Dear Editor:
Our US representative, Jeff Hurd, came to town and told us how compassionate he is (wanted to be a priest) and then went ahead and voted for the bill that will cut food stamps and Medicaid for his constituents. I wrote to him about this, pointing out that cutting food and medicine for his poorer constituents didn’t seem very compassionate, especially since they are in service to extending tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy and corporations.
Jeff wrote back that ending the tax cuts would cost his average constituent about $1400. I call BS on this. Averaging the taxes of his richest and poorest constituents is very misleading. Lower income people pay lower taxes than the wealthy — if the middle or working class needs a tax break after the Trump tax breaks expire, then our representatives could actually do their job and legislate — you know, come up with a fairer tax law. We have endured over 40 years of the trickle down/supply side experiment and it is a failure — it has resulted in funneling vast fortunes away from the middle class and into the coffers of the obscenely rich who, as it turns out, do not reinvest and hire more people — they just hoard and buy back shares. It’s time they pay their share and this should be an obvious first step in resolving the deficit issue.
The Medicaid cuts in this bill endanger the survival of our local Medical Center. Additionally, it claws back billions of dollars for manufacturing projects, some of which are incomplete — some of which is broadband for rural areas. It ends programs that help small farmers, notably the Farm to School and Farm to Food Bank programs, which was a $2 billion market for farmers. Also, this bill prohibits states from enacting any laws controlling AI for 10 years! There is more terrible in this bill and I had intended to spend this whole letter admonishing Jeff Hurd but then our president mobilized the National Guard in California.
People, this is bad. Our president wants to be an autocrat and obviously doesn’t care about state rights — he did not consult with California’s governor when mobilizing those troops and his Immigration czar, Tom Homan, has 500 marines at Camp Pendleton on alert — to combat US citizens who are exercising their first amendment rights.
That bill Hurd signed adds astonishing amounts of funding to ICE. Since no one is coming across the border anymore, that means that all of the action will be in our cities and towns. They are taking away the people who work, at their work. Not criminals, but workers and neighbors. These people pay taxes and never ever get to access any of the entitlements of tax paying citizens — they pay in but never withdraw. Once ICE gets around to Big Ag and the meat packing plants, food is going to get even more expensive. But that will be only one of the many inconveniences of living in a police state.
Lee Stopher
