Yes, the government should feed us

What's the point of living in a society if not to care for one another?

Federal SNAP funding has run out, and Donald Trump is refusing to use the $5 billion in emergency funds set aside for this exact purpose. A federal judge has ordered the administration to disperse the money, but Trump immediately took to Truth Social to argue against the judge’s order. Several state governments are rushing to fill the void, but that’s a stop-gap, at best. In all likelihood millions of people are about to get very hungry, very soon. And it’s all entirely avoidable.

This needless pain didn’t come out of nowhere. The right has long preached that it’s good to cut off assistance to anyone and everyone, and now we see fascists celebrating and justifying the SNAP cutoff. Some people peddle lies about fraud, others say it’s terrible that food stamps can pay for “unnecessary” items like cookies or Dijon mustard or lobster, and some just put their entire beliefs system out there, crying that the government shouldn’t be feeding anyone anyway.

None of this is new. We all know how Ronald Reagan ran on the made-up, racist idea of a “Welfare Queen” who he claimed “used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” This caricature was made up, of course, and was the embodiment of the idea that no one, and certainly no Black folks, should be receiving support from the government. As with many of the right-wing ideas sold largely on the basis of racism, this caricature was used to hurt people of all races, and poor folks in particular, by justifying cuts to food stamps and the broader welfare state.

As Claire Bond Potter writes, Reagan ultimately sold this country on the strange idea that “The government that helps families most helps them least.” In 1981 and 1982 alone, Reagan made more than $22 billion in cuts to social welfare programs. He made the poor poorer while increasing military spending, a norm that was to continue for decades.

The ethos behind Reaganomics grew out of deep-seated American myths about work, individualism, and the concept of deserving. For decades and centuries the US had been rife with odd beliefs like “prosperity means God favors you” or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” or the notion that we shouldn’t rely on others for help. The Progressive era of the early 20th century and the collective response to the Great Depression changed the nature of society significantly by creating protections for workers, forcing some redistribution of wealth, and creating programs that made our government care for those in need. But when Reagan came along and told people that mooches were taking their hard earned money, he was able to tap into an underlying set of beliefs that had never been dismantled.

Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash

And Democrats didn’t push back much. In 1992 Clinton offered “A plan to end welfare as we know it.” He and other conservative Democrats thought it was better politics to endlessly move right than to push back against the toxic and dishonest beliefs that led people to think cutting food money made more sense than cutting money for the Pentagon. The archived White House website from the Clinton-Gore administration still has an entire section entitled “Reforming Welfare by Promoting Work and Responsibility” that brags about reducing welfare and pushing people back to work.

The reality is, millions and millions of people who receive food stamps are working. They still need food assistance because many employers, including corporate giants like Amazon and Walmart, are allowed by our government to pay unlivable wages. So SNAP, in many cases, is effectively a corporate subsidy that fills the gap which should be filled by billions and billions in corporate profits.

But beyond the fact that food stamps act as corporate welfare we need to reject the idea that the government feeding people is bad. From Reagan to conservative Democrats we’re on the tail end of over four decades of politicians telling us that the government should do less and less for the working class, while spending nearly a trillion on war every year. Somehow the libertarian conception of government won over the minds of countless Americans, while the government never actually shrank. Instead, while people were distracted by the scapegoating of the poor, and by non-existent “Welfare Queens,” the government was used by the rich to transfer billions and billions of dollars from the working class to the ruling class.

So what should governments be for? Very, very few people would argue that the government should be a tool for giving men like Elon Musk billions of dollars. And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening as we speak. SNAP is no longer being funded, but Elon Musk’s SpaceX is about to get another $2 billion from the Pentagon. These billions are for Trump’s “Golden Dome” project, a theoretical dome to protect America from missile attacks. It’s not needed, it may never come to fruition, but it will be used to transfer billions and billions from you and me to men like Elon Musk (who already get billions from the government).

Somehow, while the Pentagon budget reaches a trillion dollars a year, we’re expected to think the government is wasting money by feeding the hungry. Thankfully, most people aren’t buying it anymore. 66% of people think families who need SNAP should get more money for food, and 67% don’t want Congress to cut food stamps. This is just one indicator of a much broader societal shift. The lies of neoliberalism, the lie that all you need to do is pull yourself up by your bootstraps, the lie that we shouldn’t be concerned with taking care of one another — these deeply misguided ideas are losing power.

But we need to go further. Not cutting good things is a start, but now we need to affirmatively decide that government is about helping one another. We need to enact a world where human society is about coming together for our collective good. We’re not isolated, we’re not individuals acting in vacuums, no matter what libertarian and neoliberal beliefs say. Each of us lives and acts within the web of human connection, and it’s time to create systems that operate accordingly.

Photo by Guille Álvarez on Unsplash

Change has begun, and now we need to accelerate it. The far-right weirdos who say we have no obligation to care for one another are in the minority, whether they know it or not. Most people don’t want our government to suddenly stop feeding the hungry, and as inequality gets worse and worse more and more people are rejecting the lies of years past. People are seeing that Reaganism was fundamentally a lie, that his talk of “small government” was always code for screwing over the poor while giving handouts to the rich. And now, most vitally, people are seeing that we need something different.

From fascism to the gross excess of late capitalism to the deterioration of the middle class, millions of people now see that none of us can do this alone. It was never really about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, an idea so ludicrous the metaphor is intentionally nonsensical. In reality the rich got rich on the backs of the poor, pulling themselves up by climbing over and stepping on others. That is the ugly system we can now reject, and replace. In its stead we can build a system where we lean on each other and care for each other, a system of real democracy where the government is an extension of our will, where it enacts the support we want to provide for one another rather than enriching the few at the expense of the many.

This is a vision for a better world, a vision that directly and deliberately conflicts with the notion that each of us should only care about our personal gain, a vision that opposes one man having $500 billion while 42 million people lose their food money. We’re expected to believe that the battle is between someone making $75,000 and someone making $25,000, while the real conflict is between those with enough money to buy elections and the rest of us. We don’t have time to be distracted by scapegoating, we don’t have time to misdirect our anger at the poor while the super-rich laugh behind our backs. We have to focus, we have to fight the real enemy, and we have to build a world where no one goes hungry in the midst of such abundance. - JP