I don’t know about the rest of you, but I frequently find myself unable to read the news. I scan headlines, and think to myself “I just can’t. I can’t immerse myself in the details of this particular effort to dismantle American democracy and substitute viciousness for humane behavior. I just can’t.”
That was my initial reaction to a recent issue of “Can We Still Govern.” The headline of the article by Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan read “The Trump plan to add work requirements to public housing,” and I immediately reacted with anger. This is an administration that has squandered the nation’s wealth from day one: deep tax cuts for fat-cat billionaires, a billion dollars a day (or more) to lose a war we never should have begun, payoff for crooks like Michael Flynn who aided and abetted our would-be King, a bloated budget for ICE brown-shirts…
This largesse that has comforted the already-too-comfortable has been partially offset by cruel and inhumane cuts to America’s already inadequate social safety net. There have been “work requirements” added to Medicaid, cuts to SNAP, evisceration of medical personnel at the VA…again, the list goes on. The motto of this administration should be “Robbing the poor to further enrich the rich.”
Now–according to the linked newsletter–the administration is proposing to add work requirements to public housing programs.
As the authors note, employing administrative burdens to make America’s safety net less accessible has always been a Trump goal. (Although Trump’s short attention span has been evident in other policy arenas, he’s been as fixated on hurting poor people–especially poor people of color–as he is on his tacky, garish ballroom.) As the linked article notes,
Work requirements – or more accurately, paperwork requirements – are simply an alternative way for Trump to achieve his real goal: dismantle housing assistance, without receiving Congressional permission to do so.
A few months ago HUD unveiled a plan to impose time limits and add work requirements on rental assistance. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 3.7 million people, including almost two million kids, could lose this support as a result, in a program that only helps about 10 million people. That seems like a pretty effective way to tip vulnerable families into homelessness.
There is a plethora of research on the actual operation of so-called work requirements. The bottom-line finding is that they are simply a way to deny benefits to people who would otherwise be entitled to them. Most able-bodied recipients of these programs already work, and the vast majority of those who don’t are the elderly, the disabled and children. When it comes to housing programs, available data shows that of the over 4 million children who experience homelessness each year., only 1 in 4 of their families that are eligible for housing assistance actually receive support.
One can’t overstate the importance of these benefits. They reduce poverty, substantially reduce the risk of homelessness, and have downstream positive effects on people’s health and well-being. Overall, 70 percent of housing assistance recipients are children, the disabled, or older adults…
Housing assistance is already notoriously difficult to obtain. Because there isn’t enough funding to meet needs, most people who ultimately receive these benefits wait years before they get help. Wait times vary across places, but in Alabama the average wait time is 5 years, compared to 2 years in Arizona, 4 years in the District of Columbia, and 3 years in Georgia. Those receiving housing assistance are also tightly monitored, and face bias from landlords.
There’s more, and I encourage you to click through and read the entire depressing analysis. But once again, my reaction was–and is–what is wrong with these people? What mental gymnastics allow an entitled plutocrat like Russel Vought to dismiss the needs of millions of children and disabled folks by calling housing programs “subsidized irresponsibility”?
How do these people sleep at night? (Of course, you might ask that about Pete Hegseth, as the Department of Defense continues to blow small boats out of the water, killing their occupants. You might ask that about RFK, Jr., as hundreds of children sicken–and a number die–from a disease that had been eradicated but has returned thanks to his anti-vaccine quackery. You might ask that about the Senators who confirmed these moral midgets and continue to enable the cruelty and stupidity of this horror of an administration. )
Ultimately, the people who voted for these very despicable people are responsible for this. Somehow, I doubt that they are losing much sleep either–but they should be.
What’s wrong with these people? Lots of things. Mostly it’s about the money that people covet. It buys philosophy in those circles where egalitarian philosophy is unknown; Republican propaganda and institutionalized racism. Money buys truth and stores it in a lock box. Money buys the false narrative of privilege and white supremacy to the point of claiming that this continent is THEIR continent irrespective of the facts that the originals had been here for thousands of years before those first sails came over the eastern horizon.
Karl Marx, I hate to keep repeating, got it right about human nature’s love affair with money, greed and societal destruction. The United States created the largest unfettered capitalistic state in history. It’s fall will be loud and precipitous.
Vernon, your words have spurred this thought. Maybe it isn’t democracy that is failing, but rather it is capitalism that by its very nature is devolving into some kind of primal force pitting the weak against the strong for control over all.
Theresa, I agree up to a point with your comment. I think that here in the U.S. capitalism is linked to our democracy. Why? Citizens United v. FEC. That allowed big money to own and operated elected officials. Congress people speculating in the stock market with insider information. Electing a psychopathic grifter TWICE as president. How’s that bitcoin business doing these days?
We have only been at peace for 8 – 10 years of our entire existence. Military and government contracts exist in EVERY state. We spend more on our military than all other nations COMBINED, so those contractors of various stripes keep getting richer. I know. I worked for some of them.
Maybe it isn’t our fault, but when we were isolationist in the 1920s and 30s, we allowed unregulated capitalism to create the founding philosophy for the Great Depression. It took FDR’s “socialistic” programs to haul us out of that pit. Remember, the Hoover administration just wiped their hands and said free-market capitalism would solve all our problems. Who elected those guys? Democracy.
In the end, it will boil down to who democracy puts into government. We’re now seeing how a mere 35% of those registered voters put in place an absolute psychopathic criminal and his idiot-level sycophants, while more registered voters stayed home than voted for either major candidate. Why did they not vote?
Marx and Einstein already gave us the solution for late-stage capitalism. It’s either fascism or socialism. Since the Wealthy have decided to hoard money and keep it away from the masses, we are going to be oppressed. It was the first topic at Davos – FEAR.
While Trump brags about his ballroom and blockades (and tariffs), the working class has lost over 100 thousand jobs in 2026, and it’s going to get worse. As the price of oil (energy) continues to rise, small and large companies are feeling the pinch. It’s what’s called Spirit Airlines to fold. JetBlue was going to buy them, but now JB is on the financial line due to higher jet fuel costs.
Scott Bessent is not a brainiac, but he acts like one on Fox News (he’s a fraud). He’s going to start messing with the dollar (weakening it). Guess what that does to our purchasing power, but it’s great for the wealthiest. What they’re doing now is going to crush the middle class. And the weakest will fall into the cracks or get mad.
I’m pretty sure that desperate people do desperate things. The locals are the foot soldiers. The clashes will start when people can’t eat. When they kicked out of their homes because they couldn’t pay the electric bill. All the scenarios in play right now are not good.
China and Russia are leading the other countries that have accepted a multi-polar world. The US has not, and we have a teenager running the country. Trump is too narcissistic to understand how his actions affect others. His Lordship doesn’t need any science because he’s smarter than them and he follows his gut (as he points to his head).
“The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.”
“Love of money is the root of all evil.”
From my Russian friend Anya, born in Russia and imprisoned as a small child with her parents as political prisoners till removed by Germany during WWII and sent to Concentration Camp in Austria, then DP camp prior to coming to U.S. when she was 13 years old. Old Russian proverb, “Do not stir shit with stick, it will cause stink.” The stick solution may have been passed from Putin to Trump during one of their earlier, friendlier. secret phone conversations. The Supreme Court handed him that stick and Congress upholds his grip on his stirring of all of this shit we are living with today. The Russian people have always lived with this situation and are immune to what life could be under democracy, they have never known it. We are aware of what we have lost and what more we face losing; look to Germany before, during and after WWII up to tearing down the Berlin Wall for people who lived through before and after Fascism for answers. Removing our military troops from Germany is not one of those answers. nor is Trump and Hegpeth’s increased actions against Iran this morning, using the term “peace” as their reason and our warships as the weapon.
Looking back to January 20, 2025, and that secret “behind closed doors”, another first in America’s history, presidential inauguration with Trump’s personal billionaires sitting in the first row should have told us what we faced. Greed and power is what is wrong with them but we have always considered the worth by the price of everything and everyone over their value.
What surprises are in store for us on July 4th, our 250th Anniversary of Democracy; who will provide the eulogy?
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Which people do you mean, the ultra wealthy, who MUST have more, like Rocco? Or the 81 million who sat it out last election? In either case they suck!
Marx’ problem was that the wrong people took his lead in the wrong direction. The Russian revolution took an autocratic kingdom and replaced it with another form of autocracy. Maybe, for a moment it was about the people…and then it was not.
Sheila, I’ve been asking myself that question since my late teens. They aren’t like us. There is wiring missing that enables a person to feel empathy and to see beyond their own front door. That’s what I think. I worked in this State, in those programs being gutted, for more than 30 years. I can say for certainty that people we elected and people they appointed to Secretary positions have no hearts. None.
First, let me say that I have voted in every election that I could have since I turned 21. That said, blaming the 81 million who did not vote in the last election for the loss of your candidate is simplistic and thoughtless.
How many of those non voters could not vote due to circumstances beyond their control? How many of the non voters would have voted for Trump, but figured that he would win so why bother? How many would have voted for Harris but were put off because of her ties with Biden, her late start, her color? How many non voters didn’t vote because they had long ago given up on our entire system of government and economics? What if all those non voters did vote and they voted for Trump? What kind of a greater mess would we have today if he really had a mandate? Is it possible that all of those non voters would have voted for Harris? Be honest here.
If you want to have a better future you need to look forward and work toward the next election, not cry over the last one.
When people are scared…by the bombardment of violence by entertainment and news, they huddle up and hunker down to take care of themselves and their own.
I have spent a lot of time listening to people who say, “Tell me what you’re for, ” but they don’t want to read the policy positions on web sites of people like Harris or Clinton. If they really wanted to get down to business, they had opportunities to do just that. They don’t want to read or do anything hard to be informed. They want to be spoon fed and they want it short and simple. If you can’t articulate your policy in one sentence, they won’t listen. Why didn’t people vote? Most of them just didn’t feel like it, regardless of their reasons. What does that say about us? We’re not interested in civic responsibility, we’re lazy, we’re incapable of rational thinking, or we just don’t know how to do what has to be done to vote? Democrats should be knocking on doors, checking to see if they can help that last group.
As far as economic viability, let me just say that there is no one perfect economic system. Some of us quote Karl Marx, as if he had the answers. Have there been any examples of a working, viable Marxist system, aside from cloistered convents? The only reason it works in those situations is that the women in them have little interest in egos. The countries that work best have blended economic systems of capitalism and socialism. Political systems bring regulation to economic systems. Unregulated capitalism, or socialism, or communism don’t work and are doomed to failure.
I’ll get down from my soapbox now to say:
VOTE!!!
People don’t vote because they have surmised it doesn’t matter.
Wrt Trump vs Harris, both candidates sucked.
Btw,Harris just bought a home in Malibu,California.
Enough American voters were willing to elect a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist to represent them to cause the defeat a a candidate who was neither. Given a choice between an evil person and a decent person, they chose evil. Millions of eligible voters who might have chosen otherwise, for whatever reasons, did not reject evil in favor of decency. Will America do any better in the next election?
Peggy, I agree with you 100%. Myself and others use Marx as an example of someone who was prescient enough of the human condition and how we are operating a highly complex series of societies with a brain that is hard-wired to tribalism, hoarding and mythology.
The picking of sides and following their lead.
Refusing to compromise. on things that could work if not demanded that they be achieved NOW. And yes, there are costs if we move to slow.
Yet if we push too hard, we can be put to a full stop. by those who gain a large number of those who disagree. COMPERMISE in many areas, while distasteful
May ?? help us. Nothing is not worth looking at IF we can get rid of this insane man, and moderate his followers.
The much-used slogan by authoritarian regimes to the masses is “Work will set You Free” that as a human being you have to earn your right to exist and pay up to their coffers. When the fruit of one’s labor is owned by libertine capitalists there are great diminished returns to the workers. It’s soul crushing and breeds a why try attitude in many. Why work hard, why vote in a system that doesn’t respond to common needs? Maybe it’s more satisfying to form groups that can gripe and commiserate together at least they have some community.
If these people believed trump was the answer to their plight, the writing on the walls is becoming clearer. Violence, wars, Mucho grift and grift and grift. Manipulating insider trading, cashing out the Ponzi scheme of their crypto coins, selling pardons to high bidders and fast track citizenships to wealthy foreigners are some of trump’s schemes. Fundraising for his ballroom, selling influence in foreign policy for cash to his personal coffers even seems treasonous during war time. It’s overwhelming to pay attention to and realize that poorest, weakest and youngest among us are paying the highest price with the quality of their lives. It’s un-American and can’t be allowed to stand.
I suspect many of the wealthy _believe_ they re working just as hard, if nor harder, than the poor. They are cluelessly ignorant. The poor will work a couple of mind-numbing, back-breaking jobs, be faced with a large commute then still have to spend an hour on dinner, do a few hours of other housework, and then try to spend a few minutes of quality time with the children, which probably often involves bathing, nagging, and cleaning, as well. They may not have a minute for themselves. All the while, they are smothered by constant uncertainty, fear and stress, and are often one unlucky event from disaster.
If they swapped places, I think the wealthy wouldn’t have the fortitude to make it through a week. Maybe not a day.
Hurting poor people for these various stupid reasons fills me with a powerful fury.
Rose, the only place I ever heard of pushing that “Arbeit Macht Frei” (sp), was on the gate to Auschwitz…do not know that it’s much used. But, I agree with the rest of your post, and Peggy, with yours, as well