I have lived in enough states to know that a man who tells you the trouble is Left against Right is usually selling something, and the thing he is selling is your attention, so you won’t notice who’s holding your wallet while you argue about the bathroom or sports.
Here is what I notice instead.
There are tents in the park. There are lines around the food bank that would embarrass a soup kitchen in a Steinbeck novel. We are getting close again to the Steinbeck novel not being fiction anymore. Into this scene walks a government that has decided the proper response to hunger is to make hunger harder to prove. Roughly four million Americans are expected to lose SNAP food assistance this year, many of them tripped up by new work-hour requirements they didn’t know existed until the letter arrived. The law behind it carved $186 billion out of the food-stamp program over ten years. This is roughly a 20 percent cut, which is the largest in the program’s history. When the government shut down last fall, the administration didn’t wait for the ink to dry on that; it trimmed benefits again, leaving households that qualify for the maximum payment with about half of it, and some one- or two-person households with twelve dollars for the month.
Twelve dollars.
I have paid more than that for a sandwich in an airport, and nobody called the sandwich waste, fraud, or abuse.
Thanks Elon. Can we point that chainsaw at you now?
Meanwhile, the same season the nation was told food aid must be trimmed for fiscal discipline, the country’s other checkbook opened wide. In January the United States launched a large-scale military strike into Caracas and came home with Venezuela’s president in federal custody, the culmination of some thirty-five strikes on alleged drug boats since the previous September, which had already killed well over a hundred people, backed by the largest naval buildup the region had seen in a generation.
A nation that cannot spare twelve dollars for a hungry grandmother can apparently spare an aircraft carrier group for a rowboat.
I am not clever enough to prove a conspiracy here, and I don’t believe I need to be. Nobody has to conspire to build a poorhouse. They only need to agree, separately and for their own reasons, that the people in it don’t matter. The hedge fund manager likes the poorhouse because it improves his margins, the politician because it wins him an election, and the engineer because the technology he used to push people farther away from help is really marvelous.
That is the old trick of every enclosure movement since England fenced off the commons: nobody wicked required, only a great many people individually convinced that someone else will mind the fence.
The tents in the park are not a Left problem or a Right problem. They are an arithmetic problem, and the arithmetic has been rigged for some time by people who never once had to sleep in that park to check their own work.
Sources: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Harvard Kennedy School; Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (via The Philadelphia Inquirer); AP/Reuters reporting on U.S. military strikes in Venezuela, January 2026.