I Got Your Compassionate Conservatism Right Here

Speaking of class warfare and who, exactly, is waging it: House Republicans pushing for major food stamp cuts.

After watching the cost of food stamp assistance soar during the recession, the Republican-led House of Representatives on Thursday plans to vote on a bill to cut the food stamp program by a whopping $40 billion over 10 years.

Welp, that logic is almost TOO perfect. More people need help, so let's cut funding to help people.

The major cuts were designed to satisfy House conservatives who rejected more moderate reductions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) earlier this year, but with millions of Americans still struggling to recover from the recession, Democrats are balking at the GOP bill.

"What the House Republicans are saying is this: get a good paying job or your family will just have to go hungry," Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said on the Senate floor Wednesday. "But there aren't enough good paying jobs, as you can see... The Republican approach is like saying we're tired of spending so much on wildfires, so we'll just cut the budget of the fire service. That isn't going to work."

It isn't going to work if one's objective is actually making sure that everyone in the wealthiest nation on the planet has enough to eat. If, however, one's objective is "reducing dependence on government," i.e. vile social Darwinism justified by bullshit beliefs about bootstraps and fairy tales about how people earn what they deserve; if one's objective is making sure that the wealthiest fuckers in the wealthiest nation don't have to pay a penny more in taxes so that the workers they exploit to become billionaires have enough food to stay alive and drag their exhausted, malnourished asses to jobs that won't pay them a livable wage; if one's objective is staging a political coup to turn corporations into the only "people" of, by, and for whom the government is made; if one's objective is modern conservatism in all its contemptible, grotesque, empathy-free avarice, then this plan is going to work just fine.

The Republican Party thinks people are not entitled to food. THE REPUBLICAN PARTY THINKS PEOPLE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO FOOD.

They think people are not entitled to jobs. They think people are not entitled to healthcare. They think people are not entitled to homes. They think people are not entitled to education. They think people are not entitled to safety. They think people are not entitled to equality. They think people are not entitled to vote. They think people are not entitled to agency. They think people are not entitled to any of what the baseline security of being a citizen in a wealthy democracy should guarantee.

They think people are entitled to guns and bootstraps, and that's about it.

Unless those people are corporations, robber barons, military contractors, or members of the Republican Congressional Caucus. And then they are entitled to everything for which they could ever ask, no matter the cost to the rest of us.