Kick down. Kiss up.
by Tom Sullivan
Former South Carolina lieutenant governor Andre Bauer summed up the attitude in 2010:
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer said during a town hall meeting, as the Greenville News reported over the weekend. “You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”
The president of the United States this week compared poor immigrants to animals. The Republican-controlled Congress is preparing to make it harder for the poor to get food. These are not coincidences.
For the ruling class, laws are for the little people. Rulers are exempt. Laws should be punitive to keep the hoi polloi in line.
Thus the proposal in Congress to make it even harder for struggling Americans in need of nutritional support, i.e., food, to get any.
Catherine Rampell elaborates for the Washington Post on the Farm Bill scheduled for a vote today. It contains an overhaul of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps). The measure expands the federal oversight bureaucracy to ensure the breeders are working. Existing law already requires work by able-bodied recipients, and most, says Rampell, are already working. But insisting the poor work for their food is too good for them. The bill also has a few problems:
One is that low-wage workers often have limited control over their work schedules. If a restaurant cuts a single mom’s hours one week because business is slow, or she has to miss a few days because her child care fell through, she could lose food assistance for an entire year.
Checking eligibility every month is also expensive.
Currently, most states verify work status every six months, or when a major change occurs in a household. A new, monthly evaluation for millions of people would be a huge administrative undertaking, requiring governments to invest in new computer systems and more staff.
Documenting work hours each month would be challenging and burdensome for lots of workers, too, particularly the self-employed. A lot of people who legally qualify for food stamps would still likely lose them.
But, Rampell writes, “better to let 10 deserving people go hungry than let a single undeserving person be fed, right?”
Right.
Congress will spend more money that the effort saves to ensure the right people go hungry. Wouldn’t want the animals breeding.
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