As I was saying

 I seldom link to the NYT (or, as Atrios calls it, "that fucking newspaper) because it's paywalled. But I believe you get three free reads a month, and in any case I'm going to pull the good stuff from Krugthulu's latest. It's about this:

Many House Republicans are reportedly listening to Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s former budget director, who has a new think tank and has been circulating a budget proposal titled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” which purports to show a way to balance the budget without touching Medicare and Social Security. The document uses the word “woke” 77 times, and — weirdly for a fiscal blueprint — also manages to mention critical race theory 16 times.

By "woke" government he refers to means tested programs -- Medicaid, SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), and Affordable Care Act subsidies. Now, in the first place, it is not true that you could balance the budget even by eliminating these entirely. But Krugman's main point is that the beneficiaries aren't who Vought and other Republicans seem to think they are.

 

When they hear about means-tested programs, they think “welfare,” and when they think about welfare, they imagine that the beneficiaries are inner-city Black people. In modern America, however, some of the biggest beneficiaries of means-tested programs are rural white people — who also happen to be the core of the Republican base.

Consider Owsley County, Ky. Eastern Kentucky is at the epicenter of the “Eastern Heartland,” a region that has been left stranded by the rise of the knowledge economy and the migration of jobs to highly educated metropolitan areas. The county is almost entirely non-Hispanic white; 88 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2020. And 52 percent of its population is covered by Medicaid, while more than 40 percent are SNAP recipients.

 

Medicaid is in fact quite popular in "red" states and as you may recall, when Republicans controlled both houses they found it impossible to repeal the ACA because it is very popular among their own constituents.  As the Krugster goes on to explain, these programs are also investments in the future because children who have the benefit of safety net programs including SNAP and Medicaid grow up to be better educated and more productive adults. And oh yeah -- children are among the principal beneficiaries of most programs. (BTW, while the majority of Medicaid beneficiaries are children and their families, the majority of Medicaid spending goes to older people in long term care.) 

So yeah, let's stay woke, and invest even more in our people.