SNAP Breaks, but We're Getting a Ballroom!

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Federal support for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is set to expire next Saturday.  That means 42 million Americans, many of them children and elderly, are going to lose basic funding assistance that they rely on for food.  That is roughly 12% of Americans.  The massive cuts in public aid will reach into every congressional district in America, and will particularly impact poor neighborhoods in urban areas as well as a wide swath of rural America.

My state, Missouri, will loose grocery assistance for 656,600 of its residents, more than a few of whom live on the same road as I do.  Some areas of Missouri - and the other states as well - will be hit so hard by sudden reductions in spending that grocery stores will have to lay off employees.  The economic impact will reach well beyond individual households.

Our Republican Congress won't help. Tomorrow will mark the start of their fifth week of paid vacation in a row, a luxury (for them) that comes right on top of their four-week August "recess."  Some Senators at least feign awareness of the seriousness of the problem, but that legislative body, as a whole, consistently declines to seriously address ending the government shutdown, the root of the funding crisis.  

And Donald Trump, the President, is infamously indifferent to issues affecting poor people.  He shows little empathy for the concerns of people not on the Forbes 400 list or companies that fail to make the Fortune 500 list.  Those are his peeps.

As an example of the Trump administration's lack of concern with the plight of our nation's poor, the US Department of Agriculture has a $6 billion reserve fund that Congress intentionally built up for just such an emergency as an interruption in SNAP funds.  The reserve fund was designed to insure that the food benefits to those in need would continue even in the case of a government shutdown.  Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would not use any of that $6 billion to fund the SNAP program.

Merry effing Christmas, Mr. Scrooge!

Today, Trump is sunning himself in Kuala Lumpur, but his thoughts probably wander to the glorious monuments he could build to himself with $6 billion.

A nation that can't take care of its children and elderly doesn't need or deserve a damned national ballroom!