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Asha Sanaker's avatar

It would take too long to list ALL the ways I, and my family, have benefitted from governmental assistance, but here's a short list:

1) When I was a kid and we didn't have a lot of money, we went to the food bank, which received a big heap of government assistance. I also received subsidized school lunch. Was it in the era where Reagan argued that ketchup was a vegetable? Yes. But you can get really far on the calories in ketchup, justifiable vegetable or no.

2) When my oldest was still an only and an infant, my ex-husband got a winter layoff from his work as a union bricklayer. He got unemployment (government assistance!), but it wasn't enough to support a family of three and we couldn't pay our winter heat bill. We got assistance paying our heating bill and assistance replacing our old, inefficient refrigerator to control our on-going energy usage.

3) My oldest attended a Head Start pre-school, which allowed us to stop paying MASSIVE child care bills for two kids that basically wiped out the entirety of my income contribution to our household.

4) When my marriage crumbled unexpectedly and spectacularly, my two kids and I survived for a handful of months because of SNAP benefits.

To my mind, the best and primary point of government is pooling resources to take care of the vulnerable. I don't need the government to tell me what to do to be a good and (mostly) lawful person. I need them to do what can only be done well collectively, caring for those left behind by our system and evening the playing field.

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Sara's avatar

Finally subscribed as a way to say THANK YOU for this. My parents were both career feds, I grew up and now live again in the DC area and it is... chaotic and sad and scary here. My kid goes to a Title I school and we have no idea what's going to happen to the programming (including meals) that comes with that. Seeing clinical trial appointments get canceled and not knowing if my sister's chemo will continue (to say nothing of paying for it, since her insurance is through NIH) is keeping me up at night. It's so easy to say "drain the swamp" and to react to how challenging it can be to deal with the bureaucracy on an individual level, but these are people. It's people doing the work, and it's people benefitting from the work.

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