| The people who were conned into voting for Trump will be among the first to suffer. It's hard not to gloat at their misfortune. Have you ever caught yourself wishing that ignorance was painful? Looks like it can be! |
| {Did these working class voters really think that Donald J. Trump was one of them??? -- Spinshield}
{Trump's} new budget comes down especially hard on the poor – imposing unprecedented cuts in low-income housing, job training, food assistance, legal services, help to distressed rural communities, nutrition for new mothers and their infants, funds to keep poor families warm, even “meals on wheels.” These cuts come at a time when more American families are in poverty than ever before, including 1 in 5 children. Source: "The Theme That Unites All Trump’s Initiatives Is Cruelty" By Robert Reich / RobertReich.org - Mar 19, 2017 Regina Feltner, a retired nurse, was recovering from side effects of radiation therapy when she got the notice that her heat would be cut off. It was a bone-cold January day. The snow was so high that her daughter had to come over to take the dog out. “I have lung cancer and it’s the dead of winter,” she remembers thinking. “What am I going to do?” Help came in the form of a heating subsidy: money from the federal government, delivered by the Highland County Community Action Organization, a small nonprofit in rural southern Ohio, where Ms. Feltner lives. Now, that program is on the chopping block. It is one of many cuts in President Trump’s new budget proposal that would inflict the deepest pain on the most vulnerable Americans — a great number of whom voted for him. “I understand what he’s trying to do, but I think he’s just not stopping to think that there are people caught in the middle he is really going to hurt,” said Ms. Feltner, 57, who was a nurse for 25 years and voted for Mr. Trump. “He needs to make some concessions for that. I was a productive citizen. Don’t make me feel worthless now.” “I’d still like to have a little dignity left, and not have to move in with someone else,” she said. “I used to be the one packing up the food in the food pantry for people,” she said. “Now I’m the one in line.” {Ms. Feltner, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES! -- Spinshield} Another proposed cut would defund the Appalachian Regional Commission … Of the 420 counties in the commission’s footprint, 399 voted for Mr. Trump. Chris Farley, 32, of Delbarton, W.Va., . . . was laid off from his job operating a drill at a surface coal mine in 2015. Last year, {he secured} a job in farming through a local nonprofit called the Coalfield Development Corporation, which is partially supported by the Appalachian Regional Commission. It pays him $11.50 an hour for 33 hours a week growing cucumbers and raising chickens and pigs. It also pays for him to attend community college six hours a week where he working toward an associate degree. “I hate to see him cut us,” said {Farley} {Mr. Farley, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES! -- Spinshield} Another worker in the Coalfield Development jobs program is Tracy Spaulding, 19. He works in a wood shop making things like TV stands, cabinets and headboards for beds. In November, Mr. Spaulding cast his first vote for president. He chose Mr. Trump, “Honestly, I like Donald Trump. That’s just how I feel, I like him. I believe I’d be a little bit mad about it if he made that cut and I lost my job and schooling, you know?" {Mr. Spaulding, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES! -- Spinshield} Money from a Community Development Block Grant helped pay to remodel Shantell Swenson’s bathroom and kitchen in Salt Lake City, making it easier for her to use a wheelchair in her home and allowing her to cook on a stove for the first time Ms. Swenson said she did not “rage toward” Mr. Trump “like some people I know.” But when she heard about his proposed budget cuts, she said, she was “boiling with anger.” {Ms. Swenson, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES! -- Spinshield} One of those proposed cuts would kill the Legal Service Corporation, That funding stream makes up 40 percent of the budget for Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma, whose lawyers saved Paula and Joe Frye from losing their nine-acre home. “This is all we had,” Mrs. Frye said. “If it hadn’t been for Legal Aid, I guess we’d just live in our car. The Fryes . . . did not vote {Mr and Ms. Frye, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES! -- Spinshield} Source: "Trump Budget Cuts Put Struggling Americans on Edge" By SABRINA TAVERNISE and TRIP GABRIEL - NY Times - MARCH 17, 2017 Mr. Trump’s weak response is maddening, or at least it should be to his blue-collar base. His budget blueprint would cut grants and training programs that help laid-off industrial workers qualify for higher-paying manufacturing jobs. While just two weeks ago, in his address to Congress, Mr. Trump repeated his pledge to spend $1 trillion on “new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our very, very beautiful land,” his budget would cut new funding from the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Program, kill the Department of Agriculture’s $500 million water and wastewater loan and grant program, cut $175 million in spending for rural airports, and eliminate the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which has been used to revitalize inner city infrastructure and housing. Source: "President Trump’s Wheezing Jobs Effort" By THE EDITORIAL BOARD - NY Times - MARCH 18, 2017 James Waltimire . . . has been going to the hospital in this small city twice a week for physical therapy after leg surgery, all of it paid for by Medicaid. Mr. Waltimire, 54, was able to sign up for the government health insurance program last year because Ohio expanded it to cover more than 700,000 low-income adults under the Affordable Care Act. He voted for President Trump . . . but is now worried about the Republican plan to effectively end the Medicaid expansion through legislation to repeal the health care law. “Now they say he wants to take $880 billion out of Medicaid. That’s going to affect a lot of people who can’t afford to get insurance.” {Mr Waltimire, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES! -- Spinshield} Many of those voters live in small Midwestern cities like Defiance and neighboring Bryan {Ohio}. Nearly a million Ohio residents gained coverage under the health care act, either through expanded Medicaid or via the new marketplaces created by the law. “People in this community are very conservative. They struggle with the federal budget deficit, and they like the idea of personal responsibility,” said Phil Ennen, the president and chief executive of Community Hospitals and Wellness Centers, which has a 75-bed hospital in Bryan. “But at the same time, we have a lot of friends and family and neighbors who just don’t have a lot going for them. There is a population out there that needs Medicaid. That’s the dilemma.” The region has voted Republican in presidential contests for decades, . . . Mr. Trump. . . took 64 percent of the vote in Defiance County. {Defiance and Bryan, Ohio, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES! -- Spinshield} Pegge Sines, 62, of rural Edgerton, Ohio, . . . now pays $222 a month for her insurance from the Affordable Care Act marketplace, with a tax credit of $712 covering the rest. That $8,544 annual subsidy is more than twice the $4,000 annual tax credit she would get under the Republican plan. Ms. Sines’s son, who along with her other two grown children signed up for Medicaid under the expansion, has been warning that their coverage could be “in trouble,” she said. She cannot believe Mr. Trump would allow that to happen. “I can’t imagine them not keeping it like it is now,” said Ms. Sines, who runs a group home for the elderly. {Ms. Sines} did not vote for president, but her husband, a longtime factory worker who died of lung cancer in December, was an ardent Trump supporter. They had subsidized private insurance through the {Affordable Care Act - AKA. "Obamacare"} health care law that covered virtually all his treatment, she said. {Ms. Sines, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES! -- Spinshield} Source: "G.O.P.’s Health Care Tightrope Winds Through the Blue-Collar Midwest" By ABBY GOODNOUGH and JONATHAN MARTIN - NY Times - MARCH 19, 2017 Rhonda McCracken is a kindergarten teacher and a Republican who voted for President Trump. Now she’s wrestling with the consequences. McCracken’s deep-rooted conservatism is matched by a passion to support Tulsa Domestic Violence Intervention Services, a nonprofit that helped her flee an ex- who she says beat and choked her, once until unconsciousness. She became teary as she described how staff members at the organization helped her and her son escape that relationship. “They saved my life, and my son’s,” she said, her eyes liquid. So she is aghast that one of Trump’s first proposals is to cut federal funds that sustain the organization. “Why is building a wall more important than educating people?” asked Billy Hinkle, a Trump voter who is enrolled in a program called Tulsa WorkAdvance that trains mostly unemployed workers to fill well-paying manufacturing jobs. Trump has proposed eliminating a budget pot that pays for the program. Ezekiel Moreno, 35, a Navy veteran, was stocking groceries in a supermarket at night — “a dead-end job,” as he describes it — when he was accepted in WorkAdvance two years ago. That training led him to a job at M&M Manufacturing, which makes aerospace parts, and to steady pay increases. Moreno was sitting at a table with his boss, Rocky Payton, the factory’s general manager, and Amy Saum, the human resources manager. All said they had voted for Trump, and all were bewildered that he wanted to cut funds that channel people into good manufacturing jobs. Judy Banks, a 70-year-old struggling to get by, said she voted for Trump because “he was talking about getting rid of those illegals.” But Banks now finds herself shocked that he also has his sights on funds for the Labor Department’s Senior Community Service Employment Program, which is her lifeline. It pays senior citizens a minimum wage to hold public service jobs. Banks said she depends on the job to make ends meet “If I lose this job,” she said, “I’ll sit home and die.” Source: "In Trump Country, Shock at Trump Budget Cuts, but Still Loyalty" by Nicholas Kristof - NY Times - APRIL 1, 2017 |
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| Comments | Contributor | Date Submitted |
| Nope, not hard to gloat at all. Serves them right for voting for that buffoon. | Linda Denton |
11/20/2017 |
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