After backing Trump, low-income voters hope he doesn’t slash their benefits
https:// www.washingtonpost.com /nation/2024/12/26/trump-voters-federal-benefits-food/ After backing Trump, low-income voters hope he doesn’t slash their benefits
Summary
Low-income voters who supported Donald Trump are expressing concerns over potential cuts to government benefits as his administration pushes for aggressive spending reductions.
Trump’s newly announced “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is tasked with cutting programs, raising fears about impacts on social safety nets.
Trump also plans to shut down the Education Department, impose tariffs on imports from China, Mexico, and Canada, and has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health Secretary, signaling a focus on controversial health policies.
Voter anxieties about these shifts are growing.
Low income voters should demand taxing the wealthy, like multimillionaires and billionaires, more rather than just hoping for benefits
9it bothers me that so many commenters are excited about the idea of people suffering.
2I'm not excited, but I lost all empathy for fellow Americans who voted Trump this election. They will get what they voted for.
16They took a risk because the economy was already good
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/the-economy-has-been-great-under-biden-thats-why-trump-won
3I mean, this. The only way any average American is going to benefit from the Trump admin is if they are very active in the stock market and know what to look for. Most of the people that voted for Trump are barely making ends meet, and they're going to be in for a rude awakening when the housing market crashes in 1-2 years, tariffs have driven up the prices of everything, and social safety nets have been eliminated.
I voted for the competent adult, who would have done things to benefit 99% of Americans, but others wanted the tantrum baby. The market is going to go up, because taxes and regulations will be more lax, and also, that's what it tends to do, and I'll personally benefit profusely from it.
I'm not a Trump supporter. He's a fraud, idiot, and a national disgrace. But I have extensive savings, retirement accounts, stocks holdings, etc, so I'm going to benefit. That's all that Trump ever does, is give more to the people that already have it, because those are the only people he interacts with.
His struggles are with getting lenders and ideal interest rates on multi million dollar loans, and on trying to shield his assets from taxes, because good forbid he pay his fair share on the obscene amount of wealth he receives from a trust fund, and never actually earned.
If those aren't problems that you have, and you voted for Trump then you're going to have a rude awakening in store. Unfortunately you dragged the rest of us into this mess with you.
2
Voter anxieties about these shifts are growing.
Oh, NOW they're concerned? Not when we were all beating the drum telling these morons that Trump was going to fuck the country again?
God.
35Remembers the chorus of - "TDS"
1Yes but what about the trans people? Surely it will be worth losing their food stamps and Healthcare to ensure that trans people suffer, for some reason.
12
17Low income voters who supported Trump deserve what he does to them.
37It's not like he was secretive about how he was going to hose them?
22Some people are more concerned about punishing the people they don't think deserve things that they'll let themselves get caught up in the same bullshit.
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“He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich,” Mosura, 55, said on a recent afternoon. “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.”
Oh. My. God.
45How are these people real?
7Ive been saying in the distant past on both reddit and lemmy that most people are fundamentally stupid on a frightening level. Maybe i expressed it poorly. I take a george carlin perspective "think about the average person and how stupid they are and realize most of them are dumber than that". I see soo much potential and it seems to often be squandered on things that make me very disappointed in humanity.
I am of the opinion this is a nearly unsolvable issue now much like climate change. Id love to be proven wrong. But ive come to a personal conclusion we are reaching the start of a very slow extinction. Im not even trying to be doomer about this stuff or w.e. the reasoning i have is that i dont think you can solve the low intelligence problem easily at least without better education and education that incentivizes curiousity.
But i think you cant fix the system without people being intelligent or aware enough to understand what they are voting for. So i think the only real path out is the populace at large gaining an interest in curiousity and learning. And always countering their own beliefs or something to such an effect.
If one could influence the overall humand hivemind to make learning and curiousity cool again that might help too. Probably more than some government program or some such (id guess its "more natural" for people to accept)
But i dont think such things are likely to happen. But it would be nice if i am wrong.
For me i just need to take a long several years break. For everyone else. I leave it to them. Its a weird time to be alive. I dont know how best to process it. I guess "anyway you can".
4
I wish I could offer them some solace, but I can't. They are absolutely fucked. We are all fucked. This is going to take decades to recover from, and that's assuming we even can.
18If you vote for trump you deserve him.
32"He's not going to hurt the poor. He's too smart for that."
Oh, you infuriating fucking summer child. It'd be hilarious if I wasn't stuck in this hellbound handbasket with the rest of you fucking mongoloids.
120That's their logic .... they weren't thinking "He's not going to hurt the poor" ....
They were thinking "He's not going to hurt ME! He's going to hurt other people I don't like."
31A friendly reminder that "mongoloid" is a racist pejorative, and that the government of Mongolia literally ran a campaign decades ago to get people to stop doing it.
21I did not know that and will adjust accordingly.
7As much as I respect Ghengis Khan and his ilk, I will not stop listening to that Devo song.
6
Well they deserve their benefits unlike those other poors who are in a bad spot due to their own faults.
18See......I don't look at it that way. It's not funny to me, even if I weren't affected.
It's like watching a blind kitten running into a house that's on fire. I don't laugh at the soon to be burning kitten. I cry for the suffering that's about to take place.
Yes, the kitten chose to run into a burning house. Yes the kitten SHOULD HAVE known that's a bad idea.
.....but they didn't. They didn't know what they were truely doing. And now it's time to suffer from the obvious bad situation you just ran into.
Only difference is, the kitten fire is now affecting the whole country.
-10That's a bad analogy. In this situation, the kittens voted to set the house in fire because there's a puppy in a different room that they don't like and it will get burned too. It's hateful, willful ignorance and a desire to hurt others.
6Yeeeeaah... but see, your analogy not coincidentally fails, since the kitten is just ignorant.
It would be more accurate if the kitten ran into the burning house because some fat, smelly old tom told it that if it did, the tom and his buddies would destroy the lives of everyone the kitten hates.
So yeah - there's a lot of ignorance there, but the foundation that makes that ignorance relevant and effective is bigotry and hatred and an utter and complete lack of empathy or integrity. If the kitten wasn't so blinded by its hatred and cruelty, "run into this burning house to destroy someone else's life" wouldn't have been an effective appeal.
22
96I hate how this is always on fucking point. These people don't have empathy until it affects them in a personal way, then all of a sudden it's "who let this happen?!"
It was you, you fucking dipshits, by not having the emotional intelligence to be able to think for one second in another person's shoes or think out the end conclusion to a piece of rhetoric.
64That’s the party of personal responsibility for you.
12
Now they’re concerned?
63Also, killing Mexicans and Palestinians is still fine. They're just worried about their benefits.
I don't fully blame them. Our systems of news in this country are so bad that you can't hold them responsible, because they're in no way fully aware of what a nightmare Trump is going to be. But if their benefits is what wakes them up, with no other change happening in the news landscape, them fuck them and they deserve it.
42you can’t hold them responsible, because they’re in no way fully aware of what a nightmare Trump is going to be
if people choose to ignore what's right in front of their face, that's a choice they made, and are 100% responsible for. i hold them entirely responsible for being so willfully ignorant and motivated by pure hate. i wouldn't give a shit if their kindergarten-tier irresponsibility didn't affect everyone and not just them
25
Leopards will become morbidly obese in 6-12 months. Being stupid is expensive.
22Fuckem.
10All well and good to admire the leopard feast, but I'm worried about the fact that once these people are down and out, society is going to have to collectively carry them one way or another.
It's concerning that many people near the edge will fall off it, regardless of their voting position.
It's obviously concerning that since republican policy will be enacted, more will solely be covered via emergency services rather than collective safety nets, which is an overall cost increase to society.
19At this point, I'm convinced it's just a matter of regulating food
Every major revolution in history was more or less sparked and accelerated because people were starving. And when you have the choice of starving to death or doing something, anything, then most people will opt for action rather than dying.
So as long as you keep people fed .... you can abuse them, manipulate them, treat them with no respect and take away everything from them and the majority of them won't do a thing ... take away their food however, and they'll lash out like a wild animal.
This also doesn't mean that you keep people well fed ... it just means keeping enough food in their grasp to keep them from revolting.
8I wish more people realize this.
4To the downvotes:
I completely acknowledge that right wing policy is the problem here, and these people brought it about. If anyone deserves consequences, it should be those that actively brought them about.
I am not sympathetic for leopard chew toys, I'm sympathetic for society which has no option but to accommodate them.
5
America's version of Brexit is just starting. Wait to see what happens in 3 years' time!
6When our economy collapses due to the Musk/Trump "management" of it, then Musk/Trump/etc will need to start a hot war to put citizens to work and excuse vast new amounts of spending (financed with borrowing), mostly on the MIC. Just like Hitler did in the late 30s. Who the victim will be, I've no idea. The stupid little post-9/11 middle-eastern wars made MIC types richer but I don't think they greatly affected the US economy otherwise. No, I think we'll need a big war, against a fairly powerful opponent, to justify all of the "sacrifice" the domestic Poors are going to be asked to engage in. The opponent should be, ideally, a prime target for racial and cultural bigotry - a people that the Poors already think is gross. That'll boost the enlistment rates among their young, who'll be all too happy to sign up to murder whoever MAGA says is foul and hateable and responsible for the shit sandwiches that they've found on their plates. But will Musk/Trump try to take on a Russia or China or NK, opponents that might let fly with nukes? Wall St. won't be keen on that I think, and the billionaires own MAGA now, but still there'll be all those starving, diseased poors ... how will we protect billionaire wealth while maximally leveraging the poors' racism/bigotry and their desire to feel strong and important, to have a stage and to have at least a micro-MAGA-sized personal claim to glory?
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