As usual, when a meme says “Let me get this straight” they, in fact, do not get it straight. This meme makes it appear like this is somehow a response to shootings like Uvalde, but it’s not. And the well meaning program goes back decades.
▪️The Texas Legislature passed this bill in Sept 2021, well before the Uvalde shooting. It provides DNA and fingerprinting kits to school districts to distribute to parents. The kits are totally optional, no parent is required to use them.
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/SB02158F.pdf
▪️These kits from the Child ID Program were developed back in 1997, and more than 70 million have been distributed in North America. It began with kits given out at college and NFL football games, but has since expanded.
https://childidprogram.com/about-us/
▪️In fact, back in 1999 the Texas legislature passed a resolution supporting the program and outlined efforts offering every child in TX a kit. Other states as well as the US Congress have also passed resolutions praising the program.
https://journals.senate.texas.gov/sjrnl/76r/html/4-26.htm
▪️These kits are primarily used for missing children, although could be useful for other emergencies. The kid’s DNA isn’t sent to the government. Parents keep their child’s fingerprints/DNA at home in a secure envelope. If their child is ever missing, they then have it to give law enforcement.
▪️The whole thing is a non issue and seems to be a well meaning program unrelated to school shootings that somehow got turned into a political issue after media reports skewed its coverage and politicians like Gavin Newsome and Beto O’Rourke hyped it up.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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