Trump Plans to Rip Away More Government Help from Citizens
President Trump has devised yet another plan to cut down on the Food Stamp Program in America. He will attempt to change it for the third time to cut around 19% of benefits from the households in need. This plan could cause around eight thousand low income households to lose all of their previously earned benefits. The original purpose of this program was to help those in need so that they can live and work properly. Without this program, the American citizens will not be able to sufficiently pay for their home necessities and they will be forced to downgrade to the point that they will no longer be able to work correctly which will later end in unemployment. If the program is cut any further, poverty levels will start increasing, as well as the unemployment rates, which would discourage Trump’s previous claims of being successful in decreasing.
What the government does not favor is the fact that some families are estimated to be receiving more money in food stamps than they require due to the differing costs of living for their area. The president is too busy pondering on the minuscule loss of a few extra dollars to think about how devastating his plan will be to the rest of his country if he goes forth with cutting almost a quarter of the Food Stamp Program funds.
To make matters worse, even the children of our country have the potential to be personally affected by the President’s plan. 500,000 helpless children will lose the one tiny privilege they were given of discounted school lunches. The President was born into wealth and has never had to endure hunger and stress that is caused when your next meal is indefinite. Many children in America only get the chance to eat a full meal during school because of the fact that their parents and them do not have enough extra money to pay for food anywhere else. Trump’s idea of depriving American children of such a necessity that he will never have to worry about just to save the government some money, is truly sickening. If congress does go through with President Trumps request, the American citizens will be the ones who will greatly suffer.
ahntkd99
carahall
andrewbecharaa
athenapup4
bane1900
bestbaker123
bmdpiano
comp0327
compclass8
cynicalwordsmith22
doglover441
drippydoughnut
drpaleontology
gcatt310
givemeclouttokens
hershey515
iamsleepy01
imagination4421
influenza123
jackso23
Jayv23
kraemercali
lazybear8
lelebxby
lg102015
lovericeandnoodles
lucbe219
morra2024
mpsj13
roses0102
Sub2MigzFilms
smellycat23
tenere84
thefrontbottom
voxpopuli75
whosyourcookie22
yankeefan25
Newspaperlessness 
Thank you for the feedback professor, I will get to those revisions and soon perfect it for my portfolio.
LikeLike
Lucbe, you haven’t specified what kind of help you want, so I’ll restrict myself to argument and evidence here. You’ll need to make substantial changes to your language, grammar, and rhetoric when you polish your Portfolio version, but let’s solidify your structure and evidence first. (No sense polishing twice!)
Paragraph 1. The president doesn’t design programs, so you can’t lay the “devising” at his feet. You can claim that his administration has devised a plan to meet his approval, or something similar. But even better, you could bolster your credibility by naming the agency that actually presented him with the plan.
The Food Stamp Program is one of many programs from the (fill-in-the-blank) department. It may or may not ALSO be responsible for subsidized school lunches. I don’t know offhand if that’s true, but you need to find out if you’re going to lump them together as part of one nefarious scheme to starve America’s kids.
For a nationwide program, the cutting of benefits to just 8000 households seems really tiny. I don’t mean to minimize the impact on those families, but the number seems oddly low. Since you provide no links to sources, I don’t know where to check to see your numbers.
I appreciate your “cascading trauma” argument, Lucbe, but it’s too vague to have real impact. When you say the loss of food stamps will force families “to downgrade to the point that they will no longer be able to work correctly,” your readers will have a hard time following your line of reasoning. (And without hard numbers, reasoning becomes your best friend.) I think you mean the loss of food dollars will force the working poor to choose between eating and, for example, buying subway passes or putting gas in their cars, which will result in job losses. That sort of thing, but you see how much easier the argument is to follow when the choices are made specific.
Paragraph 2.You have a chance to score huge rhetorical points by balancing the HUGE impact on the poor against the TINY improvement in the overall US budget. Any chance you can work some numbers to show how VERY LITTLE the savings will be compared to the MASSIVE cost of just one defense spending item? Or compared to the UNPAID MILLIONS the Trump administration still owes the cities where his re-election campaign rallies have been held?
Are you saying that for most Food Stamp recipients there will be no loss of benefits, BUT THAT THOSE WHOSE benefits are marginally higher than they “should be” based on lower costs of living in their area WILL HAVE THEIR BENEFITS CUT? And only those recipients? If so, that was unclear. But it’s important that you not confuse your readers. Again, your credibility depends on having your facts straight and communicating them clearly.
Paragraph 3. I was not aware discounted school lunches were part of the Food Stamp program. I’m still not sure that they are. I also believe the very name Food Stamp program is obsolete and has been replaced by other names including WIC (assistance for Women, Infants, Children).
I agree with CynicalWordsmith that evoking hungry children is very powerful. You’ll make it even more powerful if you can evoke the empty refrigerators at home (caused by the loss of “food stamp” income) to the empty brown bag at school (caused by the loss of cheap school lunches).
To maximize the value of whatever revisions you plan to make following this feedback, Lucbe, you should copy and paste this current version into a new post called Editorial for Portfolio—Lucbe, and then make your revisions THERE to create two very different versions that demonstrate your responsiveness to feedback.
Then, when you next ask for feedback, we might be ready to polish your prose.
LikeLike
P1: I like how you connected Trump’s own plan to diffuse the food stamp program backfiring by creating more unemployment, good connection + good use of rhetorical phrasing and diction
P2: Again, good use of the negative diction when describing why Trump hasn’t made any effort in fixing the situation-this allows your stance on the argument to subtly shine through the writing without being too obvious
P3: Bringing up children to further create an argument of ethics here will really stick in your readers mind, however “their parents and them” = “their family does not” would grammatically flow better
I wonder if this phrase, “Trump’s idea of depriving American children of such a necessity”, is a bit unfair, has Trump declared that this will without a doubt result in the destruction of discounted/free lunches? All in all, very good first attempt, and I liked your topic a lot!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ll be back to peer review this one
LikeLike