Tennessee Republicans Experience Cognitive Dissonance on Poverty
“In two moves supported by the Trump administration, the governor has already announced that the state will further limit food assistance for adults without children, and the legislature may well impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients (using dollars earmarked for the cash assistance program to implement and monitor those requirements. But at least some Republicans in Tennessee’s General Assembly have gained a partial understanding of the difficulties of poverty, because they also voted this week to increase welfare benefit payments to poor families for the first time in 22 years. Nonetheless, the impact of such an increase would largely be offset by other anti-welfare policies that the legislature is pursuing—like the work requirements for Medicaid.”