While financial hardship remains a widespread issue for many Americans, members of Congress can afford to take a paid vacation on their dime. The federal government has been shut down since October 1, but they’ve got time. What’s a missed paycheck or two for government workers?
Because who’s living paycheck to paycheck in “the greatest country in the world”? While this disproportionately affects low-income households, it turns out there are a lot of us who manage our households on shoestring budgets.
It turns out we were being strung along by the bootstrap theory, the practical strategy that we could improve our situation with determination, grit and a strong work ethic. It turns out that only works out for the capitalist enterprise, as self-determination is contrived due to systemic and economic inequality.
Profits over people, it is a system that needs a large labor force to survive while being paid pennies on the dollar. Sound familiar?
Newsweek reported last month, “Number of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck Soars.” “In its 2025 Retirement Survey & Insights Report—entitled New Economics of Retirement—the investment bank said about 40 percent of Americans now reported having no spare savings and living paycheck to paycheck, up from 31 percent in 1997,” Hugh Cameron wrote. He continued, “A separate survey from PNC Bank, released in August, found that 67 percent of U.S. workers were living paycheck to paycheck, up from 63 percent in 2024.”
Americans are penny-pinching and tightening their belts even more during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. President Donald Trump broke his own record previously set in 2019.
No round of applause for this delusional psychopath, who can’t see the suffering he causes, though he relies on visual aids to process information. Michael Wolff wrote in Fire and Fury, “He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
So, this means Trump cannot read in between the food lines formed by government workers. Then read my lips. Insert expletive—you.
Trump deserves no medal for the lapse in nutrition assistance for 42 million people. And for all the rage-baiting social media posts defending it, no one needs to earn the right to eat.
Still, it’s between healthcare and food subsidies. A false choice, a preventable outcome and a manufactured crisis that could’ve been avoided if not for hyper-partisanship, toxic politics and government dysfunction.
Both Democrats and Republicans make me sick. They have emboldened a lawless felon of a president and can’t find their voice unless under the cover of anonymity, retiring or not seeking reelection. I remain on the side of the oppressed.
Some say the approximately 730,000 federal workers, who are classified as essential and have been working without pay, may not receive back pay. Another 670,000 federal employees are on temporary, unpaid leave, furloughed until these government leaders reach an agreement. So, the government is comfortable with stealing wages then?
In addition to this financial strain are the increased costs of housing, food and childcare. It’s almost as if our government wants a permanent economic underclass.
This takes us back to the “mudsill theory of labor,” a pro-slavery argument offered by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond in 1858. Yes, it all goes back to chattel slavery.
But if we had had full-throated, accountable and centuries-long conversations about it, then I wouldn’t have to say any of this. If our school systems offered a full and fair depiction of U.S. history, then perhaps this information wouldn’t come as a surprise to many of us.
If the Trump administration were not banning books, financially abusing museums for their displays of “uncomfortable” parts of American history and curating an ahistorical narrative in support of white Christian nationalism, then we could continue to say that African Americans are just playing the victim. They just need to “get over slavery,” right? But that was not the intention of pro- slavery apologists.
During “The ‘Mud Sill’ Speech,” Hammond argued, “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.”
Hammond argued for the enslavement of African Americans, whom he deemed of low intellect and skill, a people designed to suffer as the foundational support needed for persons he considered progressive. It’s almost as if to “make America great again,” the country would need to slide back a few centuries to the relational dynamics of chattel slavery, wherein the extreme control, exploitation of labor and wealth inequality continue.
It’s a fair trade for the advancements offered by tech billionaires, right? Just ask ChatGPT how to end this funding lapse, right?
With this being the fifth major government shutdown in my lifetime, I would prefer powering it down and restarting it. All power to the people!
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
