So this came in the e-mail...repeatedly, from multiple correspondents, all of whose information has been scraped out of the text between the quotation marks below:
"
Call to Action
Delegate Kilgore Wrote an Op-Ed in the
Roanoke Times Justifying Medicaid Expansion
Using Work Requirements!
States that have expanded Medicaid
who are requesting work requirement waivers
are using these waivers to
ROLL BACK EXPANSION NOT SAVE IT!
WHAT DON'T THEY UNDERSTAND ABOUT
"NO MEDICAID EXPANSION"?
ASK THEM
How Much Money is Enough?
The Proposed Budget includes $34 BILLION for
Virginia Health and Human Services. That's 30% of the Budget!
Medicaid expansion states, on average, have spent
more than double what was initially projected.
On average, expansion states have signed up
twice as many people as expected.
Federal Government money for states
to use to expand Medicaid is being cut.
TELL THEM "NO DEAL"
NO work Requirement in exchange for Expansion
NO More money thrown at problems
NO expansion; "Use the money
we have more effectively"
WE NEED REFORM - NOT EXPANSION
[A Work Requirement Would Be a Nice Little Reform]
CALL / VOICEMAIL / EMAIL
The Delegate Elected to Represent YOU!
Tell Them to
OPPOSE MEDICIAD EXPANSION
UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES:
Delegates phone and emails HERE
Not sure who your Delegate is? HERE
Call These Squishy Delegates for Sure:
|
Terry G.
|
Kilgore
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(804) 698-1001
|
|
|
S. Chris
|
Jones
|
(804) 698-1076
|
|
|
Jeffrey L.
|
Campbell
|
(804) 698-1006
|
|
|
David E.
|
Yancey
|
(804) 698-1094
|
|
|
Israel D.
|
O'Quinn
|
(804) 698-1005
|
|
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James W.
|
Morefield
|
(804) 698-1003
|
|
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Todd E.
|
Pillion
|
(804) 698-1004
|
|
"
"Squishy Delegates"? I've always thought mine, at the top of that list, was a pretty solid Delegate. When, as now, he's not representing me, he
is at least representing his constituency, who are generally considered to be Republicans.
Part of the problem is, of course, a bit of gerrymandering that took place a few years ago. Delegate Kilgore of Gate City, which maps almost true flag red when maps use Red to stand for the old Right and bLue for the old Left, is also supposed to be representing some of the old coal towns to our northeast, which map sort of purplish due to the presence of full-time professional "needers." Not otherwise "liberal" in any sense, many of these people have lived out a life plan of working until they acquire a genuine disability and then spending the rest of their lives watching TV, gossipping, and eating junkfood at the public expense.
We have enough of them in Gate City, even, to account for the idea of Obamacare death panels. It's quite amazing how little time a person has to spend, doing real work, and looking at the teeth of "needers" who waddle around laughing at the people they intend to spend the rest of their lives exploiting, before death panels start to seem like a good idea. There's no question that any town is better off when the people who don't appreciate the need for productive employment "when anyone over fifty can get Supplemental Security anyway" are being naturally recycled into pretty wildflowers.
Work requirements? Nice idea, yes. In practice, local social workers have been exploiting a loophole, claiming that these people
caaan't get corporate career-type jobs, to keep the "needers" busy "needing" and keep the social workers on the payroll for year after year after year. Today's reality is that defining "work requirements" as "at least apply for corporate career-type jobs" means: welfare as a lifetime career. If we want to see any progress toward financial independence, we have to understand "work requirements" as including temporary gigs, day labor, self-employment, flea markets, selling postcards on street corners,
but no more handouts to people who aren't earning a little money from those. If work requirements had teeth in them, like "Any recipient of tax-funded benefits who is able to sit up will sit up on a day labor site, holding a sign advertising his or her work experience, for 40 hours a week, unless or until led off that site by an employer, and any failure to do any job will result in suspension of all benefits for at least one year," then "exchange for work requirements" would be reasonable.
On election days, however, polling places in Gate City are always surrounded with a few hundred Republican signs and maybe, or maybe not, even one sign for any Democrat on the ticket. If Republicans were solid in support of their professed beliefs, these "needers" would not want to live here. They'd go and infest Democrat precincts, and the sight of them waddling and giggling in would convert many a lifelong Democrat to Republicanism, too. We might end up without a single voting precinct where a single working person would vote in favor of any welfare scheme whatsoever. This might not be a bad thing. Some of the "needers" would go back to work, and the rest of them would lie down and die...sounds like a win-win.
Not that I would ever support any scheme for randomly shortening all of their lives, across the board. No corporate-managed welfare scheme would ever know which of the Maggot People could be restored to human life; even their relatives wouldn't know that, without trying.
Unfortunately we'll probably never know which of our Maggot People still had enough humanity to become productive human beings, because Republicans do not solidly support any realistic cuts to welfare schemes.
This idea of handing out food instead of food stamps? It's not even a good joke. It was
tried. Young people may not remember this, but Donald Trump is old enough that, if he were as blue-collar as he's claimed to be, he'd remember it well.
That old railroad track that runs through Gate City used, Gentle Readers, to stop at the depot, which was what the building currently occupied by the Life Saving Crew used to be, and it used to offload, among other things, crates of free food for our "needers." In those days my father used to be a loader, one of the young men who earned extra money, once a month, repacking the contents of the crates into cardboard boxes so each "needer" got what was considered a reasonable amount of balanced nutrients each month. Sometimes in summer fewer than half of the "needers" would show up to collect their free food, because it was in fact pretty horrible food. After distribution day the loaders would take home what was left. The free food program was replaced with food stamps in 1974 and I remember using up the last packet of U.S.D.A. powdered eggs in our house in 1978. (When you have hens as pets, it takes you a while to use up powdered eggs...but my parents believed wasting food was a sin.)
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-food-pantry-handout-game-or.html
To be fair, canned pears are pretty boring no matter who does what with them, and in baked goods where you don't actually taste the egg powdered eggs aren't bad. The cornmeal...I believed for years it had chalk mixed in, but have finally been convinced it was lard, which I don't willingly eat. The one time Mother tried heating up the canned chicken, I had a brainwave and wanted to take it out for a picnic where I could give it a decent private burial, and after Mother tasted it herself she told Dad not to bring it home again. And we didn't
know that wheat-based food was what was making my mother and me, and later my natural sister, so unhealthy, each in a different way. I ate a lot of biscuits and macaroni and oatmeal cookies, and liked them, and took a little saucer of vitamin pills with my wheat-germ-enhanced oatmeal every morning, and wondered why I still had symptoms of so many vitamin deficiencies.
But what I remember best was the macaroni with nutritional yeast. We all sat down and took one hopeful bite of this new treat, and then with one accord we all--my parents, too, without a word--stood up and scraped our plates out on the ground for the chickens. And the
chickens all walked up and took one hopeful bite, and started wiping their beaks on the grass and giving us disgusted "I thought you were a friend" looks.
So Dad and the loaders and even the social workers wrote a lot of official letters recommending that instead of being stuck with all this nasty so-called food each month, the "needers" should just be given some sort of financial aid to buy normal food that human beings would eat. That would be so much more efficient for the welfare office, which wouldn't need to occupy the depot building for a week every month; the "needers" could just go to the grocery store like anyone else. And Dad was supposed to get a new job in September 1974, so it didn't matter that the welfare office stopped paying loaders in May and that in June and July of 1974 we had an opportunity to buy groceries with those shiny new food stamps. Food stamps were such an improvement, freeing up so much money in the budget and making it possible for poor people to feed their children things that, in theory, wouldn't leave their children with symptoms of almost every vitamin deficiency known to humankind, even after taking a little saucer of vitamin pills every morning.
So...oh
right, let's go back to the food handout scheme and lose the improvement food stamps offered. Like that'll stop people abusing the food stamp program? Hah. If Republicans were in Gate City today I could show them an actual food stamp abuser who sells both food stamp shopping privileges, and food pantry handout food, for alcohol, having apparently made a commitment to drink himself to death. Yes, it's a pity and a shame. No, giving him more actual food instead of food stamps wouldn't slow down his process of self-destruction. If anything it might speed up that process. More people will trade booze and pills for actual food, since that involves less risk of being seen...
For an encore, I suppose, the administration will next propose to improve vehicles by eliminating round wheels.
Suppose Scott Adams is right. Suppose Donald Trump is a master persuader, such that even the moments of his campaign when you could all but see the status bar light up flashing "HE'S LYING" were strategically planned to recruit a percentage of the vote. If that were the case, then that line about going back to the food distribution program of 1973 would be a brilliant strategy for persuading Republicans that Trump wants to cut the welfare budget while, in practice, allowing the welfare budget to continue to bloat. And if that were the case, Republicans would be delighted...because when there's any actual chance to cut the budget items Republicans say they want to cut, Republicans have in historical fact been squishy.
Republicans do not rush to support poor people in their own neighborhood who are trying to get off welfare or stay off welfare. In fact I've even met Republicans who've seemed to want other people to stay poor. I could name at least three people--all of whom have long considered me a school friend of their children's, two of whom also claim me as a friend of theirs--whose thinking has been quite transparent lately. It goes like this: "Tracy's a doctor, Lee's a lawyer, Dale wrote a book, and our Blair was 'Most Valuable Server' at McDonald's last month...at thirty-five. Sigh. Well...but 'The Economy' is making it hard for any 'young' person to Get Ahead these days. There are Pat, Addison, Madison, Brook, and Page, too, all on welfare, so our Blair's not done all
that badly..." They may have whatever emotional feelings they use the word "like" to mean toward me, or want me to have those feelings toward them or toward their no-talent Blair or their Blair's older siblings. They do not want me, or Pat or Addison or Madison, to succeed in business. Every month I survive off welfare make it more painfully obvious that their Blair is a no-talent.
Republicans do not reliably denounce boondoggle projects. They laugh loud and long at some of the ridiculous pork proposed by
other people's elected officials for
their States or districts, but when a project is proposed that might put more residents of their own district on the payroll, somehow it's not so funny any more. Technically in Weber City, rather than Gate City, we have a proposed bridge-widening project that is in practice expected to
narrow the bridge--the only four-lane bridge in town, this is, being narrowed to two lanes--for another two
years, with the result that at least one owner of a business close to the bridge has lost enough trade to have threatened in a county meeting to close the store. But, but...a lot of people have useless brothers-in-law who are on the payroll for the widening of this bridge.
Obviously. Anyone driving from Gate City to Kingsport can just see all the in-laws not-working as the actual work is postponed and re-postponed.
Republicans do not reliably support cuts to unsustainable socialist schemes like Social Security and Medicaid. Republicans do recognize the fundamental illogic, the built-in unsustainability, of any scheme that relies on the impossibility that any national population will always have a great many more working adults earning good wages than it has "retirees" who would like to believe that the money they're drawing out of these schemes is the money they paid in. (They don't want to admit that that's not the case, either. "I worked for thirty-five years and had that Social Security taken out of my paycheck every week"--and that money was spent, at that time, to support other old people; if, Sir or Ma'am, the benefits you receive each month weren't being paid in by other
young people, they wouldn't be there; if you don't support the economic infrastructure of working adults, what's actually in your retirement fund is a lot of IOU slips. Good luck collecting those if you keep on buying things made in China and whining that you don't "need" things made by local self-employed people.) But, but...if cuts were made in Social Security and Medicaid handouts, these Republicans would...would...h--h--have to trim their
own personal budgets and
support their own parents? ?!?!?! Unthinkable! Don't talk about it! Even for Senator Dole, any suggestion that our government needs to stop giving Social Security and Medicaid beneficiaries whatever they squall for, no questions asked, was political suicide!
It does not surprise me that several solidly Republican Delegates are cooperating with the consistently, one could even say solidly, squishy Republican Party in this desperate move to appease the Gimmee Monster by transferring more of the burden of Medicaid to the states rather than the federal government. Not that it is, or ever was, or ever will be, or ever can be, sustainable for the states either. We are talking about positioning the cushions in advance of the inevitable crash.
I replied to one correspondent:
"
For too many people, the Welfare State (or "Gimmee Monster") has embedded the idea that a good elected official is one who gets more federal benefits for more of the "poor" people of our district. The poor, poor people who just can't find a scrap of wood to mend a broken-down bed frame on
ooonly $1000 a month. I could show them how to live well, improve a house, launch a business,
and support charities on $1000 a month, and once set up an Indiegogo page to invite people to sponsor that--I've been living without handouts on much less than $1000 a month since 2005. I still think it's possible that, if this project had been funded, its success
might have got some local Republicans to listen.
As it is, people still prefer to go on believing the old outdated story about our being POOR people who CAAAN'T take care of our own without lots of handouts from--I think some of them may still believe the money's coming from Eleanor Roosevelt, as distinct from coming directly from
us and, in the course of reprocessing, being used to interfere with so many things that everyone in Scott County would actually prefer to what's been shoved upon us in order to get those handouts.
"
Virginia's House District 1 is not, by any reasonable standard, a poor district. It's less obscenely wealthy than some parts of these United States. It is and has always been far less poverty-stricken than at least some of the slum neighborhoods in every major city, and than most of the Native American "reservations."
One thing that can seem to support our misbelief about our collective poverty is the fact that prices haven't been as ridiculously inflated as they have in the other corners of Virginia. Consistently during my lifetime, the same annual salary on which a reasonably mindful spender can live royally in Gate City has been one on which a frugal fanatic can live well in Washington and one that won't even rent a furnished room, never mind meals, in New York.
The "makers and takers" thread at this web site started when I read that newspaper interview with the Maggot Boy who was requesting donations from the public to help him mend his bed frame on an income of $1000 a month.
Hah. With an income like that my first regular publisher, George Peters, paid all his bills and was an entrepreneur, job creator, and public benefactor. I'm not saying that Maggot Boy's suffering wasn't real, for him. I am saying that it was created, not by lack of
money, but by lack of an intelligent, ethics-based idea of what to do with the money he had.
Those old-school "conservative" church rules could be silly, and had little to do with real spirituality...and yet I suspect they helped the Depression generation live on really low incomes. In this part of the world, in the 1930s, respectable people joined different churches that seemed to compete for some sort of prize on having the strictest and silliest rules. No alcohol. No dancing. No card games. No theatre-going. No frivolous
book reading. No musical accompaniment even for singing hymns in church. No inedible flowers in gardens. No cosmetics or other fashion items of the moment. In one church (possibly a barber was an active member) all men must be clean-shaven at all times; in another church (probably no barbers) men had to wear a neatly trimmed beard "if able." I am not making this up. But the effect of all these rules was to force people to live frugally and, if they had extra money, invest it or donate it, rather than spending it on silly fads. Young people who grew up without church rules, whose ideas of how to spend money were shaped by television instead, honestly think it's hard to make ends meet on what are, in fact, comfortable incomes.
What would
I do if I were given $150 a month with the stipulation that I had to spend it on food? I'd certainly have to make a job of figuring out how to spend it on food for myself alone, and I wouldn't try. Yet I've seen people--the last time I watched this at close range was enough years ago that local lurkers wouldn't know who it was--get their food stamps and lug in their bags full of junkfood, "novelties," microwave dinners-on-trays. Not candy or soda pop; pizza and cheese steaks. "No, the full amount of food stamps
never lasts me through the month," they wail.
They have problems, all right, these "needers." They'd probably find it as hard to develop a normal healthy sense of how to shop for groceries as they would to develop a normal body shape, or walk two miles in an hour, or keep up with the work in a junior college or trade school course whose teacher thinks the course is intolerably slow. Lack of money is not their problem. Lack of instruction and discipline is their problem, and social workers are the last people on Earth who'd be qualified to give them that instruction and discipline.
Their "needs for expanded Medicaid benefits" are, more often than not, directly correlated to their eating habits and (lack of) exercise habits. Their bloated bodies are inefficient machines that tend to break down.
I don't think Delegate Kilgore would know much about these people and their habits. He has his own job, and that's not it. I know...enough about them to see them as distinct, diverse individuals, at least, which is more than any social worker seems to know about them. I've lived among the "Appalachian" sub-species in the point of Virginia, and worked directly with the "Anacostia" sub-species in Washington; of the generalizations that are equally true of both kinds of "needers," the truest has to be that they show a full range of intelligence and character. Some of them are real Horatio Alger stories waiting to happen, and some of them are maggots, will always be maggots, and really will make their biggest positive contribution to this world when they die out of it.
I think showing the "needers" how rich they actually are, and how much good they could be doing instead of the harm they're doing now by being full-time "needers," may be
my vocation.
But the correspondent's reply shows why Republicans are such a big part of their own problem...
"
LOL... you nailed it.
The problem they can't see ...
Where is the end of the line of people they want to give free stuff too?
What is the % of the budget that should be for free healthcare? (30% ... $30 BILLION plus is not enough?)
"
Those are good political talking points...for more squishy Republican talk that never goes anywhere. And what was the reply to the new, forward-thinking solution I had just handed this person--demonstrating how well it's possible to live on $1000 a month? "LOL." Person
wanted to believe that was a joke. Republicans don't want to believe that they need to put their money where their mouths are. They don't want to believe they need to invest in my project; they don't want to believe they need to support their own parents; they don't want to believe they need to teach their own children...
Laugh on, then, Republicans. "The Economy" is in New Orleans. The date is August 27, 2005. Party hearty!
Laisse les bon temps rouler!
reported that only about 1% of his Congressman's mail was encouraging?)
