More ice cream for him
Meanwhile Trump is filling the last hours before he goes on his multi-week vacation doing his bit to take food stamps away from poor people.
The Trump administration is setting out to do what this year’s farm bill didn’t: tighten work requirements for millions of Americans who receive federal food assistance.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday is proposing a rule that would restrict the ability of states to exempt work-eligible adults from having to obtain steady employment to receive food stamps.
The move comes just weeks after lawmakers passed a $400 billion farm bill that reauthorized agriculture and conservation programs while leaving the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which serves roughly 40 million Americans, virtually untouched.
Trump is pissed off that they didn’t gut SNAP more than they already had, so he’s doing it himself.
Currently, able-bodied adults ages 18-49 without children are required to work 20 hours a week to maintain their SNAP benefits. The House bill would have raised the age of recipients subject to work requirements from 49 to 59 and required parents with children older than 6 to work or participate in job training. The House measure also sought to limit circumstances under which families that qualify for other poverty programs can automatically be eligible for SNAP.
None of those measures made it into the final farm bill despite being endorsed by President Donald Trump. Now the administration is using regulatory rulemaking to try to scale back the SNAP program.
Because starving people magically causes jobs to pop into existence.
“The president has directed me to propose regulatory reforms to ensure those who are able to work do so in exchange for their benefits,” Perdue said during a media call Wednesday. “We would much rather have Congress enact these important reforms for the SNAP program. However, these regulatory changes by the USDA will save hardworking taxpayers $15 billion over 10 years and give President Trump comfort enough to support a farm bill he might otherwise have opposed.”
Perhaps we should require our president to work at least 20 hours a week before he can watch television or golf?
I would be surprised if he’s put in 20 hours of hard work in his entire life. Many of the people who are poor would love to work if they could find a job, and many of them have worked at very hard labor jobs for many years before being laid off or losing their job for some reason.
And that brings up another issue: able-bodied. I was on food stamps in the 90s. I was able-bodied, but was unable to work because of depression, anxiety, and anorexia (which was rapidly making my body less able). I had a teenage son who had a deadbeat dad that didn’t pay child support. When I recovered enough to lose my disability, I was fortunate, because I found work within 6 months of losing my disability, and was able to keep my food stamps for about a year, because I didn’t make enough to be ineligible.
Under the welfare ‘reform’ act passed during the Clinton years, I was unable at any point to obtain welfare, because when I was on disability, my meagre check was too high. When I went off disability, I was told I would have to interview 10 times a week, and take any job offered for $75 a month. They told me I could not tell any employer that I needed to work a schedule around my college. When I asked them if this meant I needed to drop out of college, they said “If the employer requires you to work during school hours, you cannot miss work days”. So, someone trying to get a better chance in the future should give up the chance to succeed in the future for a job that would guarantee a chance to fail in the present. Bad.
Now they want to take away even the minimal remaining safety net of food stamps.
Just to clarify – that $75 a month in my previous post was the amount of welfare assistance I was being offered. I could sure buy a lot of Cadillacs on that, right?
For a moment there I thought children older than 6 would have to work or participate in job training. And I was barely surprised enough to ‘re-read the sentence and realise I was wrong.
The richest nation on earth has 40 million people who require supplementary nutrition? How fucked up is that?
Rob, it’s as fucked up as making Donald J. Trump the possessor of nuclear codes for the world’s largest military.
Iknklast, fair point. Well argued.
This reminds me of the attempt a few years ago to make the work-able unemployed in Britain do unpaid work in order to claim benefits, an idea that had businesses salivating at the thought of free labour. Fortunately there was a lot of opposition and the idea died a quiet death.
Rob, it’s as fucked-up as the fact that the wealthiest individuals in that country have more money and own more assets than the poorest countries on Earth combined.
What ‘work’ do they expect to magically appear? Breaking up rocks? Digging canals to nowhere?
Well, there’s all the unskilled labour requirements currently taken care of by temping agencies for a start.