The hits just keep on coming. The administration of faux-president Donald J. Trump continues to sign bills and executive orders and issue directives that have a direct bearing on the people of West Virginia. The problem is, none of these actions appear to be doing us any good. Here are just a few examples of West Virginia under Trumpian rule:
CHIP program
A story out last week indicates that the Trump
administration wants to cut funding from the Children's Health Insurance
Program, known as CHIP, as part of its request to Congress for major cuts to
the federal budget. CHIP provides health coverage to eligible children through
both Medicaid and separate CHIP programs. It is administered by states
according to federal requirements and funded jointly by states and the federal
government.
According to CNN, Trump proposes to cut $7 billion from the
popular program, claiming the cuts would come from “untapped leftover funds”
and “wouldn't affect operations at CHIP” or in other health care areas. “This
is money that was never going to be spent,” one official said.
First off, I’m not sure why it’s a bad thing for an account that
benefits children’s health to carry a surplus from time to time, or how Trump
and his swamp creatures know that the funds would never be spent, but here’s
what’s important: In February of this year, West Virginia had 549,651
individuals enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, according to Medicaid.gov. That’s almost one-third of the entire state population. There
is no way these proposed cuts will be good for the people of our state.
Health care
The CHIP report coincides with a new Gallup survey that shows
the rate of West Virginians without health insurance rose significantly during
the first year of Trump’s reign. Gallup attributes the dramatic increase in the
number of uninsured West Virginians to Republicans’ repeal-plunder-and-rape
campaign against the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.
“Health care advocates warned President Trump and
Congressional Republicans that their repeated attacks on the Affordable Care
Act and Medicaid would cause West Virginians to lose health coverage and face
higher costs – and today’s numbers confirm it,” said Lynette Maselli of Protect
Our Care, West Virginia. “Republicans’ war on health care has had a fast and
dramatic negative impact on West Virginians, and things will continue to get
worse until we stop these attacks on our care.”
This is a far cry from Trump’s campaign promise to repeal
and replace Obamacare with “something terrific” that would offer better health
insurance options at a lower cost for all Americans – a pledge that fell apart immediately
after Trump took office and it was revealed that he had nothing resembling a
plan to do just that.
Mining jobs
At a pre-election rally in Charleston, W.Va., surrounded by men
in hard hats waving signs that read “Trump Digs Coal,” the candidate said this:
“I'll tell you what folks, you're amazing people. If I win, we're going to
bring those miners back.”
In the past few weeks I have queried coal industry lobbyists
and union representatives and no one seems to know exactly how many mining jobs
have been filled since Trump was elected. A best guess is a few hundred, but
everyone agrees it is nowhere near the 80,000 jobs that have been lost in the
last 10 years, when, in fact, coal mine employment has actually been in decline
since the 1980s and beyond.
According to the coal industry trade group the National
Mining Association, “Coal mining employment peaked in 1984 at approximately
178,000 jobs, and has steadily declined since.” In Appalachia, statistics show,
mine employment “fared far worse under the Reagan, Clinton and George H.W. Bush
administrations than under (former President Barack) Obama…despite all the rage
over Obama's environmental agenda,” the National
Journal reported.
Meanwhile, utility companies continue to shutter and
dismantle coal-fired power plants – a major customer for coking coal – in favor
of cheaper, cleaner natural gas and even a renewed interest in environmentally
friendly energy sources including solar and wind.
Even the West Virginia Coal Association – while continuing
to bash Obama – acknowledges that coal production is up in the state but the actual
number of coal miners needed to produce it is either down, flat or up only slightly
in the past two years.
“West Virginia coal production year-to-date is up 20 percent
over the same period last year,” the association says. “Our mines are once
again producing (and) we are beginning to rehire miners after eight long, hard
years of fighting to just stay in business. Even so, we remain a long way from
the 170 million tons we produced in 2008…and we may never get back to those
levels, because most of those 400 coal-fired power generation units Obama shut
down with his regulatory assault have been torn down, left to rust or converted
to natural gas.”
Environment
Finally, you can’t talk about coal without talking about the
environment. Whether you work in an underground coal mine, teach school, drive
a truck or sit in an accounting office, you breathe the same West Virginia air
and drink the same West Virginia water. Thanks to the Trump administration,
neither your air nor your water may be as clean as it was before he started “draining
the swamp.”
It took less than one month in office for Trump to sign a resolution
overturning the so-called Stream Protection Rule, effectively allowing coal
mine operators to dump mine waste into streams and waterways in the state. The
effect of this rollback on our drinking water – if any – may not be known for
some time.
Then, in October, Trump proposed repealing the Clean Power
Plan which would require power plants – the biggest carbon polluters in the U.S.
– to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by roughly one-third between now and
the year 2030. The Clean Power Plan has been tied up in courts and has never gone
into effect, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, but that hasn’t
stopped Trump’s EPA from trying to repeal the program before it even exists.
Summary
So there you have four key issues that affect West Virginia and
which, by any legitimate measurement, have left us worse off than we were
before Trump waddled into the White House. Other than the “middle class tax cut”
which doesn’t really benefit the middle class, I can’t think of anything positive
that has come from this administration in the past 15 months.
This, despite the fact that Trump won the state by 42 points
in the 2016 election. We were his biggest win, percentage-wise, of all the
states. I ask you, is this any way to say thanks?
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