With all of the talk about our recovering economy, many people forget that cutting down unemployment numbers is meaningless unless the jobs created pay people a living wage. The latest available data on food assistance in the United States is from this past October.
About 45.4 million Americans, roughly one-seventh of the population, received nutrition aid last October, the most recent month of data. Unemployment was 5 percent that month. The last time joblessness fell to that level, in April 2008, 28 million Americans used food stamps, and the program cost less than half of what the government paid out last year.
Bloomberg news reports on this phenomenon wondering aloud how is this happening? On one hand, the government has made it easier in some cases to sign up for SNAP. They also make mention of something both the Obama administration and others purposefully unfocused people call an “uneven recovery.”
“The economy’s recovery is bifurcated,” said Kevin Concannon, the USDA undersecretary who heads the program. That makes food stamps crucial to "a very challenged safety net,” said Concannon, who previously directed state-level food-stamp programs in Maine, Oregon and Iowa.
“Bifurcated” means to “divide into two branches or forks.” You know, like a river! To put this into old-timey English, bifurcated is a nice way to say the rich are doing super better than they were when things crashed and the poor are doing worse and the middle class is mostly becoming the poor. Also, median rentals for two-bedroom apartments in California’s job-creating tech areas is $5,000.00. Who are these crazy lazybones who are not getting up and using their bootstraps to dust themselves off?
Heat-and-eat expanded SNAP in the subsidized housing where Barb Bailly lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Bailly, 65, took a job bagging groceries after being dismissed from her job with a state agency. She retired at 62 and lives on SNAP and Social Security benefits.
“I was underemployed for years. I used credit cards to make expenses,” she said. “I have to be very careful with my money, but I can get by now.”
Okay, welfare queen. Get it together. When John Kasich helped create the food stamps cutoffs millions of people are now facing, he was thinking about his next gig hosting a Fox News show called From the Heartland with John Kasich. Do you know how hard it is to get by on a cable newsman’s salary? Especially when your cable news network doesn’t even report real news? Kasich’s ideaology is parroted by Robert Rector, a research fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation:
Food stamps encourage government dependence, he said.
“Clearly there’s a group of people who are not in the labor force, and 10 years ago they would have been. Now they’re relying on food stamps.”
Robert is a dumbass. If you don’t believe me you can read about Bobby Rector’s great waste of money trying to prove the unprovable—that abstinence-only sexual education works.
He claimed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs reduce sexual activity, “out-of-wedlock” childbearing, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and that they promote personal responsibility and marital commitment. In one paper he wrote, “There are 10 scientific evaluations showing that real abstinence programs can be highly effective in reducing early sexual activity.”
I stand corrected. Or, I don’t stand corrected as an army of experts showed that Rector’s “studies” didn’t even meet the minimum of scientific criteria making them not actually scientific studies, but a guy with a mustache telling kids to not have sex.
Bloomberg goes back to talk with actual SNAP recipients who are working jobs and still in need of food assistance. The fact of the matter is this: when your opposition to something is based predominantly in the research done by an organization like the Heritage Foundation, you don’t have an argument because those are not facts.