Oh, by all means let’s see what the Trump voters are thinking todayby digby
I was really getting worried that we hadn’t taken the Trump voters’ temperatures in a couple of weeks to see how they’re doing. How can we judge the health of the country if we don’t keep up with the only important citizens within it? Luckily, CNN visited some Trump voters in Kentucky to see how they’re doing economically since their man was elected. They still love him, of course, and they are excited that he’s going to bring back coal and they’re re-opening a private prison there to house all the new felons from the opioid crisis which is ravaging their state. Good news. And they are excited about the prospect of a booming tourist industry because they live in a beautiful environment that attracts outdoors enthusiasts from other areas. Coal mining destroying that environment doesn’t seem to be a big concern.
Eastern Kentucky has long received aid via the Appalachian Regional Commission, which dispenses grants for everything from job training to trail building. Money has also been available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Economic Development Program, which funds local utilities; the Abandoned Mine Lands program, a fund supplied by payments from coal companies; and the Economic Development Administration, which has focused on helping communities left behind by coal.
The budget proposal Trump submitted last spring would have eliminated all of those programs. The area’s congressional representatives — including Kentucky’s senior senator, Mitch McConnell — protested the cuts, which local economic development professionals say would devastate the area.
The programs have been funded in the stopgap budget measures Congress has passed so far. But some local activists think the threat might lead to a needed shakeup among the federal agencies that have failed to turn around the area’s economic prospects, despite millions of dollars and decades of work.
“They have become very habitual in how they fund things,” says Chuck Caudill, a former local newspaper editor who is planning a run for Lee County judge. “I think that that will inject in the ARC the desire and the need to be more innovative.”A boarded up store along Main Street in Beattyville.
Another threat on the horizon: Trump and congressional Republicans are targeting welfare. That jeopardizes the benefits that many people in this town rely on, including cash assistance, disability payments and food stamps, which more than a third of households in Lee County receive.
Then there’s health care. Kentucky expanded Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act under its previous Democratic governor, and the uninsured rate dropped from 14.3% in 2013 to 5.1% in 2016, the ninth lowest rate in the country.
More than half of Lee County’s residents are covered by Medicaid. Kentucky’s current Republican governor says it’s too expensive and has requested a federal waiver that would cut an estimated 96,000 people from the rolls, according to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.
The article explains that a lot of people who are getting benefits are also working it’s just that their jobs don’t pay wages high enough to support their families so they qualify for Medicaid and food stamps. But many of the locals don’t see it that way:
None of that has been felt yet in Beattyville, however. And some of those who are just above the threshold for public assistance say they wouldn’t necessarily object to seeing it go away.
Leighandra Shouse doesn’t qualify for Medicaid and hasn’t been able to afford insurance through her husband’s job or on the Obamacare exchange. She’s visited the local health clinic a few times for pain in her leg, since they charge on a sliding scale, but says she isn’t getting the specialist treatment that might solve the problem.
“The people that are the ones that’s working, we’re the needy ones,” says Shouse. “Are those people that’s being handed everything free, are they going to go out and fill out an application for a job?”
She is needy, although one wonders how it can be that they can’t afford insurance for her through either her husband’s job or the ACA. I have my doubts if that’s true. And it’s unclear if this person works herself. But in any case, her attitude is common. She needs it more than other people because those other people are lazy and refuse to work.
That’s part of what fuels Trumpism, the idea that these are the hard-working Real Americans who deserve the government’s help and they aren’t getting enough of it while a bunch of free-loaders, usually foreigners or blacks, are getting everything. It never occurs to them that they’re all getting screwed and they’re getting screwed by rich billionaires like Donald Trump.
But you knew that … we’ve always known that. They’d rather throw in their lot with the rich white guy than the browns and the blacks any day. And they don’t much like poor whites either.
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