While stealing from the poor and from the barely surviving middle class Trump’s budget is handing me
through the Veterans Admin an extra six percent.

So why should I care about everyone else’s cuts in food stamps, school lunches, food pantries, laid-off job retraining,
low income rent help, medical and breast cancer research, Head Start and help for slow students? Even though
once I was one of those “disadvantaged students”.

I’ve got mine. And the four star generals and ICEmen have theirs. Down in the militarized southern states
they love the butchered budget.

For the moment Social Security and Medicare are “safe” though the GOP wolves are prowling closer.

SS and Medicare are temporarily untouched because they happen to benefit Trump’s white working class voters who,
according to latest Census Bureau stats, DO NOT BENEFIT, repeat DO NOT benefit, from means-tested “welfare” stuff like
Meals On Wheels, child-help centers and low income rent aid.

Do the math.

Among families with incomes above the poverty line — just making it at over $24,000 for a family of four — only 13 percent
of non-Hispanic whites take money from welfare programs. Compared to 42% of African Americans and 36% of Hispanics.

Race matters.

So working class whites curse welfare as a con, invented by us, to give their tax money to lazy, sexually loose,
law breaking “minorities” while they, heroes of their own struggles, get zip.

In all our talk of “resistance” let’s ask ourselves. Why should a Trump voter change their mind and return the next
sure-to-lose Democratic hopeful when our candidate dare not retreat on “giveaway” programs that pisses them off?

Yet we cannot save what’s left of the safety net without capturing The Great White Conservative Them who couldn’t
care less about Black Live Matter, LGBT and the rest of our liberal values.

Melville’s Captain Ahab was fueled by revenge and hatred, certainly not love, when he tried harpooning his whie whale
only to be drowned by it and his own arrogance.

Do the math, again.


*************
p.s. Thanks to Eduardo Porter’s NYT 7 March economics column and Joan C. Williams’s “White Working Class:
Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.”