No help from Trump
The administration’s first proposed budget would take dead aim at the working class.
Why do families go hungry in Houston?
Queso flows by the gallon and restaurants serve up steaks the size of toilet seats. Caloric scarcity isn’t the problem.
Nor is joblessness. Two-thirds of families facing food insecurity have someone working full time.
The challenge, as Houston Food Bank President Brian Greene told the editorial board earlier this month, is addressing the storm of social problems that lead people to need the food bank in the first place.
“You can’t treat hunger as if it is just some isolated thing,” Greene said. “The reason why people come to us is because they have more than one problem. They’re struggling to pay their rent. They’re struggling to pay their utility bills.”
Social and economic changes have meant that a job alone isn’t enough to keep Houstonians out of hunger. Parents who work hard and make the right decisions can still need help ensuring that their kids go to sleep with full stomachs.
The best program available to help feed these needy families, Greene told us, is the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program — also known as food stamps.
Even that program, which provides $117.80 per month for the average Texan participant, doesn’t go far enough.
Our nation needs to revolutionize the way we think about helping working families as once-reliable jobs continue to become exportable, replaceable and mechanized. Greene recommended studying some kind of guaranteed minimum income.
That was our takeaway from a meeting with Houstonians on the front lines of ending hunger.
That was the message on our minds after President Donald Trump announced his proposed budget.
Every line of that budget seems to slash those irreplaceable programs that help keep people upright and moving when the rest of their world starts to fall apart. Programs that Trump once swore he’d never touch — Medicaid and Social Security Disability — are now subject to his reaper.
A man who promised to care for bluecollar workers and returning veterans now takes aim at a social safety net that provides a last line of defense in a changing global economy.
The whole point of these cuts, $4.5 trillion over the next decade, is to get people working, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said.
Yet the programs that encourage people to join the workforce, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, suffer a blow under Trump’s budget. The policies that help Americans too young to work — such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers 38 percent of all Texas children — earn no reprieve.
The Texas state budget would also take a hit under Trump’s proposed end to sharing revenue from offshore oil and gas drilling leases. Frackers would suffer from lower oil prices caused by the budget’s plan to cut in half the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in half. Federal investments in the future of energy — the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy — would be completely eliminated.
Despite these cuts over the next decade, Trump’s budget still doesn’t balance unless you presume unrealistic economic growth. So where does all that money go? Into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy in the form of tax cuts.
Trump’s budget is likely dead-on-arrival, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has said. Most presidential budgets are DOA. So what is Trump trying to accomplish with this proposal? We’re left to wonder.
Meanwhile, we can’t help but remember what Houston Food Bank Chief Communications Officer Betsy Ballard said at our meeting last month.
“People don’t like poor people. We don’t like to admit that we have them. We undervalue them. We judge them. We assess a moral judgment to their condition.”
As longtime Houston newsman Marvin Zindler used to say: “It’s hell to be poor.”
Trump’s proposed budget would add a new circle to that hell.
A man who promised to care for blue-collar workers and returning veterans now takes aim at a social safety net that provides a last line of defense in a changing global economy.