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.
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.But, Rampell writes, "better to let 10 deserving people go hungry than let a single undeserving person be fed, right?"
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.