The GOP is always ready to undermine the fiscal integrity of government in order to give "needy" wealthy people more tax breaks and money, yet they become so fiscally "responsible and conservative" when it comes to helping average Americans in any way. It's clear, the cruelty is the point. It certainly isn't fiscal responsibility, as they have a huge surplus and this attempt to screw the poor is going to cost them much more to implement than they spend on SNAP every year. This legislation, like so many of these bills, originates in out-of-state, right-wing bill mills that are funded by obscenely wealthy, greedy, nutjobs who want more handouts for themselves and less for anyone else. These GOP lovers of the rich and haters of the poor, mirror their greedy "socialism for me but not thee" donors totally. And they call themselves Christians?!

Iowa's bill on limiting SNAP benefits is a bold attack, experts say - The Washington Post Free Article--GiftLink https://wapo.st/40fj5jZ

#GOPHatesAvgAmericans
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#Socialism4MeNotThee

"The state legislature, with the support of the Republican supermajority, was poised to approve some of the nation’s harshest restrictions on SNAP...By the state’s own estimate, Iowa will need to spend nearly $18 million in administrative costs during the first three years — to take in less federal money. The bill’s backers argue the steps would save the state money long term and cut down on “SNAP fraud.”

The measure is part of a broader national crackdown on SNAP, the federal program at the heart of the nation’s welfare system. The proposed legislation was not a homegrown effort but the product of a network of conservative think tanks pushing similar SNAP restrictions in Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin and other states. But experts say Iowa’s represents the boldest attack yet on SNAP, and Republicans in Congress have signaled a similar readiness to impose limits on federal food assistance.
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When the coronavirus pandemic started in 2020, the federal government temporarily raised its allotment of SNAP dollars for the 41 million Americans in the program. Then in April 2022, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) decided to end those emergency SNAP benefits a year early, leaving the 286,874 Iowans with less money each month for food.
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Spending money to reject money

Iowa ended 2022 with a general-fund budget surplus of $1.91 billion. But at the start of the 2023 legislative session, Republicans made clear that limiting access to SNAP was a priority because of cost concerns.

“It’s these entitlement programs,” House Speaker Pat Grassley (R), grandson of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R), told reporters in January. “They’re the ones that are growing within the budget, and are putting pressure on us being able to fund other priorities. And so I think it’s time for us to take a serious look at what they are.”
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The proposal’s backers argued that SNAP assistance de-incentivized families from working or from taking on more hours at the jobs they already had. They also pressed the case that the current program would eliminate “SNAP fraud.”
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Enacting the bill is expected to cost Iowa more than $17 million in the first three years, far more than the $2.2 million the state spends each year to administer SNAP. (The federal government funds SNAP and splits administrative costs 50-50 with the state. Last year, Iowa received $60.4 million in federal SNAP funds).
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A Florida think tank
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Its biggest proponent was the Opportunity Solutions Project, a Florida think tank that has successfully shepherded similar bills through other statehouses.

The OSP is the lobbying arm of the Foundation for Government Accountability. Both groups are run by Maine state legislator Tarren Bragdon, who started the FGA in 2011 with three employees and less than $60,000 in the group’s bank account. According to tax records, that money was a grant from the State Policy Network, a major funder for right-wing think tanks and organizations that has been linked to conservative superdonors such as Charles Koch and the DeVos family. OSP did not respond to calls for comment.

As of 2021, the organization has grown to more than 40 staff members, 40 contractors, and a $12.5 million annual budget. Although the group has expanded into pushing for election integrity laws in battleground states, the bulk of its mission seems to the aimed at cutting welfare programs to “free individuals from the trap of government dependence.”
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“This bill makes poor use of state resources, ramping up administration costs in order to take federal resources out of Iowa’s economy,” said Rep. Jeff Cooling (D).
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“It is a continuation of the myth that persons on aid programs are cheats gaming the system,” said Rep. Monica Kurth (D). “This is another way this body is blaming the victim by passing bad legislation.”

What connects Trump’s likely arrest with the bank bailouts? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-connects-trumps-call-to-protest

#InsecurityResponses
#GreedIsAnInsecurityResponse
#PowerHungerIsAnInsecurityResponse
#FearNInsecurityThreatenDemocracy
#Socialism4MeNotThee
#TheFedIsTheToolOfTheRich

"...In the midterm elections of 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to the Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
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What connects Thiel to the bank bailouts?

Days before Silicon Valley Bank failed, Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund, advised clients to pull their deposits out. This contributed to the run on the bank.

Some $50 million of Thiel’s own money was still stuck in the bank. Then, guess what? Thiel and other rich depositors got bailed out by the Fed.

Charges of hypocrisy have been leveled at Thiel and other wealthy depositors who claim to be libertarians but were rescued by the government.

There was nothing hypocritical about it. Thiel and others like him aren’t really opposed to government, per se. They’re opposed to democracy. They prefer an oligarchy — a government controlled by super-wealthy people like themselves.

Thiel is part of the anti-democracy movement, of which Trump is the informal leader.

Their antipathy to democracy comes from the same fear that the extremely wealthy have always harbored about democracy — that a majority could vote to take away their money.
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Thiel and his ilk see in Trump an authoritarian strongman who won’t allow a majority to take away their wealth.
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They also support the Fed. Like most of the world’s central banks, the Fed is removed from democratic accountability, out of fear that financial markets otherwise won’t trust them to do unpopular things like bailing out banks or controlling inflation by slowing economies and causing millions to lose their jobs. The Fed is run largely by bankers. You might say it’s part of America’s oligarchy.

A few years ago, Thiel wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Presumably he was referring to the freedom of oligarchs like himself to be unconstrained by taxes and regulations. In this narrow sense, he’s correct: Oligarchy is incompatible with democracy. Nor is oligarchy compatible with the freedom of the rest of us.

Thiel and others like him want to return to an era when American oligarchs had freer reign. In that same essay, Thiel wrote:

'The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.'

But if “capitalist democracy” has become an oxymoron, it’s not due to excessive public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are undermining democracy with giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates.

I’m old enough to remember a former generation of wealthy Republicans who backed candidates like Barry Goldwater. They called themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to conserve American institutions. But Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve anything — at least anything that came after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote (except for the Federal Reserve’s bailouts for the rich and its ability to draft average workers into fighting inflation).

The 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when the richest Americans siphoned off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of America had to go deep into debt to maintain their standard of living and sustain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced. When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.

It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed."

Lauren Boebert blows up the GOP's biggest talking point | Salon.com https://www.salon.com/2023/03/20/lauren-boebert-blows-up-the-gops-biggest-talking-point/

#Socialism4MeNotThee
#GOPHypocrisy
#GOPIdiots
#RedStateSuckers

"As has been extensively documented, the Republican Party continues to use the Southern Strategy. GOP officials regularly deploy racist stereotypes about "black welfare queens" and "urban poverty" and "ghetto culture" as a way of encouraging white racial resentment and outright racism to get and keep political power. The idea that lazy and undeserving Black people are "stealing from white America" and are "takers not makers" who don't believe in hard work" and only want "handouts" is a centuries-old lie and fiction that continues through to the present.

By comparison, Republicans deploy a narrative that depicts poor and working-class white people as being especially noble, patriotic, and "real Americans" who are more deserving of government assistance... Alternatively, when judged to be politically advantageous, those same elites will quickly erase the white poor and working class, ignoring them as inconveniences whose very existence highlights the inherent inequalities of capitalism and other structural failings of American society.
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White people constitute the largest group of poor people in America. Red states receive a disproportionate amount of support from the federal government and blue states. In fact, White people are the greatest beneficiaries of "welfare" in American history.

...white people are actually very protective of welfare and other government supports for other white people, while simultaneously stigmatizing Black people. These new findings echo other research which has repeatedly shown that many white people change their assessment of a given individual's behavior and morality based on perceived racial group membership where Black people are judged more harshly than white people for doing the same things. Other research shows how white poor and working-class people who use food stamps and other welfare programs rationalize their behavior as somehow being morally superior and different as compared to other people who receive the same benefits.

Contrary to racist and white supremacist stereotypes about lazy and government-dependent Black and brown people, White America (and Whiteness itself) was in many ways created by white welfare programs.

The most obvious example is white on Black chattel slavery and land theft and genocide against First Nations where white people as a group benefitted from a particular type of "white freedom" where wealth, income, and other intergenerational upward mobility was literally built on stolen land and stolen labor.
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What economists and other experts have described as "the submerged state" (which consists of such programs as mortgage, education and other tax credits and subsidies) is another example of white welfare that disproportionately transfers money and other resources to white Americans as compared to Black and brown Americans

Ultimately, Boebert's "rural values" and the type of double standards and contradictions about race and gender such language embodies is why the American people do not have a real social democracy that would include such things as national healthcare, free college education, affordable housing, strong unions, a living wage, and long-term unemployment insurance.

As it has since before the founding of this nation, white racism and white supremacy hurts white people too. Boebert's thinly coded racist language of "rural conservative values" is one more example of how that dynamic works.