The Cruelty Is The Point
By 
Populist president Donald Trump once again fights against neoliberalism for the working man:
Republicans in Congress could finally get their wish to make it harder for poor people to access food assistance.
“Today, at the direction of President Donald J. Trump, we are taking steps to restore integrity to SNAP,” USDA head Sonny Perdue said in an op-ed Thursday, “and move people toward self-sufficiency.”
SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program colloquially referred to as food stamps, has been helping keep Americans from going hungry since the 1960s. Perdue’s announcement came on the same day the president signed into law the new farm bill, which didn’t include SNAP work requirements Republicans in Congress had been pushing for.
Perdue’s proposed USDA rule is a farm-bill workaround, and it takes aim at “able-bodied adults without dependents,” ages 18 to 49. This group can’t access food stamps for more than three months during a three-year period unless they’re working or registered in an education or training program.
But states can request to waive that time limit, including if their unemployment rate exceeds 10 percent, or if the rate is 20 percent above the national average in certain regions. Thirty-six states and territories currently have waivers for some adults without dependents. States can also bank exemptions for later use, a practice Perdue referred to as “stockpiling.”
The new rule would crack down on the ability of states to access waivers by restricting them to areas where the unemployment rate is greater than 7 percent. The waivers would also be good for only one year to end “this hoarding of exemptions,” Perdue said.
Parody-of-a-parody counterpoint:
Now I’m no Trump supporter, but he has set TONS of policies I have found myself agreeing with! He wants to de-escalate conflict with Russia, for example, and it’s entirely legitimate to question NATO, an alliance that has no reason to exist! https://t.co/PNX0yT77EV
— Glem (@GlemGreenwald) December 20, 2018
Tons!