The only good thing for me to personally emerge from the disaster that we are going through is that I have stopped paying too much attention to political news and have used the released time for other things. But I still read some articles and was struck by this one that looked at the reactions of poor people in one area of Pennsylvania about how they viewed the future under a Trump administration that has vowed to cut the federal budget by huge amounts.
The sad thing is that many of them are under the delusion that the cuts will affect other people, not them, that they will be magically spared and even benefited, because they think that Trump really cares about them and that cutting money spent on these other freeloaders will leave more for them.
Lori Mosura goes to the grocery store on a bicycle because she can’t afford to fix her Ford F-150 truck.
The single mother and her 17-year-old son live in an apartment that is so small she sleeps in the dining room. They receive $1,200 each month in food stamps and Social Security benefits but still come up short. Mosura said she often must decide whether to buy milk or toilet paper.
It was all that penny-pinching that drove the part-time tax consultant to abandon the Democratic Party this fall and vote for Donald Trump.
“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.”
…Mosura said she has been unable to find full-time work in her field and is planning to change her party affiliation to Republican. But she also gets anxious when she hears GOP politicians talk about reducing government spending.
“We helped get you in office; please take care of us,” Mosura said, shifting the conversation as though she were speaking to Trump. “Please don’t cut the things that help the most vulnerable.”
One cannot help but shake one’s head at this since every sign is that Trump and his cronies are taking aim at the very things that have been providing the poor with even some assistance.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — whom Trump has chosen to lead a new nongovernmental advisory panel, the “Department of Government Efficiency” — have said they want to trim $2 trillion from the government’s annual budget, a cut that some experts say could be accomplished only by slashing entitlement programs. Trump’s pick for White House budget director was a key architect of Project 2025, a plan drawn up by conservatives to guide his second term that calls for steep cuts to programs such as food stamps. And GOP leaders in Congress and Trump advisers are considering significant changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other federal aid.
Others have bought into the hoary old bogus idea that the federal budget is full of ‘fat’ that can be cut without cutting the programs that benefit them.
Steve Tillia, 59, receives $1,600 a month in Social Security disability payments and $300 in food stamps to support himself and his son. Tillia, who said he is unable to work after suffering from mini strokes, still drives around New Castle with a Trump flag anchored on the bumper of his SUV.
Tillia said he’s confident that Trump and GOP leaders will reduce spending by “cutting the fat” out of government — and not slashing benefits.
“It’s not cutting government programs, it’s cutting the amount of people needed to run a program,” he said. “They are cutting staff, which could actually increase the amount of the programs that we get.”
Tillia’s neighbor, Dawn Simmons, nodded her head in agreement. Simmons receives $900 a month in Social Security benefits and $171 a month in food stamps, and she also said Trump’s decisions may even lead to enhanced benefits in the coming years because he plans to “put Americans first.”
…But as Kathy Davis sat in the “smokers patio” at the Riverside Apartments, she said she is as confident as ever that Trump’s presidency will benefit her.
Davis, a retired artist, subsists on a monthly $1,300 Social Security payment and $75 in food stamps. She rents her studio apartment for $385 per month. Asked whether she worries that Trump’s agenda could hurt the poor, Davis said the incoming president is “too smart for that.”
“You can’t wipe out half of the population” of New Castle, Davis said. “We are old and tired and just want to be taken care of, and Trump has too much common sense, so I don’t think he is going to do anything to hurt us.”
Will these people turn on Trump and his cronies when he does cut their programs? While it would be nice to see Trump & Co. crash and burn as a result of their overweening hubris and arrogance, the problem is that a lot of highly vulnerable people will be harmed by their actions.
I am at a late stage of life where whatever he does will not affect me personally that much but that is small consolation. These people are living on the edge. When the cuts come, there will be little that they can cut in their personal budgets to absorb the blow and I shudder at what will happen to them.
Indeed. It’s sad as hell.
It is sad indeed. And they will suffer even if the Trump administration is too incompetent to actually do what they want to do which is to cut most or all of the so-called entitlement programs because the tariffs and the war on immigrants and immigration will cause inflation on almost everything but especially on basic necessities such as food and lodging.
If they thought they have it hard now, they haven’t seen anything yet. But I don’t think they’ll actually blame Trump for it. They’ll somehow find some other scapegoat and remain blind to reality.
You know who I feel sorry for? Anyone who pays for tax advice from the first moron in the story above. I also feel sorry for all the people that voted in their own interest but will suffer because these drooling morons voted for their magic orangutan. I mean, what do you say to “too smart for that.” or “Trump has too much common sense”? Have they ever actually heard him speak?
Sadly, these dopes won’t “turn on Trump and his cronies when he does cut their programs,” instead they’ll blame Democrats for not stopping him.
Sorry all, reading this just really makes me dyspeptic in the head (and stomach!)
Indeed. And still too fresh for me to feel what I’d call “sad.” We’re all gonna suffer here, not just this select group of dimwits. Many decent, intelligent people also depend on these social programs.
No, they will not. They will continue to rationalize their beliefs.
@Jean #2
Correct.
These people have been abandoned by the libertarian style neo-capitalism of the US, and neither party really is going to do anything to help. So they feel abandoned by Democrats -- is it a surprise they turn to a cult leader that promises he can fix it all? The story is too compelling for them. When the benefits decrease they will blame the deep state, or immigrants or who knows what, but it won’t be Trump they blame.
probably also blame the draft-dodging brats who refuse to commit to really winning the war against the canadian-danish-mexican triple alliance. this is going to be cosmically depressing and darkly hilarious, some dr. strangelove shit from hell. absolutely mind-rending and soul-crushing to see what these trumpists think like, to see what the human species is made out of, what rules us all at the end of the day.
@6: you nailed it. “Draft-dodging brats” but no women allowed in the military. A comedian pointed out the senselessness of the conservative mindset: “You longtime married, stable couples who want IVF: NO babies for you! You 10-year-old impregnated by your mother’s boyfriend: ALL the babies for you!”
Priorities.
@Holms; but they’re sure the leopards they just voted into office will never eat THEIR faces. No, they’re deserving. It’s those other people who are leeches on the system.
Mano said: hoary old bogus idea that the federal budget is full of ‘fat’ that can be cut without cutting the programs that benefit them.
This is not -entirely- a bogus idea. Those 200 USD hammers are now 2000 USD hammers. The 700 dollar toilet seats are now 7000 dollars. Our marines died in the Pacific off the coast of Japan because they were ordered to not replace the defective crony-created porkbarrel seats in their aircraft with their own. The helmets for that hangar queen F-35 are hand-crafted, as are all of our old B-52 repair parts. As Marcus has (repeatedly) pointed out, no discussion of cutting the budget is sane unless you are willing to consider reducing that massive up totally outrageous bloat that describes our horrific military budget.
Perhaps you are eliding something of what you meant by this, out of politeness?
Homelessness is soaring. And will get worse, probably, under the Trump administration. (Why would he approve any kind of relief for tenants when he is himself a landlord?) You have to have an address to vote. The homeless have no address. So a large chunk of disaffected poor voters will not have the right to vote him or his crowd out of office in 4 years.
#8 Oops, I forgot to include the reason I quoted that segment about Lori: she is in that situation, yet thought it reasonable to by an F-150.
@12, Holms, I wouldn’t read too much into that.
I’ve been looking for a used F150 and you can get one for <$2000. Lori may have had it for a long time, it may have been cheap, or it may even have been given to her. When I was ready to replace mine the trade-in value was $500, and I found someone who really needed a reliable vehicle who was willing to purchase it from me for that amount.
That being said, Lori appears to be unaware that the policies which have led to her being unable to find work or having a solid enough social safety net to survive are due to corporations more concerned with stock value (which is largely meaningless to companies) then with their employees. While the republican party has been the primary driver of enabling the wealthy to gain more wealth, the democratic party has been complicit to some extent as well.
I don't think it's all that surprising that poorly-informed voters who are struggling to make ends meet vote against whoever's in power, or for someone who presents as an outsider who will change things for the better.
sea change @#10,
I would agree that much of the defense budget is waste. But when people talk about cutting the ‘fat’ out of the federal budget, they are NEVER talking about the defense budget. That is considered sacred.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262742/countries-with-the-highest-military-spending/
[my bolding]
I can’t post pictures here but encourage people to click the link and get some perspective on the US “defense” budget.
@ Holms
Dude, it literally says she, “can’t afford to fix it”. Weird that in your head that translated to impoverished people buying cars. I could say more in very strongly worded language but Mano is quite rightly trying to discourage infighting so I am obliged to refrain. X-D
And how was it acquired in the first place, sbob? Flex makes a point in his response at #13, you could learn from that example.
This comment will be a little off-topic, and it will likely be a little long. So feel free to skip it if you wish. It’s about something which I often have to remind myself; “Beware of the Fnords”.
Many people here are probably already aware of Robert Anton Shea’s and Robert Wilson’s sprawling Illuminati Trilogi. I read it a few times in my teens, many years ago now, and it was my introduction to such disparate topics as anarcho-capitalism and Jacques De Molay. It was my introduction, in a fictional way, to how conspiracy theorists pull together random topics and make connections between them. It also has a lot of sex and drugs in it, candy for the adolescent male mind. This trilogy predates (I believe) the now ubiquitous trope of a bulletin board covered with papers, stick-pins, and yarn, supposedly showing connections between assumed unconnected topics. But that’s probably the best analogy for the work. A conspiracy-theorists bulletin board; connected by strings of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.
One of the concepts in this paranoia-fueled trilogy, besides preventing Hitler from ascending to godhood after living in Argentina since WWII, was the concept of the “Fnord”. In the novel, all first-grade American children are taught under hypnosis that the word “fnord” does not exist, it is not a word, and has to be ignored. The result of this hypnosis is that if a person, even into adulthood, sees the word, “fnord”, they will no longer consciously see it, but it will impinge on their unconscious mind. This discontinuity between the conscious and unconscious mind gives that person a tiny smidgeon of anxiety. An anxious person can more easily become a fearful person, and a fearful person doesn’t think as clearly and is likely to see change as dangerous, not as an opportunity for growth. According to the novels, this whole exercise is done by the Federal Department of Education in conjunction with Herbert Hoover and the FBI in order to prevent civil unrest, aka the civil rights movement, legalization of marijuana, women’s liberation, cultural acceptance of homosexuals, and hippies.
Now, there is a vanishing probability of the Federal Department of Education doing this to all children in public schools. But the concept of a word, or phrase, used in media to generate anxiety or evoke an opinion, or re-enforce an opinion which the viewer has already been exposed to is certainly a possibility. The quoted sections in the OP are, in fact, doing so. There are fnords in those sentences, possibly included even without the writer’s knowledge.
There is a trope of poor people purchasing items far beyond their means. People who live on $30,000/year, renting a trailer in a trailer-park, but buying an overpriced but culturally-centered, vehicle, like an F150. A new F150 starts at ~$40,000 and can easily pass $80,000. Currently a $40,000 vehicle on a 5-year loan, no money down or trade-in, would be looking at ~$750/mo car payment. Someone with a $30,000/year income (which is a little more than $1000/mo after-taxes) probably should not be spending 3/4 of their income on a car payment. And they probably aren’t. But I’ve seen myself expensive new SUVs turning into trailer parks. The natural assumption that I make is that these vehicles are driven by people who live there. The reality is that I don’t have enough information to make that assumption, but my mind does it anyway because of cultural influences.
So, there is this cultural idea that people purchase trucks and SUVs because they are obeying the advertisements which tell is American’s that we need these big vehicles to carry our bicycles to the park or because they are safer on the roads. We also have a lot of people in our media telling us that these vehicles are over priced, waste petrol, and not used for the functions they are ostensibly designed for (e.g. SUVs which are never driven even on dirt roads, let alone off-road). Then we have this cultural idea that poor people are more easily manipulated by this advertising, and they are living beyond their means. We also have a cultural idea that poor people are more likely to be proud of their cars (e.g. The Dukes of Hazard). And finally we see reports and often personally witness expensive vehicles in poor neighborhoods.
All these cultural ideas combine when we read something about a poor person who drives an SUV. I had the same initial reaction as Holms when reading the quoted text. My reaction was, “What is this person driving an F150 for? They are expensive vehicles!” I would be surprised if Holms and I were alone in our initial reading, there is a full cultural history leading us to that conclusion. However, one word added to the quoted text would have changed how I read it, or how Holms would have read it, adding the word “old” in front of F150.
And here is where we go back to the concept of a fnord. Words which change how the reader/viewer understands the concept being presented which are added, or left out, of the communication might as well be called “fnords”. These can be intentional, like the dog-whistles we all know about. Or they can be unintentional, and the quoted text in the OP was probably unintentional. Fnords can be adjectives which are known to be prejudicial, like stating the race of a captured criminal, e.g. “a black man was arrested today for threatening a white woman at a gas station.”, while there is a whole lot of unknown information in that example sentence, the races of the people involved are really irrelevant, but mentioning them reinforces certain already established stereotypes. While I would like to think that any person who threatens someone else gets a talking to, for all we know from that sentence the complaint of being threatened was baseless.
So, how do we identify and avoid the fnords? Simply put, we can’t. Not all of them. The best we can do is to be aware that they exist and when some topic comes up for discussion we can try to understand what is, and what isn’t, being said.
I tried to gently remind Holms above that we don’t know from the quoted text if the broken F150 was purchased new or used. It would make more sense, and seems more likely, that it was a used F150 which was in need of repair. But, there really is no evidence either way. Lori may be trying to make payments on a new F150. Human beings do get themselves into those types of situations. It may be less plausible, but it is possible. But the author of the quoted text, inadvertently or deliberately, pushed us into thinking the F150 was purchased new. Because, as explained above, that is a current cultural trope. If the author had written, “Lori Mosura goes to the grocery store on a bicycle because she can’t afford to fix her old truck.”, the meaning is the same, but it does not invoke the fnord. Experienced journalists, writers, and editors know this, although they may use other terms to describe it. Expect more fnords with the introduction of AI into journalism. The very nature of AI means that it will generate more of them and be unable to detect them.
My wife and I play a game, which is usually pretty good for road trips. One of us selects a news story, usually one where the motivations of the people in the story don’t make sense, often a Florida Man story, and we concoct out of our imaginations a series of rational, logical, steps for someone to end up in that situation. We also come up with absurd progressions of events. It’s a fun game and provokes a great deal of laughter. This game of looking at what is reported in an article, and trying to guess what was left out, seems to help identifying the fnords, and also helps us to maintain perspective. I observe new vehicles entering a trailer park; what other explanations are possible beyond that of the residents wasting their money? I can come up with half a dozen without cracking a sweat, and so can everyone else. But we have been trained,culturally, to jump to the conclusion that the residents are spend-thrifts, and if we don’t think about it that conclusion remains. Even if we don’t think deeply about everything we encounter, and we can’t, we should be aware that our thoughts are influenced by our culture, that we rarely get the full story on any news report, and that our initial reactions could be greatly mistaken.
Beware the Fnords!
A fnord I see here is this: the attack on the idea that the poor deserve help.
Because really, as someone who pays a high level of tax due to high earnings, I read about these people and my first reaction is that I hope they starve and haven’t been able to successfully breed. And then I have to remind myself that there ARE people who deserve the help wasted on these morons, and that cutting that help will affect them, too. I have to remind myself that no, you don’t execute criminals, you house and feed and educate them. (“You” in this case being the people in civilised countries, not the USA, obviously).
Stories above seem explicitly designed to make me forget those priniciples, even if only for a moment. They are poison.
It’s not the car ownership here that brought me up short. “Unable to work”, but able to (and still legally allowed to) DRIVE??? Er… no. If you can drive, you can work. If you’ve suffered BRAIN DAMAGE that makes you unfit to work there’s no way you should be allowed to operate a motor vehicle. I do hope someone from the DMV picks up on this…
Excellent comment flex
I live in Clearfield county, Pa.
Back in 2016 I paid $2500 for my Tahoe, which had 123,000 miles on it. Used car prices have gone up somewhat but there just isn’t enough excess cash around here for the dealers to suck it out of people’s pockets. One big consideration is parts. Even though I’d have rather driven a Honda, I got the Tahoe because every local garage can repair a GMC truck, replacement parts are cheap, and the junk yards are full of salvageable components. I can’t think of anyone in my neighborhood who drives a new car.
There are a few folks who we often see walking by the side of the road, and sometimes I stop and pick them up, except for the one guy who always tries to get a $5 off you and then asks to be let out across the street from the liquor store.
When I got the Tahoe it was in great shape; the paint was good and I put new tires on it and a light bar and brush guards (I legitimately need them, you’d agree if you saw my driveway) I’m sure someone might look at that truck and think it was a single-owner vehicle I paid list price for, but really nobody with any brains buys a new GMC product.
I don’t think the schools teach critical thinking. Every election I’ve been here the republicans put up signs to the effect that the democrats will grab everybody’s guns. So far, we’ve never tried. In fact the democrats continue to disappoint me with their weak attempts at doing anything about gun control -- tell me democrats how “we are going to get AR-15s off the streets” equates to making it harder to sell new AR-15s but I can still swing by Grice’s and buy one without a waiting period. It is disappointing as hell because the democrats’ way of dealing with republican bullshit, here, is to deal bullshit of their own.
I’ve talked about some of this stuff with some of my neighbors. One guy, who I bought some oak tree rounds off of, said he didn’t want any “creeping socialism” so I started to explain socialism to him. As it happened, he lives pretty well on social security and his pension from the WAL-MART warehouse. He said he thought the union was corrupt, anyway. So we talked about how the steel workers’ unions were corrupted by the companies, to take deals that the members would never agree to if they understood them. We talked about how the evil Chinese had stolen all the job and I had to carefully explain that it was not the Chinese that stole the jobs, it was the capitalists that moved the jobs to China because negotiating with even the corrupted unions was just too much for them.
This is Appalachia, and it’s not the Appalachia VP Vance thinks he comes from. People out here aren’t stupid. They’re just badly educated and have been fed a steady diet of lies. Their ancestors came here because Stalin was starving Ukraine to reallocate land ownership, and abandoning everything to come the America and work in a steel mill or coal mine was an improvement. My Norwegian ancestors came here during the potato blights, as did the Irish half of my family. From there on, successive waves of immigrants stole eachothers’ jobs until the capitalists offshored them. Trump does not, of course, understand anything about the US labor market.
If you haven’t seen Harlan County it is a pretty good look at what Appalachia was like in the 60s. In the 60s I was in the south of France, where honestly things were no better or worse. The peasants still brought in the hay with ox carts, and if you had a medical problem, you had to tough it out. Education there was nonexistent, too. I can’t help but think of that whenever the republicans start attacking public education. It’s not so far away. One computer security genius I used to work with was the first child from his county to go to college, and graduated with honors from MIT. He grew up in a house with a dirt floor and remembers when the electricity came. Clearfield County where I live is like the French Riviera compared to deep Tennessee.
I vehemently object to the politics of the people in the story. As far as I can tell, with their votes they’ve committed something like the financial version of a murder suicide.
But I don’t think that makes them less worthy of having a roof over their heads or food on their tables. These are basic human rights and I can’t see anything good from treating people as less than human solely because of their political views. I certainly don’t want the power to inflict misery and death on others just because they disagree with me. Frankly, that weird desire to force people to conform is exactly the problem I have with the sort of politician these people voted for. Why would I want to act the same way?
There’s also the rather poignant issue of how to actually get some of these people to make better choices. Unless your answer to that is voter suppression (which I would also disagree with) then the only path is through helping them. When they’re desperate, this is how they vote. It kind of sucks to give them what they want for making lousy choices for all of us, but realistically what’s the alternative? Pray they stop?