What will Trump’s proposed budget cuts mean for an already decimated working class in Ohio? Looking at housing and other social services offers a window into the coming devastation if the U.S. Congress ratifies Trump’s plan of unrestrained capitalism.
Compared to last year, Trump’s budget proposal will cut 16 percent in healthcare, and 13 percent in both housing and education. Various programs on a federal level, such as the HOME program and other block grants will be chopped. How will such cuts impact Ohio?
Many aids that will be eliminated from housing and urban development effect vast numbers of senior citizens, such as the Community Services Block Grant. The elderly are one of the most impoverished and neglected segments of the U.S. population. The suffering of the elderly will deepen if the Senior Community Service Employment program and the Low Income Housing Energy Assistance Program (which assists heating homes for hundreds of thousands of Ohioans) are eliminated.
These are just some of the services that would be eliminated. Other vital services will be severely cut under Trump’s proposed budget. For example, Direct Rental Assistance programs such as Section 8, vouchers for homeless veterans and other public housing programs, will receive the largest brunt of the housing cuts.
In Columbus, and around the state, Trump’s proposed budget threatens desperately needed urban development projects currently under way, such as the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority’s (CMHA) Five-Year Program that began in 2016. According to local news, the bulk of it is going to water lines, streets and sidewalks. These projects that will make life safer for working class residents, especially for children and the elderly, are long overdue.
The estimated cut for Columbus’ public housing capital fund is almost 70 percent, while operating funds would be cut by 11 percent. The crumbling sidewalks are a testimony to the infrastructure caving in around us from an inherently crumbling system. As automation continues to replace the manufacturing jobs that were so abundant in post-WWII Ohio, public housing and other social services are also disappearing. In the place of working class manufacturing jobs has stepped drug addiction and increasingly punitive legislation criminalizing former workers.
Take for example The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 under the Reagan administration, which mandated the strict eviction of tenants engaging in crime. And later, in 1998, the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (paired with the “One Strike and You’re Out” legislation in 1996) under the Clinton administration allowed the automatic eviction of convicted drug offenders and felons as well as give the authority to exclude applicants that fit the ‘description’ of a felon despite lack of actual evidence.
What we can see are segregated areas where education and infrastructure have been ignored. In such communities, it is easy for police to kill people, or transfer transfer them into the system of mass incarceration. The number of inmates in Ohio rose by 15 percent from just 2005 to 2016.
Do we expect Trump, or the Democrat and Republican Congress, to really serve the interests of the poor and oppressed communities in Ohio and beyond?
Under a planned economy, such as socialism, the landlord, whose sole role is to collect rent money, would not exist. Housing would be considered a right, not a commodity. There would not be properties sitting vacant while people are without a home. Ohio ranks among the top ten states with the most vacancies in the nation with over 80,000 homes and condos taunting us with their inaccessible availability.
What we are now faced with is capitalism’s contradiction: trying to to sell commodities to working class consumers who do not have the means to buy the commodities produced by capitalism, because they are not paid enough by the capitalist bosses.
The need to fight back is becoming increasingly necessary as more and more lives are at risk. We need to combat not only the blatantly evil Trump regime but also the system that puts people like him and others in power.
