You want to cut food stamps? Live on food stamps.
You want to slash Medicaid? Go without health insurance.
You want to vaporize housing assistance? Sleep in your car.
You want to freeze the minimum wage for fifteen years while your own salary goes up? Survive on that wage.
If you want to vote for the conditions that kill people, you must survive those conditions first.
The proposal is simple. Before a politician can vote to cut a social program, they must live under the conditions that cut would create. For one year. No exceptions. No loopholes. No family trusts. No donor gifts. No side income. Just the program they want to gut. If the program is unnecessary, as they claim, then living without it should be easy. If the program is a crutch, as they claim, then walking without it should be simple. Prove it. With your body. With your life. With the same math the people you are condemning have to do every single day.
The hypocrisy isn’t a bug. It’s the architecture. The politician with the government-subsidized healthcare voting to take away yours. The politician with the lifetime pension voting to kill Social Security. The politician with the expense account voting to cut food assistance. The politician with the per diem voting to freeze the minimum wage. They have no idea what they’re cutting because they’ve never needed it. And they never will. The system insulates them from the consequences of their own votes. They call it fiscal responsibility from an office paid for by the public, with a salary paid for by the public, voting to keep the public poor. The distance between the vote and the consequence is the distance between the Capitol and the trailer park. And that distance is deliberate. It is maintained. It is defended. It is the moat around the castle. And the people in the castle are the ones voting to fill the moat with the bodies of the people outside.
$7.25. Since 2009. Fifteen years. The longest period without a raise since the minimum wage was created in 1938. A full-time worker at $7.25 makes $1,160 a month before taxes. $13,920 a year. The federal poverty line for a single person is $14,580. The minimum wage doesn’t even clear poverty for one person. Add a kid and you’re in the abyss. The politician making $174,000 a year votes to keep it there. Votes against raising it. Calls it entry level. Calls it starter wages. Calls it unskilled labor. From a desk paid for by the people who will never be able to afford to sit at it. Since 1979, productivity rose 73%. The minimum wage stayed flat. The difference didn’t vanish. It went to the top. The worker produced more. The worker earned less. The gap is the theft. The stagnation is the crime. In 1968, the minimum wage was $1.60. Adjusted for inflation, that’s over $13 an hour. The worker in 1968 had more buying power than the worker today. The country was richer. The worker was poorer. The difference went somewhere. It went to the top. It went to the people voting to keep the worker poor.
What does $7.25 actually buy? Rent. Food. Transportation. Healthcare. The impossible equation. The choices that aren’t choices because there’s no good option. The rent that eats 70% of the check. The car that breaks down and ends the job. The tooth that rots because the dentist isn’t in the budget. The body that breaks down because the food is cheap and the stress is constant. The psychological toll. The anxiety. The depression. The trauma of poverty. The brain on scarcity. The cognitive load of choosing between insulin and rent. The constant state of emergency. The politician has never felt this. The politician has never had to think about the cost of thinking. And these issues don’t exist in isolation. They stack. The low wage makes you need SNAP. The SNAP cut makes you need Medicaid. The Medicaid denial makes you need housing assistance. The housing assistance cut makes you homeless. The politician votes for each cut individually and pretends the cumulative effect doesn’t exist. Let them live the cumulative effect. Let them drown in it. Let them choke on the math they refuse to do.
A 56-year-old woman in Alabama. Worked minimum wage her whole life. No health insurance. Found a lump in her breast. Couldn’t afford the mammogram. By the time she went to the ER, the cancer had spread. She died from a condition that was treatable when she found it. The politician who voted against Medicaid expansion will never know her name. But he voted for her death. He signed it. He owns it. A father in Ohio. Two kids. $7.25 an hour. Couldn’t afford the insulin. Rationed it. Passed out behind the wheel. The car crashed. He’s dead. The kids are in foster care. The politician who voted against raising the wage will never see the wreck. But he caused it. He put the car on the road. He took the insulin out of the cabinet. He just did it with a vote instead of a weapon. A veteran in Texas. Served his country. Came home to $7.25. Couldn’t afford the rent. Lived in his car. Froze to death in the winter. The politician who voted against housing assistance will never sit in that car. But he put him in it. He parked it there. He left him there to die. And then he went home to a house with a mortgage deduction and called himself a patriot.
Who benefits from keeping the wage low? Corporations. Shareholders. The same people who donate to the politicians who vote against raising it. The politician isn’t just voting their ideology. They’re voting their donor’s balance sheet. The low wage is the campaign contribution in reverse. Follow the money. The corporation pays the politician. The politician votes against the wage. The corporation keeps the profit. The worker keeps the poverty. The cycle is the system.
And the system has names. Senator Joe Manchin. Voted against the Raise the Wage Act in 2021. Net worth: $7.9 million. Salary: $174,000. Government healthcare. Government pension. Never made $7.25 an hour in his life. Voted to keep the people who do at that number. Then got in a car he didn’t pay for and drove to a house the people who make $7.25 will never see. Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Voted against the Raise the Wage Act in 2021. Salary: $174,000. Government healthcare. Government pension. Voted to keep the minimum wage at $7.25. Then did a curtsy on the floor of the Senate. The people making $7.25 weren’t curtsying. They were working. They were drowning. They were dying. And she curtsied. Senator Ted Cruz. Voted against the Raise the Wage Act. Net worth: $4.6 million. Salary: $174,000. Government healthcare. Government pension. Calls minimum wage jobs stepping stones. From a marble floor. Paid for by the people stepping on them. These aren’t public servants. These are aristocrats with voting cards. They’re landlords with law degrees. They’re executioners who never have to look at the body.
Work requirements for food assistance. The politician who has never been hungry votes to make hunger a condition of survival. The average SNAP benefit is $6 per day. $6. For three meals. For a human being. In the richest country in the history of the world. The politician with the expense account votes to make it harder to get. Votes to add more hoops. Votes to cut the benefit. Votes to call it dependency. From a podium. After a steak dinner. Paid for by a lobbyist. Let the politician live on $6 a day. For one year. Let them plan meals around what they can afford, not what they want. Let them stand in the aisle and choose between the cereal and the bread because they can’t have both. Let them feel the hunger they’re voting to impose. Let their stomach growl during the committee hearing. Let their hands shake while they sign the bill. Then let them vote.
The politician with government-subsidized healthcare votes to take away yours. Medicaid expansion blocked in states where people die from preventable conditions because they can’t afford to see a doctor. The rural hospital closures. Over 150 since 2010. The nearest emergency room 45 minutes away. The nearest specialist three hours away. The politician who will never wait in that emergency room votes to close it. Let the politician live without health insurance. For one year. Let them feel the lump and not go to the doctor because the visit costs more than the rent. Let them watch their kid wheeze and wonder if it’s bad enough to justify the ER bill. Let them choose between the prescription and the groceries. Let them lie awake at night calculating the cost of staying alive. Then let them vote.
And then there’s the roof. The politician with the mortgage deduction votes to cut housing assistance. The waitlists. The vouchers. The families living in cars. The children doing homework in shelters. The politician who has never been homeless votes to make homelessness more likely. But this isn’t just about a bed. This is about the address on the form. The address that gets you the job. The address that gets your kid into the school. The address that tells the system you exist. Without the address, you’re a ghost. You can’t vote. You can’t work. You can’t live. The politician isn’t just cutting a roof. They’re cutting the proof that you’re a person. Let them be the ghost. For one year. Let them lose the address. Let them lose the ID. Let them try to prove they exist to a system that has already decided they don’t. Let them stand in the cold and explain to a clerk that they are a human being while the clerk types in a computer that says otherwise. Then let them vote.
Who works minimum wage jobs? Disproportionately Black and Brown workers. Disproportionately women. Disproportionately immigrants. Who gets their programs cut? Black and Brown communities. Poor communities. Rural communities. The communities that didn’t donate to the campaign. The communities that don’t have lobbyists. The communities that don’t have a voice at the table where the cuts are decided. The minimum wage was originally designed to exclude agricultural and domestic workers, the jobs held by Black workers. The racism is baked in. It never left. The cuts aren’t colorblind. The poverty isn’t colorblind. The votes aren’t colorblind. The politician who votes to cut the programs is voting to cut the people who were never meant to survive in the first place.
The models exist. Australia. Minimum wage: $23.23 AUD. Universal healthcare. Germany. Minimum wage: €12.41. Universal healthcare. The UK. Minimum wage: £11.44. Universal healthcare. The data exists. The proof exists. Other countries have decided that the people who make the coffee should be able to afford to drink it. That the people who clean the floors should be able to afford to stand on them. That the people who feed the nation should be able to afford to eat. The only thing missing here is the will. And the will is blocked by the people who profit from the lack of it. The will is blocked by the politicians who take the donations from the corporations that benefit from the poverty. The will is blocked by the aristocrats who will never have to survive the conditions they create for everyone else.
The chorus of “it’ll kill jobs” and “the market should decide” and “these aren’t meant to be careers” is the sound of cowards hiding behind a spreadsheet. They claim the market is freedom while the market forces people to choose between insulin and rent. They claim these jobs are for teenagers while adults work them to feed families. They claim prices will rise while prices rose anyway and the wage didn’t. They claim they were elected to make these choices while insulating themselves from the consequences of those choices. It is not an economic theory. It is a shield. A shield held by people with government healthcare and pensions to protect the profit margins of the people who donate to their campaigns. Being elected doesn’t make you immune to the consequences of your votes. It should make you more responsible for them. If you want to vote for poverty, you should know what it is. If you can vote to kill people, you should have to look them in the eye first. If you can vote to create poverty, you should have to live in it first.
The proposal isn’t punishment. It’s accountability. It’s the requirement that the people who make the rules live under the rules they make. The politician who votes to cut a program should have to survive without that program. The politician who votes to freeze the wage should have to live on that wage. The politician who votes to create poverty should have to experience that poverty. If the program is unnecessary, prove it. With your body. With your life. With the same math the people you’re condemning have to do every single day. If you can’t survive the conditions you’re voting to create, you don’t get to vote for them. Period. The distance between the vote and the consequence is the distance between the Capitol and the trailer park. Close the distance. Or close your mouth.
You want to cut the safety nets?
You get to jump first.
