#waronpoor

Yet many people would like to pretend that the financial woes of millions of Americans are not systemic but, rather, their own fault, a side effect of their spendthrift, undisciplined ways. There’s been a long campaign to blame financial difficulties — especially millennials’ troubles — on everything from lattes, to avocado toast and iPhones. Others attempt to sound well-meaning and posit that it has to do with lack of financial literacy, as if there are millions of people out there who somehow don’t believe they need to save money or are ignorant about how to do so. Personal finance advice likes to pass itself off as service journalism, but when the advice is passed off as something anyone can do, with no serious attempt to grapple with how greater economic and sociological circumstances combine to render the advice offered useless to almost everyone, that “service” becomes as political as it gets. It’s blaming individual Americans for their failure to surmount a system in which the rich get richer and the rest of us fall behind.

In other words, the well-to-do already do what workfare advocates seem so nervous about: rake in money they haven’t earned through market labor and thrive off the government’s largesse. Perhaps that itself is unfair — so why duplicate it on the other end of the economy? Put simply, it seems ludicrous at best and sadistic at most to start one’s fairness policing from the bottom up. If we mean to transform our economy into one in which people earn precisely what they work for and no more, and receive nothing from the government lest their work ethic wither, it would be best to start from the top down, where nobody runs any risk of starvation or homelessness if they lose their benefits.

These healthcare cuts will cost lives. About 13 million people will lose coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office. We know that for every million people without access to healthcare, 5,000 die preventable deaths. That means our lawmakers and the president of the United States are prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to deliver a massive tax break to the fortunate few.

Meanwhile, the tax cut will add $1.4tn to the national debt, setting the stage for deeper cuts to public goods. In the short term, we could see automatic cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. In the long term, this tax plan will lay the groundwork for massive cuts to Social Security and other programs that sustain the poor, the elderly, and the most vulnerable among us.

Cutting taxes on the wealthy and eliminating services for the poor and dispossessed has been a plan of white nationalists ever since the days of the southern strategy led by the likes of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. It is a strategy that those with power and wealth have used throughout history to divide and conquer people at the bottom. What is tragic is the states that are the poorest are the states with the worst voter suppression and the states with the members of Congress most ardently behind this plan.

The real purpose of the law is to coerce more indigent defendants to plead their cases early in the process in order not to run up high attorney fees. The new law serves to punish those who exercise their right to trial by jury in a criminal case. This is part of a larger war on the poor that has been waged for decades in this country - and in this state. Most defendants are indigent to one degree or another. They spend months, if not years, in jail awaiting the resolution of their cases because of our for-profit bail bond system. Then, once the case is resolved they get hit with a bill for attorney fees.

Oh, what this budget means is less for those people who are needy, for people who are disabled, who are poorly educated and don’t have good jobs, who lost their jobs because of trade—one of Donald’s big issues—and, instead, lavishes more benefits and continues spending that benefits the wealthiest among us. And this goes to the Republican theme that I describe as: The biggest economic problem we have, according to the Republicans, is that the rich don’t have enough. This is more Republican redistribution to the rich, who don’t need it, and away from those who have demonstrable, unquestioned need.