Darren Bullock, 40, is a Trump voter who switched from the Democrats in 2016.
He is likely to lose Medicaid coverage because of the new requirements, although he is not hopeful of finding adequate employment.
“If they want people to work 80 hours a month, they’d need to bring in a lot more jobs,” he says.
I have a hypothesis that many conservatives are reflexively opposed to change. So if you suggest putting in a bus lane, they’ll fight you tooth and claw. But once you get it in, a couple years later, if someone suggests removing it those same people will fight tooth and claw to keep it.
In other words, sometimes they’re stupid and don’t have good reasons.
It’s been documented that the fear center in conservatives’ brains gets activated a lot more than it does for progressives. They are scared and angry and aren’t spending the time to understand anything which is exactly what would calm their worries. They’re basically just running around breaking shit and making life hard for everyone because they’re stuck in monkey brain.
Also they do seem to like change when it means removing stuff that benefits others. It’s not change exactly that sets them off, but anything they perceive as giving their resources away(and they most certainly do not understand the concept of an indirect benefit).
I think its because change always sucks over here. I was a caregiver before COVID, the agency took Medicare, so my wages were set by a state committee. The state raised the minimum wage, but I never got a raise because the committee took years to approve one. The state passed a law mandating PTO, but it was less than the 2 weeks we were already getting, so we didn’t get more. I was doing overtime, living paycheck to paycheck, then the state decided that they wouldn’t transfer the clients to palliative care, and we needed to watch them die too. No bump in pay, but they gave us the number to an employee helpline that would tell management if you used it, so I never used it.
There was a client I had been taking care of for four years, and I held her hand so she wouldn’t die alone. I was out of PTO, couldn’t afford an unpaid mental health day, another longterm client died, and I drove into traffic. I haven’t been able to hold down a job since.
It’s said a rising tide lifts all boats, but sometimes people get caught in the undertow.