The government has cut $4 billion from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), as well as subsidized school lunch programs for 2020. Imagine living off of $25,750 for a family of four (maybe you don’t have to imagine)! This is currently the official “poverty line”. To qualify for free lunch in school the family has to earn less than $31,930 per year, and feed a family of four. According to the 2015 census, one child in five was living at or below the poverty line compared to one in eight adults, which is bad enough. That’s 15.5 million “officially” impoverished kids. But many more go hungry if we consider that the poverty line is much lower than what really constitutes hardship!
What is really “bloated”? The profits of the banks are bloated!
Companies that are making a killing, figuratively and literally through their connections to the military, are bloated! Military spending – with over 800 billion for this coming year (a $180 billion increase over the next two years) – is bloated!
Meanwhile the cost of SNAP is less than 2% of the federal budget (44 billion). US corporate profits rose by $66.1 billion in the second quarter of 2019 or 3.7 percent, to $1.86 trillion!
The scandal is that we live in a world where any child can go hungry, and where we accept the lie that this is a meritocracy, where supposedly deserving people have money in their pockets and those who don’t have themselves to blame. How can we accept this lie? We want no bloated overlords, with private jets, telling us what we do or don’t deserve. We produce the food, we package the food, we deliver the food, we distribute the food. Working people should all have food, and those who raise children should never have to think for a minute about whether they “deserve” it.
