious hunger crisis since the Great Depression.
The reactionary senator Josh Hawley’s bill to fund food stamps in spite of the shutdown is a clever end run around the Democrats’ strategy. It makes Republicans look responsible and muddies the Democrats’ last stand. It’s good Machiavelli. It’s another nail in the Affordable Care Act’s coffin, band-aiding the patient so he can be executed later. In any case Hawley’s bill does nothing to reverse the $186 billion cut to food stamps so the Big Beautiful Bill could partially offset those trillions in tax cuts.
Hawley’s bill also detracts from another fraud. It’s not just that Trump is deciding to deny 41 million people their food stamps while continuing to shell out billions for his paramilitary goons in ICE, for his lawless war in the Caribbean, and for his own junkets abroad and on his golf courses at home. But as with Social Security and Medicare which operate on separate, self-funded mechanisms, food stamps can still be issued. They have billions in emergency funds for situations just like this. Trump, illegally–imagine that–chooses not to release them, claiming technical difficulties.
A judge ridiculed that new lie, and today ordered the government to release the funds. The administration will doubtless appeal.
Either way, there should’ve been no question that Florida would let its 2.9 million citizens starve. The state has a $3.6 billion surplus. A month’s worth of SNAP benefits in Florida would cost half a billion dollars–$100 million less than the cost of that one concentration camp for migrants in the Everglades–and would be reimbursable. Gov. DeSantis can use his emergency powers, as he did to steal the land for the concentration camp, to put food on 2.9 million Floridians’ tables. He preferred laughing off the suggestion, and his one-party legislature isn’t about to defy him on this one. Never underestimate the ideological limits of Florida’s church-going Republicans.
Food pantries scrambled. Community efforts like Flagler Broadcasting’s WNZF’s Foodathon with Grace Food Pantry are commendable and essential. But I wish the leaders of those two organizations, David Ayres and Pastor Charles Silano, were a bit more openly vocal, more outraged at the Republican party they sympathize with. I wish they connected the dots between the mendacity and cruelty of tax cuts for the rich at the expense of health care and food aid for the poor as lines get longer at the food pantry. When I interviewed Silano in March about the USDA cancelling $1 billion in aid to food banks like his, he bent over backward not to be critical toward the administration, reminding me of Dickens’s Oliver stretching his bowl to the workhouse master.
“People being hungry is not a political thing, it’s a result of it,” David said on the radio this morning, “and I don’t care what your religion is or what your anything is, we want you to have food in Flagler County for you and your family.” To claim that it is not political but a result of it is to say the very same thing: this manufactured catastrophe is nothing but political, and playing dodge with words won’t make a difference. Nor will Democratic protests. Nor can food pantries make more than a dent in the need. As Robert De Niro put it this week, “You can’t just sit on your ass and wait for the insanity and cruelty to pass. You gotta stand up and fight.”
In Florida, it’s only when Republican loyalists in red counties like Flagler use their powerful platforms that lawmakers will be moved to act responsibly. So more power to the foodathon. But it doesn’t get at the root of the cruelty. So David and Charles–not to mention every other Republican in this one-party county–here’s to hoping you use your voices to connect those dots. Give us a little less dodge, a little less Oliver, and a bit more DeNiro.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
Laural says
Right now, on Bloomberg, “Court orders Trump Administration to keep providing foods stamps during government shutdown.” That should make everyone happy, right? The administration wouldn’t want it any other way, would they?