It’s hardly just corn growers who should be irate. Indeed, everyone with a conscience should be mad as hell at those in Congress who have signed up to a heartless farm bill proposal to begin cutting an additional $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps). Their plan has begun to throw millions of people out of the program and cut benefits for millions more.
If you are a man, woman, parent, business owner, farmer, teacher or veteran, you should be furious. If you’re old, young, Black, Hispanic or White, your blood should be boiling. Why? Because we all stand to lose big!
Seniors: SNAP’s a lifeline for millions who have no or insufficient Social Security. The House Republican plan will leave many of them hungrier, increase their health problems by denying needed nutrition, and strip their already-meager bank accounts as a precondition of eligibility. And it won’t do much for their will to live. It’s a veiled death sentence.
Children: Rampant unemployment and the proliferation of low-wage jobs have resulted in one out of two American children spending at least a few months during childhood on food stamps. The good news is that food stamps and the nutrition they supply help boost their health, learning and long-term productivity. The bad news is that House Republicans have made children prime targets for cuts. Why don’t we cut their salaries down to the poverty level and let them try to live without proper nutrition.
Parents: When food runs short, parents frequently skip meals so children have enough to eat. Hungry, stressed and feeling guilty, the parents’ suffering hurts their children as well. Through their SNAP cuts, House Republicans have shown a deep contempt and lack of consideration for low-income parents, including millions of working parents!
Women: SNAP cuts are particularly brutal to women. Because they tend to earn less and be the primary caregivers to children; 60% of working-age adult SNAP recipients are women. In addition, 67% of elderly SNAP recipients are women. Without exaggeration, this a quiet kind of death sentence for our people, as the above and following will show.
Rural Americans: Too many members of Congress would like us to believe that the Farm bill provides agriculture subsidies for rural areas and food stamps for urban areas. The truth is, hunger is as prevalent in rural America as in urban America. And during this tough economic time, SNAP benefits are boosting rural and urban economies alike. Without food stamps, those communities will suffer every day from malnutrition.
Business Owners: One of SNAP’s many strengths is that it uses efficient American markets like grocery stores, superstores, farmers markets and bank-issued debit cards to get food to needy people. Therefore there is no fat, no pork in the food stamps program. The stamps are there for those who need them to survive on. And that’s it.
Farmers: They have supported SNAP for decades. Since they can only be used to purchase food, SNAP benefits are spent quickly at stores. The benefits pay farmers, grocers, truck drivers and others who supply our food, while providing a quick boost to the local economies. Approximately 16 cents on every grocery dollar spent goes back to farmers, who form the backbone of our food supply.
Educators: Nearly half, 50%, of SNAP enrollees are children. SNAP cuts will mean that hundreds of thousands of kids also will not receive school lunches, which help children to be physically stronger and more attentive in class, along with better attendance and fewer disciplinary problems. You can take that from an ex-teacher from some of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods.
Veterans: At least 900,000 struggling veterans and low-paid enlisted active duty military families receive SNAP each month. More than $98 million in SNAP benefits were redeemed at military commissaries during Fiscal Year 2012. Proposed work requirements would be particularly hard on veterans living in areas of high unemployment.
Health care advocates and deficit hawks: Recent research from the Health Impact Project found that the potentially 5.1 million adults and children who could lose SNAP benefits would ultimately suffer more poverty and poorer health. That could translate into nearly $15 billion to manage diabetes alone at taxpayers’ expense.
Moreover, in a nation that can spend billions, trillions on wars and armaments, plus provide easement programs to foreign countries, cutting food stamps in the USA would be an even bigger disgrace. As big as the fact that the Occupy Movement has shown: 2% of the richest Americans live like royalty while 99% of them, the poor as well as fading middle class families, are having problems keeping their heads above water and/or living from paycheck to paycheck. To take SNAP benefits from them is to support a perverse plutocracy in which only the rich have a right to exist. And that shouldn’t be America.
Voters: Thus voters must recognize that SNAP cuts will harm a wide swath of Americans. Democrats oppose cuts by an 83–17% margin, Republicans by 53–47%, and Independents by 72–28%. Why? After all, we are all vulnerable, whether Black, White, Brown, Yellow or Red, rural or urban, conservative or liberal, man or woman, child or adult, business owner or worker. Before America turns into a Third World country, let the big shots in Congress wake up and do the right thing for the expanding numbers of poor in this country, thanks to an economy broken by continued recession caused by the shenanigans of the financial industry.
When you consider the cross section of Americans whose lives stand to be harmed by the House Repuglicans’ plan to cut SNAP by an additional $40 billion over the next ten years, it’s hard not to get angry. This is a coldblooded lack of humanity. So, demand that your Congress people pass a farm bill with no cuts to SNAP. It’s not only the big food corporations that should profit from the bounty of America’s fertile food production. It’s we the people—all the people of America who need help from the hawks of hunger—and need to receive the full protection of SNAP.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
If American citizens are not actively revolting, and killing their oppressors, then I guess they will continue to live under tyranny and increasing tyranny. The way I see it, from their reactions and inactions, they love tyranny, deserve tyranny, have tyranny, will get more tyranny. They seem to be getting what they want and what they deserve. I’m glad for the pukes.