The other day I wrote a post on America's poor children. Around 23.1% of the children in the United States lives in poverty. That means nearly one in four children live in poverty-stricken families in American -- families that rely on help to provide the basic needs like food. One would think a figure like that (along with the fact that over 43 million Americans currently are on the SNAP Program -- food stamps), the Congress would do something to improve this situation.
Maybe a reasonable Congress would, but we haven't had one of those in years. The United States Congress (both branches) have decided that they would rather make the situation worse -- and that is what they have now proposed. The Senate proposal is bad enough. The Senate Agriculture Committee has approved a new farm bill. And since the Agriculture Department oversees the food stamp program, that bill will determine the funding for food stamps -- and they are cutting that funding by slightly more than $4 billion. I would like to think this is a GOP thing, but nothing gets out of a Senate committee with at least some Democratic votes (and the bill was approved on a 15 to 5 vote)..
It is inexcusable to cut the vital food stamp program in this time when poverty is still growing -- and the program is needed more than ever. But if you think that Senate bill is bad (and it certainly is), then wait until you hear about the House version of the farm bill. The House Republicans have decided that the Senate is being too generous by only cutting $4 billion. The House wants to cut a whopping $21 billion form the food stamp program. The Republican cuts would kick more than 2 million people off the food stamp roles -- mostly senior citizens and the working poor with children.
I can understand the desire to cut the government budget, but there are much better ways to do that than to take the food out of the mouths of poor people (including the elderly and children). They could create a decent jobs program to put people back to work, or tax all income as earned income (which would only affect the ultra-rich), or put a small sales tax on large amounts of stock trading on Wall Street. But those things would not only reduce the budget, they would make sense -- and making sense is not something Congress is recently in the habit of doing, especially the GOP-controlled House.
It looks like this country is still in the grip of a "trickle-down" economic policy and a GOP version of austerity -- which says the rich need to be given more while the poor must bear the brunt of that giveaway. This is a shameful and disastrous policy, which has already resulted in a recession and the loss of millions of jobs -- but Congress never seems to learn from past mistakes. They remain convinced that all they need to do is make those same mistakes even bigger, and then everything will be OK. They are idiots (and so are the people who keep re-electing them).