I live in Pennsylvania. The state is in the process of introducing an asset requirement to receive food stamps. And they are doing it in an astonishing cruel and stupid way.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having a personal asset limit to qualify for food stamps. Why should the government pay the food bill of the wealthy? But the amount of assets one should be able to retain and still qualify, which in Pennsylvania is just $2,000 (excluding home and a car) is just plain cuckoo.
People work all their lives to put aside a bit for when they get older, or they have some saved from their work before becoming unemployed. A certain amount of such assets is an absolute necessity to keep from being totally destitute. With just $2,000 in accessible assets, the new Pennsylvania ceiling, you are one car repair, one medical bill, one broken boiler, and four or five weeks of city living away from having nothing at all. Nothing.
There have been times in this country when issues such as the appropriate size of allowable assets to still qualify for government food stamp aid could have been worked out by sensible public officials. They would look at things like actual living costs (much higher in a place like Philly, for example, than rural Mississippi) and come up with a sane and sensible number of allowable retained assets. We no longer live in such a time, however.
On the radio today I heard the administrator of Pennsylvania’s food stamp program explain why the asset qualification was about to be applied. It wasn’t about economics. It certainly wasn’t about fraud (the food stamp fraud rate in Pennslyvania has been estimate at a near non-existent .01 percent). No, the reason is because a lot of people who this administrator identified as “taxpayers” had contacted her department complaining about rich people getting food stamps, possibly because there was a story awhile back about a lottery winner somewhere doing so.
Listening to this woman’s rap, her department’s rationale, threw me back to the early 1980s, and listening to some of the rants coming from Ronald Reagan. On matters of nutrition, he expressed views such as ketchup was a vegetable. But his most famous statement when it came to the undeserving poor and their needs was that there were a lot of welfare queens coming to pick up their welfare checks in Cadillacs.
Food stamp millionaires are today’s welfare queens. Overblown or outright nonsensical excuses for cruel treatment of the needy. The “taxpayers” that complained about food stamps in Pennsylvania were almost certainly Tea Partiers who in former years bought into that welfare queen drivel.
There are sensible compromises that can be made on virtually all issues facing the country today. Certainly on who should qualify for food stamps. Except ideological idiocy is trumping common sense. And in the food realm, much unneeded and undeserved two-meal-a-day pain will result.
Information about this writer’s new book —This God-Awful Political Season (In Verse) — can be found online.