Republicans are taking food from NC’s poorest children. It’s immoral. | Opinion

As The Assembly reported last week, North Carolina’s poorest counties are struggling to find ways to meet the increased costs of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) imposed as a result of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. One of the principal ways the new federal law offset its gigantic tax cuts for the richest Americans was to make the largest cut to the food stamp program in history. No surprise there, I suppose.

The General Assembly’s Legislative Oversight Committee learned that Bladen County, one of the state’s poorest, will have to pay at least $397,000 in new administrative costs, after already cutting its budget by 14% in the new fiscal year. Scotland County must come up with $318,000, Columbus County needs $416,000, Craven County has to find $672,000, Robeson County is on the hook for over a million dollars. More populous counties have decidedly bigger tabs — Cumberland County requires $3 million in new funding, Mecklenburg County may owe over $8 million.

Karen Powell, executive director of the N.C. Association of Social Services, understandably, worries most about the smaller, rural counties. “They have a disproportionate hardship because their tax base is limited; they don’t have anywhere else to get the money, whereas bigger counties can shift around a little bit easier,” she told reporters. If state and local agencies can’t pay the newly created fare, thus requiring cuts to the SNAP program, Powell explained: “Who is going to suffer there, the families who need it most.”

You might recall that the Big Beautiful Bill cut taxes for the richest 10% of Americans by more than $14,700 per year per household, and by more than $50,000 annually for the wealthiest 1%. It offered tiny tax cuts for working class folks and actually reduced the incomes of the poorest families. Such, apparently, is Republican populism. Sen. Josh Hawley described the statute as “reverse class warfare, taxing the poor to give to the rich.” Josh Hawley.

Is it acceptable, even in 2026, to note how immoral, how deeply immoral, it is — in the richest nation on earth, the richest nation ever, and, as Thomas Piketty has taught us, the most economically unequal nation in human history, the place with the greatest gaps between rich and poor — for our government to take food from the poorest children to lavish even more wealth on the very richest among us? How ethically horrifying, how dramatically un-Christian, such a decision is? Does that even register with our political leaders?

I make no claim that it is the worst, the most crushingly abhorrent, of our present national moral outrages. Such a studied ranking would be, one guesses, a life’s work.

But we have launched an illegal, unconstitutional war against Iran which, whenever explained at all, is supported by an unfolding, endless cascade of presidential lies. No one even anticipates that he would tell the truth. After all, when has he?

We invaded Venezuela, again in bold violation of international law, to steal its oil — like the rankest imperialists of centuries past. We explained we did it because no one could stop us. Cuba is reportedly next up because Trump wants to “take” the island.

We unilaterally kill people at sea and then laugh and brag about it — as if we were boys playing a video game.

Trump has turned his massive, thuggish, personal militia loose on Democratic-led cities — where they kill citizens execution-style, slander the victims and shield the perpetrators from accountability.

In the process, we have become a sort of predator nation — shaming our history, shaming our sacrifice, shaming our defining mission, and shaming our character as a people.

Must make Republicans proud.

Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.