McDowell County, West Virginia—the birthplace of the food-stamps program—is watching its security internet collapse attributable to President Donald Trump’s home coverage legislation.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy despatched his agriculture secretary at hand out meals playing cards to a miner’s household in Welch, launching the pilot that may turn out to be the fashionable Supplemental Vitamin Help Program, or SNAP. Right now, most of the county’s 17,000 residents depend on SNAP. Greater than half of the kids are enrolled within the Youngsters’s Well being Insurance coverage Program, and one-third of seniors depend upon Medicaid.
Now the Related Press studies that new eligibility restrictions embedded in Trump’s new legislation will tighten entry to SNAP, hitting counties like McDowell particularly arduous—locations the place a 3rd of the inhabitants lives under the poverty line. Nonprofits that have been already on the brink are shedding employees or burning by means of reserves simply to remain afloat. As Rosemary Ketchum, the manager director of the West Virginia Nonprofit Affiliation, advised the AP, “These federal cuts are ravenous folks.”
Final 12 months, Trump gained 79% of the vote in McDowell County.
West Virginia isn’t simply one of many poorest states within the nation—it’s additionally one of many reddest, and it’s the third-most dependent on federal help. It’s a real triumph of conservative culture-war politics that the individuals who most depend upon authorities companies are those voting for the get together that destroys these companies. These persons are voting for their very own demise, cheering the most recent assault on a transgender child whereas their meals help vanishes.
And since West Virginia depends so closely on federal cash, it’s absorbing the complete weight of Trump’s insurance policies. Coal jobs vanish, Medicaid shrinks, meals applications dry up, catastrophe reduction disappears—and but MAGA devotion stays untouched. Republican governors in crimson states, happy with their rock-bottom tax charges, are actually privately begging Trump to not lower the federal help they will’t reside with out. In West Virginia, federal {dollars} make up practically 50% of the state funds. However that doesn’t cease them from ranting about so-called socialism in California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington—the very states subsidizing them.
And but we liberals by no means complained about that association. We have been completely happy to assist the much less lucky—sure, together with white folks in dirt-poor Appalachia. And the way did they repay that generosity? By voting for the man who’s now gutting the very applications protecting them alive.
West Virginia isn’t alone, after all. As I famous in my story on how crimson counties depend upon the very authorities they hate, that is the nationwide sample. Us coastal elites have been subsidizing these salt-of-the-earth, bootstrap sorts for many years. And McDowell County stands out as the clearest instance but: The place is totally reliant on federal {dollars}, and it’s now being crushed by the insurance policies of lawmakers it helped elect.
The folks of McDowell County helped create SNAP. Now they’re more likely to lose a lot of it—not as a result of it failed, however as a result of they voted for leaders who see federal applications because the enemy, not the answer. And people cuts aren’t theoretical. They’re meals skipped, hospitals closing, and seniors going hungry.
Don’t fear—most individuals in McDowell will nonetheless discover a solution to blame Democrats like Joe Biden or Barack Obama for his or her distress. The MAGA cult is tough to flee, and West Virginia is all in. All we will do is shake our heads and marvel at this ongoing, breathtaking act of self-destruction.
