Well, Christmas is just a few days away now,
and so the Trump administration decided to
give an early present to needy families all
over this country, and that present is, we're
about to cut your food stamps and there's
nothing you can do about it.
You see Donald Trump and the Republicans had
actually been working on cutting food stamps.
They had been wanting to do that for quite
some time now.
Uh, but they tried to put it in the farm bill.
Well, it did not survive in the farm bill
farm bill gets signed anyway.
So the Trump administration got a little more
clever with it.
How can we cut food stamps without having
to go through Congress?
And the s da came up with a brilliant plan.
They just issued a new set of rules this week
that increases the work requirements for people
receiving snap benefits.
Here's the way it currently works.
If you are receiving snap benefits, there
are work requirements.
I think you'd get about three months without
having a job before you get kicked off.
But if you're in a state where the unemployment
rate is 10 percent or more, you can get an
extension on that because obviously you're
in an area where work is hard to find.
The government took that into account.
The new rule lowers that unemployment rate
from 10 percent to seven percent.
This is going to result in a few million people
getting kicked off of the food stamp programs.
Now, these could be people who are just unable
to find work.
They could be people on disability who are
unable to work or have an exceptionally difficult
time finding work.
Whatever the reason is, the Trump administration
doesn't care.
We don't want you to keep suckling off the
government's teat.
We want you to get off your ass and go get
a job.
Right?
And not what the Republicans always say, get
a job.
You Bum.
A lot of these people can't.
They want to.
They don't want to sit there and just have
to have the government take care of them.
They want to take responsibility, but due
to circumstances, a lot of them not of their
own making, they're unable to.
Whether it's a faulty economy in the city
or state where they live or an accident that
happened to them that prevents them from being
able to properly work.
They didn't do this to themselves, but they're
the ones being punished.
Meanwhile, the USDA also wants to cut the
program by one point $6, billion dollars annually,
so not only are fewer people going to be receiving
benefits now, but the benefits the people
do receive.
We're going to reduce those because, hey,
we just gave the wealthy a big tax break last
year and we've got to pay for it somehow.
Right?
I, to me, this is Paul Ryan's dream child
right here.
We get to screw over the working class poor
and then screw them over a little more by
just reducing the total amount of benefits.
Anyway, after kicking so many people off of
these benefits, and this is what this administration
prioritized, right in the days before Christmas.
I mean, I can't think of anything more heartless,
deceitful and disgusting than what they have
done to these people.
Right in the heart of the holiday season.
Maybe if Trump gets visited by three ghosts
on Christmas Eve, maybe they'll decide that
this is a bad idea, but I seriously doubt
any of that's gonna happen.
Cutting aid for needy people in the United
States has been the Republicans number one
agenda item for more than a decade.
They finally found a president heartless enough
and clueless enough about what the public's
going to view this like a to actually go through
with it.
Trump is their guy and they are his guys.
There is no distinction anymore between Donald
Trump and regular republicans because they
are all one in the same with the same goal
of screwing over as many poor people as possible.
