Republicans Love To Punish People For Being Poor

The recent decision, and near-immediate retraction, by a Pennsylvania school district to throw children into foster care if they have student lunch debt is the latest in a long line of policies in this country designed to punish people for being poor. And these policies are almost always pushed by the Republican Party. To say that the party lacks empathy is an understatement, but it also doesn’t fully capture the nature of today’s GOP. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains the REAL problem with Republicans and their anti-poor policies.

Become a member today!

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

Follow more of our stories at

Subscribe to our podcast

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Recently, a lot of people in this country were shocked to learn that a Pennsylvania School district, specifically the Wyoming Valley West School district, decided that they were going to basically kidnap people's kids if they had school lunch debt. They were going to take somebody's kids, put them in foster care if their parents were not able to pay off their school lunch debt. Now, the people who made this decision pretty much after the public learned about it, backtracked on it and said, okay, well we weren't going to let people donate, uh, to go ahead and pay these lunches, but now we are. So maybe we won't have to turn them over to foster care because their parents are poor.

Now, there's no clear indication at this moment whether or not the people in this school district were Democrats or Republicans who enacted this law. But given the history of both parties, I think it's pretty easy to tell what ideology these people on this a school district, school board, uh, are. Democrats typically don't do stuff like this. Republicans always tend to do stuff like this, and that's the bottom line. Know this is bigger than just this one story or this one incident. This is what the Republican Party does. It's what they've been doing for my entire lifetime.

The Republican Party never runs out of ways to punish people just for being poor because that's what this is in this country. School lunch. Debt shouldn't even be a thing. It shouldn't exist. If a kid can't afford to pay for their lunch, it should be provided to them free of charge, but Republicans want to come in and make a profit off everything, right? Gotta make money gotta be money. And if you don't have money, then you don't matter. Hell, that should be the motto of the Modern Day GOP. If you don't have money, then you don't matter.

And what gets me is that a majority of people who vote for the Republican Party in this country, they don't have the money. There are people that probably would have lost their kids because of school lunch debt. There are people who are going bankrupt because of medical bills, and they don't even stop to realize that the Republicans are the ones who did this to them and the Republicans don't care about them. I, I've, I've seen a lot of analysis over the years. Everybody says the Republican Party just lacks empathy. They do, but it's also far more intense than just that. You know that that's an easy statement to make. That really doesn't address the problem. They lack empathy. Move on. No, there is a sociopathic quality about the Republican Party and the pathology of a sociopath does say that they do completely lack empathy among so many other things.

And we see that here in the Republican Party, one of the biggest things we see is the victim blame. You know, when talking about poor underprivileged people here in the United States, Republicans always have the same response, hey, the economy's doing great. Why can't you get a better job? Why don't you work a little harder once you pull yourself up by your bootstraps? You know, why don't you, why don't you, why don't you never wants acknowledging that the system is rigged against these folks?

#rof #trofire #theringoffire #progressivenews