Miller County has several senior centers and Meals on Wheels programs. It also has a tax supported senior services board that helps support those centers and services.
Federal Meals on Wheels support stopped dead last week, along with uncountable other stoppages. I don’t know if the state plans to try to make up the loss but doubt there is money to cover the entire loss.
Will charitable organizations be able to step into the gap. Certainly not entirely.
Federal spending needs to be cut but the cutting so far has often been brutal and not well thought out. I suspect the cutters really have never come in contact with some, or most, of what they have cut. They appear to all be raised in and living upper middle class up to insanely rich lives.
There was a better way.
The cabinet secretaries should have been told to gather their department heads and managers and come up with 10 percent, 20 percent, or some figure, in expenses and have their list ready within 90 days. Informed decisions could, and should, have been made.
Now we live with the mess created and I’m pretty sure some of the mess has inflicted damage that cannot be repaired.
Meanwhile, I expect Social Security payments to be interrupted, perhaps for a long time. I also do not plan on ever seeing one cent of any tax refund we are due.
It’s not a good time to need help, or to have believed the promise of Social Security. The social safety net is being hacked up by a chainsaw.
