If you thought for one second that the latest government shutdown actually had anything to do with helping the poor and the middle class with affordability of housing, medical insurance, food, utilities or childcare, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
I knew from the moment the shutdown began back in September that there was was absolutely no way the Republicans would agree to extend subsidies for the ACA, continue to fund expanded Medicaid and SNAP, or roll back the cuts to other social services that were approved in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that was passed a few months ago.
It was never going to happen.
They got what they wanted with the BBB – tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense see if the poor.
I expected the government would eventually reopen for two reasons:
- Eventually Trump and Congress would want to access more money that they couldn’t get their hands on with the government being shut down.
- Airline and flight delays.
The politicians’ self-serving motivations behind Reason #1 are so obvious I don’t need to say anything else about them.
Reason #2’s motivation is that the shutdowns affect commercial airport security, air traffic control and government services required to support air travel (FAA, NTSB, Customs, etc.). This means that the longer the shutdown continued, the more inconvenient it would be for the politicians in the legislative and executive branches. These people fly everywhere on taxpayer funded flights. They don’t want to be inconvenienced due to short staffing because employees have walked off due to not being paid. Even if they are flying private, they still need air traffic control support, security clearances, motorcade support from local police forces and other services that rely on furloughed staff to handle. Flying sucks in general. During the shutdown, it’s a total shit show.
As for:
- SNAP recipients who aren’t getting their grocery money for two months.
- Headstart programs that educated young, poor children closing because of lack of funding.
- School lunch programs and subsidies to feed the kids.
- Medicaid to provide a base level of health insurance coverage to the poorest in society.
- ACA subsidies for 30 million people.
F*ck ’em.
The politicians on both sides will reference poor, working class and middle class people, and “special interest groups” like farmers, ranchers, law enforcement and immigrants as pawns to score political points. But if those people are not part of the wealthy 5-10%, they can forget about getting any real support.
Just like we’ve decided that shooting children is an acceptable trade-off for lax gun laws and corporate profits outweigh meaningful healthcare reform, we have also decided as a country that the poorest among us do not deserve anything other than what they already got – f*cked.
If you think, wait a minute, we are better than this! I have a newsflash. You or I might think we’re better than this. We might wish it. But if we were, it wouldn’t be happening now would it?