The Monster Behind the Big Beautiful Bill

Rich people’s insatiable hunger will make the rest of us hungrier

The Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) is Congress’s biggest blow to America. With JD Vance having laid his finger on the scales toward cruelty, Republicans are plundering the bellies and bodies of regular people by stealing billions from SNAP and Medicaid. Many Contrarians are making the righteous lament: they’ve robbed the poor to feed the rich! And they have. The rich—including those in congress—are getting richer as a result. They are insatiable.

Theirs is the energy of Windigo, that monster feared among Algonquin-speaking peoples in North America who lingers in the shadows of famine and want. Windigo is so desperately hungry, he will eat his own lips. He will eat you and your whole family and still be unsatisfied. As scientist and Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches us in Braiding Sweetgrass, the more a Windigo eats, the more ravenous it becomes; its “mind a torture of unmet want.” Windigo is a cannibalizing greed.

Throughout my career working on hunger in America, I’ve known those hurricane-strength winds of Windigo. In 2008, I advocated with Witnesses to Hunger colleagues to raise SNAP. Soon after, Congress made a 13% boost to SNAP in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). This was a proven way to boost the economy during a recession and it prevented food insecurity. Yet in 2010, Congress voted to take much of that SNAP money away, robbing SNAP of over $2 billion to make improvements in school lunch. Those cuts were apparently just an appetizer. With $186 billion in cuts to SNAP over the next ten years, it’s time to lift our gaze to a broader horizon, face the monster, and get more creative.

SNAP is the top public assistance program to prevent and treat hunger. It improves child health and prevents hospitalizations; it also improves children’s math and reading scores. SNAP boosts the economy and generates more than 150% of its cost in the GDP; it responds gracefully to economic downturns, and it holds up small towns where the grocery store is the main employer.

Until the BBB, SNAP was often a bi-partisan darling. When I served on the bi-partisan National Commission on Hunger, all of us agreed that SNAP was the most effective program to treat and prevent hunger. We saw problems with it, of course. The biggest problem was that benefits were not enough to help families eat healthy. So, we advocated for improving that calculation based on the true cost of healthy meals. In 2021, the Food and Nutrition Services of the USDA finally made improvements to the SNAP benefit calculation based on decades of common-sense science and wisdom of SNAP participants. This improved incomes and reduced food insecurity.

With all these plusses for the economy and public health, why would Republicans gut SNAP and dismantle its funding structure, forcing states to pick up the impossible bill of its administration? Why this lack of care and loss of reason?

Something else is at work that has been present since America’s inception. It’s Windigo’s violent hunger for land, labor, more money, and more power. If people are in the way? Eat them: a metaphor for genocide, colonization, enslavement, and beating people into working for pennies. The United States media and our schoolbooks still celebrate the rich and selfish. Our government enshrines these same values in our systems by feeding the greed of corporations under the guise of helping people in poverty. Many people know it but seem afraid to lift the veil.

Virgil Findlay, illustration for Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo,” published in Weird Tales (1930s).

Let’s peek under Walmart’s shroud. No, it’s not “beauty at maximum discount.” It’s greed at maximum exploitation. Walmart is the largest redeemer of SNAP benefits. It’s no wonder that, like my colleagues and me, Walmart’s lobbyists advocate for SNAP funding. SNAP feeds their profits. They pay their workers so poorly that they’re eligible for SNAP and Medicaid, and then eat the benefits their workers need to survive with an open maw of “discounts.” You and I are picking up Walmart’s tab through our tax dollars. The Walton’s, Walmart’s owners, are the richest family in the world.

Republicans think we’ll swallow their pond scum rationale, that the BBB indicates it’s time for people to get out of the basement and start working. In the 25 years I’ve been talking with people who use SNAP benefits, I’ve yet to meet that lazy bogey man. He doesn’t exist. The vast majority of people on SNAP who can work are already working. They are working to the bone without a lot to show for it—precisely because of people like the Waltons, who are notoriously fierce when they fight to prevent unionization and have previously resisted calls to improve wages. Meanwhile, Walmart and others in the big food and beverage industry continue to profit from SNAP dollars.

First, let’s call rich people’s bluff. The SNAP participants that my colleagues and I know do not want to be on SNAP; they deserve a living wage and should not suffer the stigma thrown at them for participating in SNAP. If Republicans agree that the goal is to get people off SNAP, it’s high time to raise the wage so that already hard-working people can feed their families.

Second, state administrators should lean into guaranteed income programs. This is especially important, as the BBB will trigger significant job losses. Guaranteed income can make America healthy. In my new home state of Massachusetts, guaranteed income programs reduced emergency room visits, reduced food insecurity and improved mental health. Similar results are coming in from the Mayors for Guaranteed Income efforts in Newark. The expanded Child Tax Credit, a guaranteed income program during COVID, was enormously successful in improving mental health, and housing and food security. These programs should be part of a new system to prevent hunger. Such programs give families more freedom—freedom to be food secure, to be healthy, and to have more time to spend with each other and build community.

While the rich chew on their own lips, destroying the systems we have with their insatiable consumption, we should keep the broader horizon in mind. With newer structures that help us care for each other and live well, we can create more dignity and freedom. Enough to go around.

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Mariana Chilton is author of The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: why we must unlearn everything we think we know and start again published by MIT Press in October 2024.