Thinking more about our unjust economic system, I was further discouraged to read Sheila Kennedy’s post today, What Swamp is Being Drained?
She points out that the Administration is saying there are people who don’t “deserve” the programs and benefits they are cutting and eliminating.
From the Washington Post:
The whole point here is to set “taxpayers” against the supposedly undeserving whose scams and schemes can be stopped with only indiscriminate cuts to social programs. Watching Mulvaney answer questions from the press this morning, that idea came through again and again. Every time he’d get a question about a specific cut the administration proposes — to Social Security disability, to food stamps, to Medicaid — Mulvaney would say that the only people who would suffer would be those who don’t deserve to get the benefit in the first place. “We are not kicking anybody off of any program who really needs it,” he said.
But if you paid close attention, you noticed a curious logical gap in his argument. See if you can spot it in this line of reasoning:
There are people on these programs who don’t deserve to be.
Therefore, we will slash the program.
Then only the deserving will receive the benefit.
What’s missing is any suggestion that the Administration has some sort of plan to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving.
Example: Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
The future at Pine Ridge could soon grow bleaker. The budget that President Donald Trump unveiled on Tuesday makes deep cuts to a slew of areas that life at the reservation depends on. The spending reductions touch every part of life from access to clean drinking water to block grants that fund programs to feed the elderly to much-needed after-school programs. In one of the nation’s most deeply impoverished communities, residents and tribal leaders say the cuts could be devastating. –CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/27/politics/indian-reservation-trump-budget/index.html
Quakers, social justice and revolution 