President Trump said food benefits will only get paid once the shutdown ends, in a post on Truth Social Tuesday morning.
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Zoom in: “SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office,” Trump said on Truth Social, “… will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government.”
Archive: https://archive.is/tSMcS
It’s relatively simple to imagine what happens. Starving people will do anything to not starve, if food is in that store over there, they will loot it. This quickly results in a spiral of unrest as the social fabric starts to unravel. The longer it goes on the harder it becomes to correct it. You can’t just turn the food faucet back on, the stores are looted and destroyed and shipments aren’t coming in. The logistics of feeding people becomes increasingly complicated and difficult and local law enforcement become overwhelmed. The military gets called in but unless they bring food with them, it is unlikely to successfully stabilize the situation - again, starving people will do anything to not starve.
It’s a hugely stupid move to withhold food from a significant segment of your population - a key component of bread and circuses is the bread.
There is actually not that much food in a given supermarket. In large part because of logistics and food waste costing a lot of money. Its why “hole up in the grocery store during a zombie apocalypse” actually wouldn’t work out all that well.
And the moment a community lives the dream and burns down a kroger, there will be no more shipments to that or any aldi or whatever in… quite possibly that entire state.
At which point you have a hungry populace, regardless of income, and are back to “who can we shoot to make this go back to normal”.
Yes, that is the social fabric breaking down. The answer is going to be basically Lord of the Flies. Imagine Hurricane Katrina but all over the country.
Isn’t what typically happens in other countries is the shelves empty long before the riots start? Except we might still be a long ways from that.
I think the problem here is that most cities are now full of rich people so stealing from a kroger is unlikely to cause a real problem. In fact what will most likely happen is that richer people will pay higher prices and poorer people will steal more food and grocery profits won’t change much.
Though I would expect rural areas would get hit harder.
The issue is that most countries under this kind of chaos aren’t… selectively starving their populace. The people dependent on SNAP… it gets complicated but let’s simplify and say “aren’t shopping at kroger”.
So the idea that “the poors” might rob a supermarket? That actually becomes very plausible. There is food. They can’t afford it. It is life or death and, this is America, so we have more guns than books. So there will probably be people who try to pocket a bag of rice and… depending on how long this is projected to go on, we’ll either see more security guards and cops at the supermarket or an even faster push to lock everything behind plastic because kroger et al don’t want humans in their supermarkets and want to make everything curbside pickup.
But as people get more desperate? Suddenly that assault rifle in the trunk of their car starts looking like a viable option. And THAT is when the store just shuts down and “the lower middle class” becomes just as fucked over.
This is not good.