Poor would lose food over Kushner errors
Scores of paperwork corrections, no penalties
What should a mistake cost you? Jared Kushner, who was born into one fortune and married into another, has updated his financial disclosures at least 40 times in multiple filings since March 2017, when he joined the White House staff as a senior adviser to the president and director of the Office of American Innovation.
Kushner also added more than 100 foreign contacts to his disclosure forms that somehow slipped his mind during his original filing. What have Kushner’s dozens of mistakes cost him? Well, after a year, his security clearance was downgraded so he can’t see the top-secret president’s daily briefing. But don’t worry. He still has his job.
Matthew Cortland has a chronic, incurable bowel disease. Unable to work but (unlike President Trump) also unable to rely upon his father to bail him out well into his 40s, he sought help from SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as food stamps. It generally offers those in need about $1.40 per person per meal.
Despite “constant diarrhea, severe abdominal pain, nausea that even powerful prescription anti-emetics barely controlled, anemia, arthritis and crippling fatigue,” Cortland had not been declared disabled and thus was subject to the program’s work requirements. (Yes, there are already work requirements for SNAP.) Because he still wanted to eat, he sought an exception.
Massachusetts’ Department of Transitional Assistance sent him a letter to arrange an interview, but it did not put the apartment number on his letter. Thus began a Kafkaesque maze of bureaucratic burlesque that went on for months, a labyrinth Cortland was only able to navigate because he happens to be a lawyer. Most Americans, you may have noticed, are not lawyers.
One mistake, a mistake he didn’t even make, could have cost him his life.
The paperwork required by both Kushner and Cortland should have the same goal: protecting U.S. taxpayers from our own generosity. But that generosity is generally unquestioned for the rich and evaporates for the poor.
Because he was born rich, Kushner’s only burden is more billable hours for his lawyers. If they’re poor, Americans face an “exhausting, labor-intensive” process, writes single mom Stephanie Land, one that, “meant many hours on the phone, or at the department’s office, waiting for several hours in line — time that cost me jobs and money.”
The new farm bill proposed by House Republicans will make that worse. It presumes Americans on SNAP are lazy and devious, while Kushner and his associates are assumed to be capable and honest — despite dozens of corrections and indictments that suggest otherwise. The bill expands work requirements to all non-disabled workers ages 50 to 59, while raising the required hours of work from 20 to 25 by 2026, even caregivers if the person they’re caring for is older than 5. That’s not even the worst part. Make one error because you or your caseworker messed up paperwork, no food stamps for a year. A second error and you can starve for longer than a two-year term in the House.
The only true benefit of this proposal is the enjoyment some get from watching the poor squirm. Taxpayers will end up saving little compared with the huge costs this plan exacts on states, local communities and our health care system. And if Republicans wanted to save more over the next 10 years, they could rescind the $22 billion in tax cuts Congress gave to the richest .1% just this year and still have $5 billion to spare.
More than anything, conservatives want to teach us a lesson: Poor people need to be punished into not wanting to be poor, and rich people need to be coddled or they won’t try so hard to be rich.
It’s easy to make new demands on poor people. They don’t have lobbyists, lawyers or time to fight back. They definitely don’t have what Kushner takes for granted most — a second or 140th chance to get things right.
Tweeting about Kushner’s errors, novelist Celeste Ng noted that one way to look at privilege is “who’s allowed to make mistakes.” Too often, that depends on the family you were born into.
Jason Sattler, aka @LOLGOP, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.