Please vote in your elections. Please.
I'm slowly making my way through Graeber's The Utopia of Rules and he makes the argument that welfare requirements have been and always will be a way of paying people to make poor people feel ashamed. That said, the reason to do this is that the fewer people that claim their "entitlements", the less money you spend on them. The less money you spend on them, the more you can cut to "give back" to the taxpayers of the great state of Kentucky. The more you can cut taxes, the more Saint Reagan smiles down upon you.
That's good insight from Graeber and I think it's spot on. I've lived my life around this mentality. There is a sign above the assistance center in my town that says "a request for assistance in (my state) is a request for help finding a job." This all relates well, I think, to the NPR discussion about parents being gardeners vs carpenters. It was a whole thing based off a book by Alison Gopnik, for those interested. But basically it's about molding people vs letting them choose to grow on their own. I think states like KY and my own have a perpencity to be carpenters rather than gardeners. I think it's a well-meaning but ultimately short-sighted approach that leaves people suffering and accomplishes none of its goals.
I just expected some explanation in the article from the governor explaining why he did it even though he didn't want to because the democrats and activist judges made it his only option. I'm in a couple welfare programs now. I'm aware of the trap that's created in our current system where it can make more sense to underachieve to keep welfare rather than work your way out of it and lose eligibility by taking a slightly better job. The system should be reformed. But the standard republican solution is to take a machete to it because fuck the poor, these programs don't work at all, burn it to the ground. The rational solution to me is to ease people out and roll back benefits slowly as their income increases after they're accepted so they aren't caught in a catch-22 as they advance. But I don't make policy and conservative policy for thirty plus years has been "fuck the poor and be angry at your neighbor for his $192 a month in food" because when you can divide the poor as a voting bloc, you got carte blanche to exploit single issue voters who will give up welfare inadvertently to "save the unborn" or "send back the illegals". Are Republicans playing checkers against the Democrats playing chess? Bowknow. They're winning with a very simple strategy for now though
Liberals value equality. Everyone should have the same opportunity, regardless of circumstances. Conservatives value fairness. Everyone should play by the same rules, regardless of circumstances. And when you grow up well-off and white, the opportunities you see wasted on minorities seem fundamentally unfair to you - after all, nobody gave you a leg up! veen and I were discussing a couple papers I threw at him about the rise of geographic inequality in the United States. Over the past 50-70 years the advantages of GDP and productivity have gone more and more to cities and developed areas while the strife has largely hit rural America. If you can get out, you're doing good. If you can't, you're dying. If you can get out, you're exposed to a cosmopolitan world. If you can't, it's you and the neighbors you grew up with... that also couldn't get out. They are the Left Behind, their time is up, and they know it. And they're angry. Demographics have not been kind to Kentucky. No surprise it's starting to look like Romania. Without substantial federal investment it's reverting to form. Unfortunately for the rest of us it could have a population of one and still get two senators.
On the subject of Kentucky specifically, I'm pretty sure they accepted Medicare expansion which is slightly unusual for a red state. And also Mitch McConnell is not all that popular there as it turns out. What that says about this specific issue, I have no idea. Just seems to me like the governor wants to fuck over the poor. Because I don't know if he was the governor who accepted Medicare expansion. Make of that what you will. I'm pretty sure I'm right about Medicare expansion and ambivalence about McConnell. I don't disagree with your assessment of liberal v. conservative ideology. The GOP seems like it's had much better recent historical success with wrangling up the fence sitters. The poor, frightened ones by exploiting their fear, prejudice and other negative emotions. I mean I got into a bit of a thing on hubski yesterday trying (poorly) to explain how poor conservatives view a stereotypical liberal as a feckless cuck (to use their terminology because laziness). It just seems to me that the GOP Playbook for, I don't know, like, 50 years, has been to pit poor people against each other. I've met plenty of poor people from rural areas who hate the fuck out of the idea of food stamps. Whether or not it's because they don't qualify and are jealous or are too proud to apply, I don't know. Either way it seems to boil down to, "I'm not getting free shit." Which dovetails with your assessment of conservatives as wanting fairness. And tacitly supports my idea that these people would give more of a shit about other poor people if the GOP weren't so good at exploiting them and the Dems weren't so bad at reaching them. I'm not 110 years old so I don't know firsthand, but it seems like there was more solidarity among the poor during the Depression. Not that poor white people weren't incredibly racist and everyone was singing Woodie Guthrie songs around the May Pole. But more of an abstract solidarity. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass. I just think the GOP leverages wedge issues much better and part of that was making poor people hate poorer people.
I don't know Kentucky politics. I know the governor and the legislature don't have to be in lock step. I also know that states have to balance their budgets. The Feds cover most of the Medicaid bill but not all of it. If a million people get a $2 jar of tylenol under Medicaid and Kentucky pays 10% of it, they're still out $200k. I mean, yay tylenol but it's not a wash. You got into a thing because you were expressing a rural South viewpoint of liberal stereotypes as opposed to a cosmopolitan North viewpoint of liberal stereotypes. They're all stereotypes, of course. Cuck, by the way, doesn't mean what you (or they) think it means. It derives from "cuckservative" which is just a more offensive way of saying "Republican In Name Only" with a little added emasculation thrown in. A cuck has to have lost something - a homosexual liberal cannot be a "cuck" because he never had any masculinity to be cuckolded. At least, that was the thinking before rednecks started using it as a politically-charged version of "douchebag." The GOP playbook, for exactly 50 years, has been to pit poor white people against poor anybody else people. The "hate the fuck out of food stamps" angle is because of our Protestant work ethic: hard work is holy and handouts are for heathens. If you take charity it's a sign that you are impure. Here's the cognitive dissonance: 'boomer rednecks grew up with a reasonable assumption that if you work hard you'll get ahead but that's no longer true. So if you're working hard and not getting ahead it must be because of those Mexicans that are taking everyone's jobs. Globalization did fuck rural America pretty hard. So did NAFTA. There's legitimate beef. But the Democrats don't have a solution and shrug and whistle while the Republicans don't have a solution but they're happy to lie about it. Build the wall. We're a long goddamn way from the Depression. However, the Depression was certainly a driving force for socialism. That's one of the reasons FDR basically grabbed Huey Long's platform and TVA'd his way through it. Also keep in mind: the Depression was blamed (rightly) on Hoover, who was a Republican... and it landed squarely in a Democrat's lap.
I've been swimming in the matrix for the past eighteen months or so - no, that's not true. I've been swimming in the matrix since November 9, 2016. When the economy crashed and nobody could quite explain in simple terms what a CDO or tranche was, I set out to understand. I now subscribe to a dozen financial newsletters, three of them paid, and have read maybe 30 books on macroeconomics. I have an opinion on who wrote the best book on the Great Depression. When the government crashed and nobody could quite explain in simple terms what Rural America wanted, I set out to understand. I'm not quite there yet but I know a few things: the problem is bigger, the problem is more intractable, and the solution is more elusive. I didn't link to this article because its tone was snarky, apocalyptic and full of bad analogies but I keep coming back to it. Susan McWilliams argues that Rural America is the Hell's Angels - fucked from the get-go and motivated by nihilistic hatred. I think that's an oversimplification, but I think it's one view through the panopticon of modern American poverty. Fundamentally? American democracy was not designed for equality. It was designed for the appearance of equality, for the opportunity for equality but at a structural level, advantage goes to the landowners. And big landowners have always had an advantage over small landowners. The last time we had inequality this bad, you could still lynch black people. You could steal farms from the Japanese by interning them in camps. You could banish Mexicans by the busload for growing hemp. It sucked to be poor and white but not nearly as much as it sucked to be black or hispanic or asian. The liberals, however, have led a 70-year crusade to make it suck less to be black or hispanic or asian. The end result has been poor white people experiencing a net decline in socioeconomic status. Which is not to say things are better for black people - but they are less worse. Meanwhile, things are more worse for poor white people. And they're not going to get better. The entire weight of politics and economics is against them. From hospital bills to payday loans to crumbling education to rising rents, things are easier now for the rich and harder now for the poor and the rich are richer and the poor are poorer. And it's better in the cities, but everybody knows it's better in the cities. And you talk about your acre of paradise but you're in Kentucky. I may live (during the summer) in a Mexican ex-pat shithole but I'm 45 minutes by metro to GOOGLE. I could be at Snapchat in an hour. And that's why in my neighborhood a 2br 1ba with bars on the windows is $850k. Why is the homeless rate so high on the west coast? Because that's where the jobs are, duh. So much of American politics has become angry dead-ender nihilism. The problem is, the only way it's going to get any better is if we can make things better for the poor against their goddamn will like when the Obi-Wan dude gets all "I cast you out!" on the warty white "you have no power here" dude in Lord of the Rings. And that's not going to happen any time soon. To get a little Kabbala on it, Strauss and Howe argued that things had to really go to shit between 2004 and 2030 in order for their whole "saeculum" theory of history to play out. Steve Bannon's whole schtick was to accelerate the catastrophe. I think if you're in a bad place it's going to get extraordinarily worse. And I think if you're rich and Republican you know your margins go up the poorer poor people are. I mean, shit - make abortion illegal and that whole "we've only got two workers per retiree" problem solves itself, right? 
You are correct enough. I will say I'm probably exposed to more casual vernacular use of cuck than you. And also the article should have at least given background and current rationale. I assumed it was blah blah budget, but for whatever reason I only saw "we didn't get what we wanted so fuck the poor." And some of the potential requirements wouldn't help balance the budget except to disqualify people
In Michigan, the terrorist group formerly known as the gop has finally figured a creative way to solve this problem. They passed a bill that levies a work requirement for Medicaid but only in counties that have a high population density. Can't quite put my finger on what the difference between urban and rural poor is, but I think they're up to something.The "hate the fuck out of food stamps" angle is because of our Protestant work ethic: hard work is holy and handouts are for heathens. If you take charity it's a sign that you are impure. Here's the cognitive dissonance: 'boomer rednecks grew up with a reasonable assumption that if you work hard you'll get ahead but that's no longer true. So if you're working hard and not getting ahead it must be because of those Mexicans that are taking everyone's jobs.