Government’s biggest cuts hurt America’s smallest citizens

This article originally appeared on Cleveland.com and is reproduced here with permission.

Now that they have passed funding to get through the rest of 2018, President Trump and his allies in Congress will begin sharpening their knives to slash federal programs that keep our kids healthy and safe: Trump’s 2019 budget proposal calls for deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid and housing assistance.

President Trump would cut $213.5 billion from SNAP, which helps put food on the tables of over 700,000 households in Ohio, almost half of which include at least one child. He would gut Medicaid by repealing the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansions. Medicaid covers 3 million Ohioans, including close to a million children. He would slash funding for Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by 14 percent, leaving nearly 84,000 Ohio households with kids in danger of being left out in the cold.

These programs don’t only benefit the people who directly receive them. Every $1 the federal government spends on SNAP circulates $1.70 through local economies. In some urban and rural communities, where many families receive food aid, that’s enough to keep grocery stores in business. Ohio’s largest single payer of health costs is Medicaid; cutting that program will have ripple effects throughout the healthcare industry. HUD assistance limits the myriad costs of housing insecurity to law enforcement, hospitals and taxpayers generally.

As a teacher, I’m especially concerned about the effects of these cuts on children’s ability to learn. The cuts President Trump proposes will mean thousands of our kids going to school hungry, missing school because of preventable illnesses and leaving school without a consistent place to call home.

Kids affected by hunger, illness and transience struggle academically, emotionally and socially. I’ve seen it often. Think of the last time you were truly hungry: the light-headed wooziness, the irritability. Now imagine trying to grasp long division, cell structure, the Bill of Rights. Imagine trying to catch up on those lessons after a long illness your parents couldn’t afford to have treated. Imagine the cruel joke of being assigned “homework” when you don’t know where you’ll spend the night.

It isn’t hard to see how the effects of poverty resonate through a child’s academic life, and it isn’t hard to see how underperformance in school could drive down one’s earning potential after graduation. The children we fail to care for now don’t disappear; they grow up, often with futures compromised by the long-lasting effects of childhood instability. Safety net programs aren’t handouts; they are investments in the future we share with, and will ultimately hand over to, our children.

While corporations have lobbyists to make their case, and while the wealthiest 1 percent can use campaign contributions to influence members of Congress, Ohio’s kids need leaders to stand up for them. Sen. Rob Portman and every Republican representing Ohio in Congress voted in favor of the tax overhaul that necessitated these cuts. They have supported attacks on Ohio’s working families for long enough. This time, let’s make sure our representatives stand up and fight for us by opposing any cuts to these essential programs.