As the lead story of the latest issue of The Progressive Populist by Jill
Richardson reminded us this week, the House of Representatives wants to cut
$2.0 billion out of the annual food stamp budget. A bill in the Senate would limit the cut in
the food stamp program to $400 million. Either set of cuts will result in some
combination of fewer people receiving food stamps and those receiving food
stamps getting less. Let’s make no bones
about it, people will go hungry.
In a recent article circulating the Internet, someone
named Michael Lombardi puts two well-known numbers together to demonstrate the
enormity of the problem of food insecurity in the United States: the number of
Americans on food stamps (47.7 million) and the number of people living in
Spain (46.2 million). Guess what? More
people get food stamps in the United States than live in the entire country of
Spain.
We have a country’s worth of people so poor that they need
government funds to buy food.
Despite what race-baiting right-wingers like Rick Santorum say, the large number of people on food stamps does not reflect on the weak moral fiber of Americans or some special group of Americans. Believe me, very few if any of the nearly 48 million U.S. citizens on food stamps want to be on food stamps. Food stamp recipients must earn less than 130% of the federal poverty line, which in 2013 computes to a little over $30,500 a year for a family of four and less than $15,000 a year for an individual. But there’s another catch. To qualify for food stamps you pretty much must have no savings, since even $100 in liquid assets (bank accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs) will disqualify you, no matter how little you make.
Do you know anyone who wants to live at the poverty level
with no savings? I don’t and I never
have, even during the hippy-dippy-trippy days of the 1970s.
I know people who have lost their jobs or are chronically
underemployed. I know people who don’t have the skills to get a decent-paying
job and I know people with skills that have grown obsolete. I know people who
were never trained how to write a resume or cover letter in school and people
who have trouble reading because of a disability.
I know people who have been emotionally crushed by fighting
one or more of our dirty wars or who have had the energy drained out of them by
extreme and persistent poverty. I know people who overextended themselves in
debt because of illness in the family. I know people who bought into the
American ideology of consumption and didn’t save enough money and then lost
their jobs.
I know people who lost their jobs when the CEO screwed up
and then walked away with a golden parachute.
I know a lot of children in poor families, who face food
insecurity through no fault of their own, merely because they were born into a
poor family or one that fell from the grace of a middle class life.
All of these people—the children and the adults, those in
poverty through no fault of their own and those who “got what they deserved”—all
have something in common besides their impoverished conditions.
They are all human beings. They don’t deserve to go hungry
in a land of plenty.
So why do so many of our elected officials want to starve
their fellow Americans?
If we want to cut the food stamp budget, we should create
more jobs through major public projects such as improving mass transit,
retrofitting buildings to make them greener and safer, and repairing bridges,
highways and dams. We should make sure the jobs are well-paying by
substantially raising the minimum wage and fostering increased unionization of
the workforce. We need to invest in our schools.
Starving people to cut the budget is inhumane and not worthy
of a representative democracy.
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