Keeping the heat on

It’s a gray, chilly morning, the kind of day that sends damp fingers of cold seeping into the house urging me to nudge the thermostat up one, two, half a dozen degrees just to settle the goose bumps and quell the shivers.

Central heat is a marvelous thing.

As long as there’s gas to fuel it.

And money to pay the gas bill.

I have both. Count me fortunate.

That wasn’t always the case.

One was in diapers, the other a toddler. Hogs sold for half what it cost to raise them and the last job left town six months before. We were in a drafty farmhouse on a windswept ridge in the middle of a Minnesota winter.

We had no money and darn near no gas.

It’s an experience I wish I could share.

The President sent his budget proposal to Congress last week. Therein, bobbing in the sea of red ink springing from the administration’s extraordinary largess toward the most affluent among us is the President’s proposal to save the Treasury $3 billion by eliminating the LIHEAP program – Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Now getting rid of federal heating assistance is just one of a market basket of money-saving measures poor people would be paying for – and yes, I’ve heard the arguments: There’s waste; there’s fraud, they foster a culture of dependence; they’re a burden on productive Americans; they should be replaced by private charity; they’re the creeping forerunner of socialism and the coming Red Menace…

They also keep babies and old people warm in the winter.

Until you’ve bundled your children three-layers thick and set the heat to just keep the pipes from freezing you really don’t know how important that is.

So I guess I might be able to imagine how a rich boy from New York, who, if the air gets a bit nippy on Pennsylvania Ave, can, on a whim, summon his private 747 to whisk him off for lunch and golf at Mar-a-Lago, might not get it.

And $3 billion – for most of us --is a lot of money.

But then, for most of us, the more than $3 million we pay for each of his weekend get-aways is a lot of money too.

So what is our return on investment for each?

For $3 million Donald Trump gets a round of golf and a well-done steak with ketchup.

And that $3 billion? It helps keep more than 20 million Americans warm in the winter.

And just for the record, that’s less than $10 a year for each of us – not even half the price of a mediocre steak dinner…

Or, to put it another way, it’s less than two and a half cents a day for each of us.

In a country where lots of folks won’t bend over to pick a penny off the street … well, it says a lot.

And none of it particularly good. Yeah, it’s unlikely that the Congress will go along and this particular cut will remain just a repugnant proposal … this time. But again and again the poor, the weak, the vulnerable are put in the legislative cross-hairs. At the risk of hyperbole, the war on poverty has become a war on poor people.

It’s a curious thing when plutocrats talk like Marxists – but how is it that whenever anyone points out the systematic assault on economic support for the poor and working poor the accusation of “class warfare” is leveled by the most vocal partisans of privilege. For all of us who are a couple of paychecks and a mortgage payment away from joining the folks in poverty, fear, envy, and a nagging awareness that “there but for the grace” muddle our vision; keep us from seeing which side we should be on.

But trust me, it doesn’t take many days in a cold house to clear up that misunderstanding. To understand that we all really are in this together.

Really, for two and a half cents a day will you let your neighbor’s pipes freeze?