You have already felt the reduction of a bare-bones diet by about 21 meals a month caused by the expiration of stimulus funding passed in response to Wall Street’s Great Recession. This cut amounts to about $5 billion. Now Tipton and his tribe have passed legislation providing for $39 billion in additional cuts.

You see, Tipton thinks that you should earn everything you receive, like he did. Yeah, sure he worked 16 hours a day at minimum wage to feed his family and went to Fort Lewis College, too, so you can see why he might resent your receiving $1.70 a meal for minimum nutrition. You might wonder why not increase revenue to balance the budget, like rolling back the subsidies for the world’s wealthiest and most profitable companies collectively known as big oil? Or closing offshore tax havens? Well, there are a couple of reasons here. One is his opposition to the concept of our doing anything as a national community, from helping one another to regulating runaway banks to protecting our air and water. The other is that the very rich fund campaigns and you don’t.

One in 10, or about 2,500 people, in Tipton’s home county, receive nutritional assistance. Do you suppose Tipton has ever visited or volunteered at the Cortez Food Pantry or Grace’s Soup Kitchen, to see that being hungry doesn’t make you a lazy parasite? I really doubt it. It is so much easier to live in an ideological cocoon, and allow your ideology to set your policy.

Christopher Isensee

Durango