President Donald Trump’s golden campaign promise of a better life for Americans has morphed into Oval Office gilt and a glittering $300 million ballroom, even as the Trump administration is emptying the grocery carts of 42 million Americans and forcing higher health costs on as many as 24 million of us.
Starting Saturday, almost 3 million Floridians will be among those losing federal money to help put food on the table. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is suspending its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, citing the government shutdown’s impact on spending.
“Bottom line, the well has run dry,” the agency wrote on its website. Then it blamed Democrats. Then it veered from food into rambling about “gender mutilation” schemes.
Democrats have rightly refused to sign off on the current budget bill. If they relent, the tax credits that keep health insurance affordable for up to 24 million Americans under the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare are wiped out. Without the credits, the cost of policies being purchased or renewed is expected to more than double.
Florida gets hurt twice
So Floridians get hurt either way.
As the nation’s third most populous state, Florida also has more SNAP recipients than all but the two bigger states, Texas and California. They need the food program running in order to eat. But South Florida also has some of the highest concentrations of people on Obamacare. They desperately need the tax credits to keep their health insurance.
The reason Floridians need federal food assistance is the same reason they need Obamacare.
For years, Florida leaders have been content to grow a benefit-poor economy dominated by low-wage service workers, and the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid has left it with a far higher percentage of residents who depend on the ACA Marketplace.
Glittering talk about South Florida as a prosperous “Wall Street South” does not truly represent most people living here. Seniors can’t afford their medicines. Rent costs $2,000 a month for a cramped one-bedroom unit. Working moms have to buy groceries with a credit card at 22% interest — that’s the new Florida economy.
Our miserly governor
Gov. Ron DeSantis sneers at Obamacare, saying it isn’t worth the money. But like his predecessor, Gov. Rick Scott, he also refuses to expand Medicaid, which would have helped Floridians who use Obamacare.
As for the cutoff of grocery help, to date there has been silence on whether DeSantis and the Legislature will tap billions of state reserves to help Florida’s most vulnerable citizens eat. The emergency is real, the money is there, and hurricane season is almost over.
The Trump administration also has more than $5 billion squirreled away by the Department of Agriculture to fund SNAP in case of an emergency, but it refuses to spend that money. The feds’ explanation: The money can only be used when there’s not enough money from Congress; if there is no money at all from Congress, it can’t be touched.
Pardon the food analogy, but this is slicing the baloney awfully thin. It’s made worse because it comes from an administration that routinely flouts both Congress and the Constitution to spend money any way it wants.
Rising grocery prices
And if there were any doubt that the Trump administration has stooped to weaponizing food, the Department of Agriculture also warned states that might want to ease the coming hunger that the Department will not reimburse them for providing meals.
This is much too big a problem for food banks to pick up the slack.
For one thing, the Trump administration slashed half a billion dollars in dairy, meat and produce earmarked for food banks this spring. There are no cheap foods for families to fall back on.
Capping a four year climb that began with COVID, grocery prices posted the biggest month-to-month increase in almost three years in August, and are on track to rise 3% overall this year. Buying food in the richest country in the world is now a “major” stress for one in two Americans, according to an Associated Press poll.
“I campaigned on that,” said Trump of grocery prices in April.
Now, he emphasizes the importance of building a football-field size dance hall on top of East Wing rubble. The garishly gilded building is “really the president’s main priority,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
She meant that it was first only among Trump’s construction priorities.
But to the millions heading into Thanksgiving without knowing where their next meal is coming from, the context was clear enough: Let them eat ballrooms.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board includes Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
