The Republican position has for decades been built on lies, all of which are crafted to enable the GoP to ensure its wealthy benefactors become ever-more wealthy. One of the lies is the “welfare queen” story whereby undeserving women “live off the backs of hardworking people” by taking food stamps etc. largely by fraud. In reality the Government Accountability Office released a report back in 2017 that stated categorically fewer than 3% of welfare disbursements across all categories were potentially fraudulent, whereas at least 20% of all disbursements made by the US government to contracting corporations were potentially or likely fraudulent.
But the GoP can’t make political capital out of harming the very companies that donate to their campaign funds, whereas they can tell their simple-minded ignorant voters all about “welfare queens.”
The problem for the GoP is that so long as ordinary decent people are claiming their entitlements, they can’t give endless tax breaks to the super-rich. Although 86% of Congressional votes by Republicans are for bills that favor the rich, there’s that pesky 14% that represents serious dollars. So by removing all the basic supports any civilized nation would regard as essential and sacrosanct, the GoP is clearing the way for more aid to the struggling super-rich. While the Trump give-away was nice, that was paid for entirely by new borrowing, and even the Republican Party realizes that eventually if they keep borrowing endlessly to give to the super-rich a few of their brain-dead uneducated voters may notice. So cutting welfare is the best way forward.
The Republican Party has become truly a party of evil, and those who vote Republican cannot regard themselves as decent human beings. But so few US citizens bother to inform themselves of the facts that most Republicans are totally clueless (which is, of course, why the GoP targeted them in the first place) and their entire view of the world is based solely on sound-bites and memes they’ve swallowed mindlessly.
I’m sorry you and your family must live in a nation that is so backward and so dysfunctional as to take food out of the mouths of hungry children. But then again, the USA is a nation that tears small children from the arms of their parents and puts them in concentration camps. So not much is to be expected except more horrors ahead. Let’s hope the day is still distant when the USA criminalizes the very fact of being poor.
