Tag Archives: food stamps

Whose War on Christmas?

One of the many good things about Christmas Day is that Fox News will now suspend its peculiar annual ritual ranting about the fictitious liberal “war on Christmas.”  Now, admittedly some liberals are a bit uncomfortable with the country’s fixation on the feasting and gifting part of Christmas when so many are hungry and in want, but liberal guilt pangs hardly rise to the level of a “war” even by today’s lax usage standards (“the war on tire underinflation”). Besides, feasting and gifting are at best peripheral to the “real meaning” of Christmas? Even a Fox anchor (at least one caught unawares) would have to admit that the ecumenical meaning of the Christmas holiday is a message of peace, love and brotherhood. Right? Sounds pretty liberal to me (practically a hippie manifesto). So who could be at war with that? Hmm…

Well, a NYT op ed today discussed the upcoming House and Senate compromise deal on the Farm Bill, part of which contains $8 billion in cuts to food stamp benefits to 850,000 of the nation’s poorest households. The “compromise” part means that the House Republicans compromised their Christmas wish for $40 billion in cuts down to only $8 billion. Gee, less food for the hungry. Now there’s a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking (oops, can’t even do that—Republicans don’t want to provide home heating aid either). Say, who else didn’t want to give out coal?

“Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire… No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

That’s right, Ebenezer Scrooge was at war with Christmas. Sound like anyone we know? Maybe, the Republicans? Fox News? Now of course they all just love the crèche in the city hall courtyard, the nativity scene re-enactments at the school pageant. But those displays seem to be the beginning and end of their devotion to the Christmas spirit. And here’s what Dickens’ Christmas spirit had to say about that:

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

Yes, cutting food and health care for the poor, referring to them as “takers” who are simply a drag on society (“what, are there no workhouses?”) is the ultimate war on Christmas. When your concerns are only with the “haves” and “have-mores,” then you are at war with Christmas. The real Christians seem to think so. Pope Francis stated in his Christmas Eve message last night:

“If our heart is closed, if we are dominated by pride, deceit, self-seeking, then darkness falls within us and around us.”

Well, Scrooge ultimately changed. He reclaimed his sense of fellowship with humanity, he even bought food for the poor. Perhaps we could do the same. All of us.

Merry Christmas to all.

Less Food for the Hungry

Republicans are using the new farm bill as a vehicle to continue their long tradition of ensuring government money does not go to undeserving recipients. Oh, you say, they’re going to change the law so that rich people no longer qualify for farm subsidies and crop-insurance subsidies (see NYT article yesterday)? You mean billionaires like Paul Allen and Charles Schwab won’t continue to get government $$ for the farmland owned by the intertwined rat’s nest of corporate shells they maintain? Multistate food producing corporations that bear as much resemblance to a struggling family farm as the US Navy does to a couple duck hunters in a rowboat will have their handouts cut?

Hah! Of course not. We can’t do means testing when the well-to-do are involved. No, the undeserving recipients of aid who worry the Republicans are hungry people (as in hungry for food, not as in hungry for wealth and power—those people don’t bother Republicans a bit). The specific hungry people are those receiving food stamps from SNAP, the supplemental nutritional assistance program (interestingly always handled under the Farm Bill). The food stamp program was cut by $5 billion Nov. 1, which is already having a significant impact. And the House is proposing to cut $40 billion over the next decade which will remove 3.8 million people from SNAP the first year (and keep 210,000 kids from getting free school meals).

Why are the Republicans doing this? Well, they say the economy has recovered, so there theoretically shouldn’t be as many hungry people, so we should cut down the number we help. Unfortunately the “recovery” didn’t trickle down to the bottom. There are still 49.7 million people living in poverty and the SNAP program helps keep several million above that line (see Americanprogress.org).

And if the Republicans don’t care about feeding the poor (perhaps they all misplaced their Bibles) they should at least consider that the food stamp $$ go directly to businesses (ummm, businesses making money! Me likey!). And if that isn’t enough benefit to people who are not desperately poor, perhaps we could tack on a provision to have SNAP fund caviar carts that circulate around the offices of busy hedge fund managers. Then food aid would never be touched.