Republican governors in at least three states — Mississippi, Arkansas, and Nebraska — have turned away hundreds of millions of federal pandemic relief dollars allocated to preventing evictions because they don’t want their residents to receive those funds.
In March 2022, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said, “We must guard against big government socialism where people are incentivized not to work but are instead encouraged to rely on government handouts well after an emergency is over. We cannot justify asking for federal relief when Nebraska has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation and we are no longer in a state of emergency.”
Given low unemployment, why doesn’t it occur to him that most recipients are working, but can’t pay their rent because of soaring housing costs? Because he’s stupid, that’s why.
As the leader of a Nebraska nonprofit that helps people struggling to afford housing said, “Unfortunately, in certain cases like ours in Nebraska, some of the leadership just doesn’t seem to understand that it’s not as simple as people need to get back to work.” It seems pretty simple to me that if people are already working, helping them with rent — which costs the state nothing — won’t keep them out of the workforce. But that’s apparently too much complexity for a Republican brain to process.
In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves says, “Mississippi will continue to say no to these types of liberal handouts that encourage people to stay out of the workforce. Instead, we’re going to say yes to conservative principles and policies that result in more people working.” In other words, blind ideology prevails over real people’s real-life needs. He also presides over a state where the program, while in effect, was so poorly run that renters and landlords had to wait months to get the money.
Maybe this has something to do with it: “The typical applicant in Mississippi was Black and female.” I can’t prove that’s a factor, or that he’s trying to incentivize Mississippi’s black population to leave the state; it’s just a suspicion, like Republican suspicions the 2020 election was stolen, but with more substance given Mississippi’s history of racism.
NBC News noted that fewer than a third of Mississippi applicants were unemployed, but “nearly 70% earned less than the area median income where they lived.” (Read story here.) It’s a state where the minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, unemployment benefits top out at $235 a week, and federal welfare benefits for a single mother of two children are $260 a month (until July 2021, they were frozen at $170 a month for 21 years). No wonder Mississippi is the nation’s poorest state.
Let’s also not forget that Republican governors fought to keep businesses open during the height of the pandemic, fought measures to keep workers safe, tried to shove workers back into workplaces before they were safe, prematurely ended federal enhanced unemployment benefits, and opposed pandemic relief checks to households and individuals while millions of people were still unemployed. Those are “conservative principles,” too.
These people often call themselves Christians, but it would be interesting to hear what Jesus would say about how they treat the least among us.