There's never been ongoing and so even half-adequate American press coverage of the day to day horrors in the USA of the working poor. Take a family where the dad is a McD's manager and has 2 other jobs along with mom's 2 jobs and that's just to make sure that their rent, the utilities and both used car payments get met, not to ensure there would always be enough food on the table, or ever anything left for clothes, shoes or car repairs.
I knew that guy from my trips upstate while I was a weekend commuter for five of Reagan's 8 years in office. And that's the family the GOP still later wanted to cut food stamps for because if you work you don't need food stamps, right? A dollar earned in exchange for a dollar of public benefit cut?
Well it seemed a right formula to Paul Ryan's GOP. And now there's even a later version, now it's about how if you got stimulus checks and extended unemployment you must be rolling in dough so let's not disincentivize work any further, it's time for everyman who doesn't have a nest egg to get off his butt and catch chickens or clean bathrooms or code 25k lines a week bug-free for $17 per hour remote from his two-bedroom apartment shared with five other people in the same boat. "Working poor" is making its way up the white collar jobs ladder thanks to the too long ignored shortage of affordable housing.
But never mind: If the Rs win the midterms you can expect yet another round of attacks on food stamps, home heat assistance, section 8 housing, etc. because work is dignity and dignity is key. Key to keeping taxes off the backs of the wealthy.
And if the Dems prevail? Well there's the question of who's going to pay for the real and social cost of inflation, reduced public benefits, failure to fund adequately the erstwhile thrashed bits of "Build Back Better"? The Dems aren't able to get agreement that the time for use of fossil fuels is closing and it's critical, urgent, to invest in renewables --and also a good way to improve employment and so consumer spending in recovering the economy from the lingering effects of the pandemic. Meanwhile the Ds allow the Rs to amplify voices of people complaining about gas prices, as if lowering the price of gas were a reasonable solution. It's not. It's time to subsidize renwables including use in affordable transportation, and time to let the failure of Solyndra be what it was, not a catastrophe but a single example of risk taking that didn't work out, same as any venture capitalist can come up with when pressed to admit a less than perfect record.
And let's not blithely say that everyone will suffer if things can't be worked out in budget negotiations across the aisle. No way. Congress and K Street do know how to take care of their own and their donors.
So far it still works to build higher walls and turn the volume up on the noise cancelling headphones. It's always the downtrodden and what's left of the middle class that takes the hits. Last hired, first fired doesn't begin to cover the abuse. What's not being noticed though is that the level of suffering is creeping up the ladders. Eventually, "no wall high enough".
I read exactly one newspaper article during the Obama era about the impact on rural working poor of the "cash for clunkers" law and the perceived sin (in the eyes of the working poor) of government-mandated pouring of concrete into engines of those ol' cars because there's such a dearth of public transportation options in rural America. One piece. Past that the newspapers were focused on how great it was that Bush and Obama worked together on righting the economy. Well yeah, there was that. I'm pretty sure the single mom of 2 trying to roll-start her dead-batt car down the hill to get to her fast food job 50 icy miles away really thought a lot about how cool it was that a current and past prez of the USA were righting the fucking economy. Oh okay she might have wondered how she'd cope when this used car finally gave up the ghost altogether, because no one she knew had been able to scout up another rat car either.
So there's that. Neither the Dems nor the Republicans should shine a light on how this country treats the poor who are born right here but meant to fend for themselves in the fake meritocracy of "not my zip code, not my problem".
