Administration uses ‘divide & conquer’ approach to aid

Bill Knight column for Mon., Tues., or Wed., May 14, 15 or 16, 2018

When President Trump and Congress’ supporters last year tried to gut Medicaid as part of their scheme to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they were surprised that most Americans support Medicaid. So last month conservatives returned to the “divide and conquer” playbook that reactionary forces have used against everyday Americans for decades.

This Spring, Trump signed an executive order that showed his ignorance about poverty and exposed his agenda: dismantling America’s safety net. The order, “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility,” sounds good but actually instructs federal agencies to review programs helping low-income Americans and make recommendations on how programs can be made harder to use.

But the scheme itself could be hard to achieve.

It isn’t just Medicaid that Americans don’t want cut. Americans overwhelmingly oppose cuts to Social Security, SNAP (food stamps), housing assistance and many programs that were set up to help Americans get by – especially if such cuts are enacted to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

“As polling by the Center for American Progress (CAP) shows, Americans are less likely to vote for a candidate who backs cuts,” said Rebecca Vallas, director of CAP’s Poverty to Prosperity program. “By contrast, vast majorities of Americans across party lines want to see policymakers raise the minimum wage; ensure affordable, high-quality child care; and even enact a job guarantee to ensure everyone who is able and wants to work can find a job with decent wages. These sentiments include majorities of Independents, Republicans and even Trump’s own voters.”

However, instead of legislation based on citizens’ preferences, Trump and crew exploit racial suspicions and myths about aid programs to pit struggling workers against one other. It’s a tactic used by employers and administrations on national, state and local levels since before the Civil War, stoking resentment and animosity against foreign-born workers, women, minorities, youth and other segments of society.

Creating fear of “others” using government help or taking jobs has relied on such often-contrived divisions and suspicions that some recipients truly need aid. But numerous inspector-general reports finding improper payments in state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs, according to Eric Schnurer in The Atlantic, “appear all to be due to bureaucratic incompetence categorized by the inspector general as either ‘eligibility and payment calculation errors’ or ‘documentation errors’ rather than intentional fraud by beneficiaries.”

Nevertheless, Trump is using a broad brush to paint government help as wasteful and destructive. His order said, “The terms ‘welfare’ and ‘public assistance’ include any program that provides means-tested assistance, or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households or families that have low incomes (i.e., those making less than twice the federal poverty level), the unemployed, or those out of the labor force.”

Also labeling child-care assistance, unemployment insurance and TANF (which in 1996 replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children) as “welfare” lets the administration and its enablers on Capitol Hill to use inaccurate stereotypes about poor people to kindle fiery antagonism about others who actually share a lot with other ages, genders and races in the working and middle classes.

The TANF program is an example of government betraying its mandate to “provide for the general welfare,” as the Constitution establishes.

“Fewer than one in four poor families with kids get help from TANF today – down from 80 percent in 1996,” she said. “Families who do receive TANF are lucky if the benefits even bring them halfway to the austere federal poverty line. For example, a Tennessee family of three can only receive a maximum of $185 per month, or a little over $6 a day. TANF has proven an abject failure both in terms of protecting struggling families from hardship and in helping them get ahead.”

Further, Trump’s order directs agencies to increase work requirements and time limits on benefits for certain unemployed and underemployed workers despite research that for years has shown that work requirements don’t help anyone find jobs.

“Myths about poverty [are] that ‘the poor’ are some stagnant group of people who ‘just don’t want to work’,” Vallas said.

But many Americans work two or three jobs to make ends meet, many live paycheck-to-paycheck, and almost all Americans –  70 percent – will need some help, like SNAP food stamps, some time in their lives.

Trump claims his order is intended to eliminate “poverty traps,” but the actual trap is the minimum wage, which doesn’t bring a family of two out of poverty.

“We don’t have welfare in America anymore,” Vallas said. “What’s left of America’s tattered safety net is meager at best, and – contrary to the claim in Trump’s executive order that it leads to ‘government dependence’ – it’s light-years away from enough to live on.”