The United State has fallen into a pit of political absurdities so chaotic, so brutal, and so cruel that many of us have become desensitized to the torturous, slow ruining of lives that poverty in our country causes every minute of every day.
We’re so mesmerized by the viciousness of our politics that rich lawmakers have no qualms about taking food out of poor people’s mouths, passing laws that diminish their only hope to get an adequate share of life’s basic substance through food stamps.
And of all the maladies poverty brings, food insecurity is among the worst. It can drive people to desperate acts. It slows a child’s development. Worse, it can leave the chronically hungry without energy, prone to disease, and incapable of optimism, one of the major sources of self-improvement.
As terrible as hunger is in a country of plenty like ours, it seems it actually doesn’t appear monstrous to many of us to cut food stamp funding for working families, to keep the minimum wage so low that a family with even one child can’t make ends meet, and to allow the “free market” to undermine American businesses so they feel somehow justified in forcing their employees to work for substandard, non-livable wages.
It’s not a matter of asking ourselves if our country has become so mean spirited and so maliciously self-interested that many of us no longer care about our fellow citizens. It’s not a matter of speculation. They don’t.
The U.S. House and Senate last month thought it perfectly rational and even, in some twisted way, morally high-minded to cut food stamp funding in the Farm Bill. The House would slash food assistance by $20 billion over five years, while the Senate pared it back to $4.4 billion over the same period. And that’s out of an annual food stamp budget of $75 to $80 billion. No tax dollars could be spent more wisely nor with better results as far as the health of human beings is concerned.
The cutting of food assistance programs is, indeed, monstrous behavior. But no serious effort was made, or even mentioned, to increase food aid. Why? Because a bogus economic philosophy, chained to the dogma of deficit cutting, trumps all humanitarian betterment.
Food stamps, which have morphed into something called Electronic Benefit Transfers (EBTs), are absolutely essential for living in a slave-wage economy like ours.
A family of four, with a net monthly income of $1,921 is eligible for some $660 from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Imagine what it means to work 160 hours a month and make only $1, 921. That comes to something like $12 an hour, $3.50 more than the minimum wage in some parts of New Mexico. That just goes to show what a ludicrous insult to hard working people the minimum wage really is.
It doesn’t seem to bother many people anymore that folks working hard every day, who can’t make enough money to live on, could have their most basic needs threatened by people who make $174,000 year. That’s the base pay for rank and file members of both the U.S. House and Senate. The nasty penny pincher who’s the current Speaker of the House makes $223,500 a year! I wonder how many years in their lives most readers of the Mercury made such a wage. The editor and publisher never have come close, that’s for sure. And what makes the food stamp cuts even more galling is that almost half the members of Congress are millionaires.
What do the 30 percent of New Mexicans who worry about their next meal make of that? If the corporate news machine pointed out such disparities we might have a voter revolution at the polls.
Oh, some people will say, they work so hard in Congress. Maybe some of them do, but they can’t be working as hard as the guy who’s laying down tar on the road, or the immigrant putting up drywall, or the waitress in the small café whose husband is sick, or the nurse who’s going to save your life one day.
One in five New Mexicans, that’s more than 411,947 of us, almost as many people who live in Albuquerque proper, receive food stamps. That’s just over 20 percent of our population according to the 2011 Capital Report New Mexico. I’m sure the numbers are higher now.
That gives New Mexico the second highest per capita food stamp use in the nation, just behind Mississippi. And that’s because New Mexico is in last place, 50th, in the nation when it comes to the percentage of working families that are “low income.” That would be 44%.
The party of Ronald Reagan, which has a lot of power in New Mexico, still evokes the noxious imagery of “takers” and “welfare queens.” Forty four percent of us, at least, know in their sore feet and aching backs just how savagely stupid and
malicious such talk really is. It’s what bullies would say as they whack on people who have no way to defend themselves.
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