Somehow, modern America is stepping sideways into Nineteenth Century France. Prison terms for stealing food to feed starving children could be right around the corner.
The House of Representatives Agriculture Committee has voted along party lines to cut over $800 Million from the Food Stamps program, incidentally taking away subsidized school lunches from about 40,000 kids. This is just part of the $3700 million in proposed cuts the committee came up with.
If you think that desperate parents will not turn to crime to feed their children, you weren’t paying attention to Katrina’s aftermath. If you think they can solve their problems by just getting a [insert expletive] job, you haven’t been paying attention to fuel costs and the “working poor.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. The federal budget is way out of control and seriously needs to be reigned in. Creating desperate families with hungry children (who will spend their school days wondering what they will eat instead of how to solve the math problem in front of them) is not the answer. We could follow Wolfowitz’s admonishment to cut farm subsidies. We could end billions of dollars of tax breaks to some of America’s most profitable corporations, oil companies. We could stop paying for mercenaries and re-think how contractors are selected. Then of course there are the obvious things that could be done to help balance the budget: cut pork; let certain tax cuts for the very rich lapse; let the IRS audit more large corporations and fewer low/middle income American voters.
Nope, certain members of Congress would rather take candy from a baby… or take school lunches from kids who made the mistake of being born “poor”.