Trump wants to chop down the $20 trillion debt on the backs of the poor and vulnerable while he jets off to his Florida White House every week at an astounding cost to us tax payers. (And then there’s the eye-popping cost of protecting his wife and son back in New York.)
We serve more than 2.4 million seniors each year. For the average cost of a one-month nursing home stay, we provide home-delivered meals 5 days a week [as we have] for approximately 7 years.”
— Response from Meals On Wheels to Donald Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney, who took a cheap shot at Meals On Wheels Thursday
How is it that ultra-conservatives always and forever find enough money for defense spending that continues to give us the likes of the F-35 fighter jet: an epic boondoggle of massively expensive proportions that our tax dollars keep feeding?
With his Slash and Burn Economics, President Trump has proposed an increase of $54 billion in defense spending while drastically cutting funding for, well… everything!
Above all, anything that might benefit low-income seniors like Meals On Wheels, which got trashed by Trump’s budget director Thursday, and at-risk children programs that work (contrary to what the budget director said).
I’m a “yuge” (to use the President’s favorite word) fan of New Yorker magazine’s political satirist Andy Borowitz who tweeted this:
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Donald J. Trump’s budget cuts virtually all funding for the humanities while spending billions on the inhumanities.
And this:
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It doesn’t seem like Donald J. Trump needs to increase the defense budget so much when he’s only declaring war on the poor, the sick and the elderly.
Indeed, this is takes The War on Poverty and transforms it into The War the Most Vulnerable–the people that Jesus stood in radical solidarity with.
As if the poor can afford to save money for their health care as the Obamacare replacement proposal presumes.
So if we have to deal with the nation’s runaway spending and $20 trillion debt–which I agree wholeheartedly has to be dealt with–we don’t have to do it on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable. And this while those who make Trump money will make out, as usual, like bandits from his health-care plan and tax cuts.
Along with the military industrial complex that the prophetic President and war hero Dwight Eisenhower warned of when I was 7 years old.
Navy pilots hate this machine, which has a 20-year history of expensive problems.
Ike’s warning was a lot of years and a tremendous amount of wasted tax dollars ago.
And by the way–here’s some breaking news:
The U.S. already spends more more on its military than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, France, India, and Germany — combined.
*I make one passing reference to President Trump in my book The View From Down in Poordom: Reflections on Scriptures Addressing Poverty.
That single reference is in the context of a few words comparing him to a compassionate billionaire worth multiple billions more than the President.
But the book was written largely, though not entirely, in response to the Trump mentality that leads to bashing and scapegoating the poor for all our economic woes–as I point out in the Introduction.
The good thing about Trump, from where I sit, is that he’s made my book so timely and relevant.
Or at Amazon here.
Der Rev. Paul,
As an older person, with more than one “minor” disability, I find I cannot cook any longer. I do, however, have an IHSS provider who helps keep my small studio (w/cat) clean and tidy.
BUT, as I no longer cook – not safely, anyway – means I must depend on Meals On Wheels for my nutrition.
In a preliminary interview, they take my health needs into consideration and their dietician, at lest in the San Francisco Bay Area, turns out some marvelous meals.
I do miss cooking, but I am so unsteady and unsafe, I am glad and grateful to the “Holy One of Israel” I need simply pop the meal into the microwave for 5 minutes and *voila!* a hot meal ready to go on the table.
For instance, Friday, St. Patrick’s feast day, while it is a Friday in Lent and I would very much have preferred a fish meal, we got corned beef and cabbage, with potato. I called the office to thank her, and deferred the baked fish dish to tonight, Saturday.
Also, I look forward to my visits from the volunteers: their birthday and Christmas gifts – not extravagant, mind you, but thoughtful.
And this Mulvaney creature wants to cut this service? I guess he and Trump will be happy if I just DIE IN THE GUTTER!
I want to remind Mr. Trump and Mr. Mulvaney of the Reagan curse. He, too, did terrible things to older citizens, unthinking things, with the result that the “Ancient of Days” caused him to die a terrible, lingering death.
Time and again we see the Scripture lived out before our very eyes, yet we are “too” sophisticated to believe such things!
As the Apostle warns: (Hebrews 10:31) It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
Evidently, the Trump Cabinet are too greedy to understand this simple precept! I shall pray for them.
Thank you, once again, for addressing issues of moment in the public forum.