Nothing grinds my gears more than elected officials abusing the privilege of their oftice by promoting false narratives that mischaracterize reality and are designed to simply stoke fear.

And that’s exactly what the Democrats are doing with respect to the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Contrary to their doom-and-gloom talking points, there are no cuts to Medicaid or food stamps in the bill. Rather, recipients who are able to work are required to do so or at least be searching for a job to qualify for benefits. Requiring Medicaid recipients to check in at least twice a year to prove eligibility is not going to cause people to die, as Democrats would have you believe. In fact, we should devise systems that require continuous eligibility checking.

Requiring states to cover more of the cost of administration of the SNAP program when their error rate exceeds a reasonable threshold is not taking food out of the mouth of babies.

There are numerous other examples.

The fundamental problem is that we’ve conditioned our society to feel entitled to government largesse, even though we’re literally borrowing $.50 of every welfare dollar. It’s entitlement-itis on steroids.

The federal government has evolved into a giant re-distribution apparatus. Most of our government is concentrated on transfer payments.

That’s a far cry from the constitutionally appropriate functions as envisioned by our framers.

And, our states are addicted to the drug of federal dollars, only made possible by the federal government’s virtually unlimited debt capacity.

If the Fed cut spending sufficient to balance the budget, a giant hole would be blown in every state budget, including Mississippi. Sadly, we are the most dependent on federal dollars.

The Medicaid program in Mississippi is larger than the General Fund budget. Our goal should be to wean ourselves off reliance on dollars sent to the Treasury by the deep blue states plus the debt incurred by the US treasury to finance transfers to our state.

Try something different, Democrats. Tell the dang truth.