#for some of them I'm sure it's a straight-out gift to corporations looking to break new wage-theft records

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

You don't necessarily have to want churches to be the only option for aid, or care where people turn to replace the resources that the stripped funding was providing, but all the reasons are pretty much exactly that awful.

If you tear massive holes in the social safety net, shitty employers can start making (even more) bank. They can cut wages, start demanding that staff clock out and keep working, cut back on safety measures that staff refused to work without, union-bust to their hearts' content, etc. etc. etc. All the jobs people weren't taking because they were dangerous, degrading, and didn't pay dick?

If you cannot afford to give up a single dime out of your paycheck without going hungry or losing your home, your boss can do pretty much whatever the hell they want and you're stuck putting up with it, especially now that the government may just... not enforce the employee-rights laws they're breaking at all, instead of in 6-10 weeks.

Shitty landlords get a chance to turf out tenants who suddenly can't make rent. Local laws put in place to keep people from being evicted just to flip a property for development, preserve rent-controlled properties, capping year-to-year rent hikes, etc., almost never keep people from being evicted for non-payment, and most don't curtail what can be done with the property if there's not an active tenant.

Plus in cities where ritzy developments have to set aside x many units for low-income or section 8 tenants, there are a shocking number of people who'd rather see the units empty than tenanted by the wrong sort of occupants. Suddenly cutting off the money the subsidizes the rent those tenants otherwise can't make without the vouchers means the units will go empty.

Shitty health insurance plans will probably see a big windfall off the medicaid fuckery, too. No medicaid doesn't stop your kid from needing insulin, or you from needing heart pills, so now companies offering predatory policies that cover just enough to keep you from dying a preventable death get a chance to soak even more out of the poor.

Research agencies, non-profits, cultural institutions, etc. all also get much, much more vulnerable to manipulation or outright capture by corporate interests or pathological rich fucks if federal funding gets yanked or just suddenly becomes unreliable. If an institute turning out research that was bad for your business suddenly gets a 30% hole blown in its budget, it becomes very easy to let the research tank or offer to make up the shortfall... so long as they don't do stuff you don't like.

Non-profits that have to go begging to private philanthropists frequently find themselves beholden to those interests, either because any donations are earmarked for things the donor thinks are important or because the donations will dry up if they piss the donor off.

Why would they do this? Because desperate people are wildly easier to exploit. Because if you'll starve, lose your home, or die of medical neglect if you try to enforce your rights, then those rights might as well not exist. Because it gives oligarchs even more social and political power than they already have. The church is just one way to exercise social control over the poor.

I am finding out that a lot of things I thought were common knowledge about Christian Fundamentalism are not in fact common knowledge.

Like with the aid freeze, people were like why would they do this? And I was like cause they want churches to be the only option for aid.

And people were shocked. And I was also shocked that this wasn't like...more well known. I grew up with people who were anti-aid because they felt that belonged to the church and made people behave more worldly if they could get it elsewhere. It was so well known it was a debate topic in my Philosophy of Religion course in high school.

I'm just...I'm concerned at how little some groups seem to know about Christian Fundamentalism. I wish I could help translate more.