feh...
Posted on 05/25/2015 9:16:09 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
[full title] GOP’s demonic new crusade: Right-wing zealots look for even crueler ways to treat the poor like garbage
Happy Memorial Day! But if you’re in Wisconsin, and relying on food stamps, remember that Republicans don’t want you to have ketchup on your hamburger. They’d probably rather you didn’t have a hamburger at all, but Wisconsin farmers and ranchers have clout, and so proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program made room for Wisconsin products. But they still don’t want you to have “crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish.” Or ketchup. Or spaghetti sauce. Really.
For now, that’s all grandstanding. SNAP is a federal program, and the Obama administration hasn’t allowed states to restrict food purchases that way. But that hasn’t stopped GOP legislators from trying. Maine and Missouri want to ban SNAP “junk food” purchases. Wisconsin and 16 other states are also trying to drug test recipients.
And Wisconsin has nothing on Brownbackistan, I mean Kansas. The state has already outlawed the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program debit cards at a range of businesses, including movie theaters, college sports games (?) and cruise ships. (There goes the welfare cruise ship business!) Kansas TANF recipients also are unable to withdraw more than $25 a day from their accounts. That means to withdraw $100, they’ll pay five bank fees (since ATMs only dispense $20s). Banks win, the poor lose.
All this is happening against the backdrop of GOP policy failure. We’ve had a 30-plus year experiment in Republican approaches to the problems of poverty and declining economic opportunity – and it’s turned out abysmally. Ronald Reagan convinced a lot of people that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” so Democrats came together with Republicans and slashed the largest welfare program for families with children, first in the states, then federally. Bill Clinton signed the federal bill into law, thinking he could get the issue of the lazy poor behind him, and then concentrate on the supports low-wage workers might need to climb.
Of course, Clinton never completed that part of his agenda; he got distracted by the GOP witch hunt known as impeachment. Republicans still didn’t want to make friends even after Clinton gave them punitive welfare reform; go figure.
Then George W. Bush became president, and we got a lesson in the way tax cuts create jobs – as in, they don’t. In eight years of the Clinton administration, which raised top tax rates, 23 million jobs were created, compared with 3 million in the eight low-tax Bush years.
It might be time to try a whole new approach to fighting poverty – raising the minimum wage; strengthening workers’ ability to bargain; investing in infrastructure to shore up our roads, bridges and rail system but also to create jobs; expanding access to college. Instead, red state GOP legislators are pushing ever crueler ways to treat the poor like garbage.
Sam Brownback’s Kansas is becoming an ever more awful dystopia. It’s an absolute laboratory for tax-cutting, welfare-slashing schemes, and it’s circling the drain economically. Scott Walker is an amateur compared to Brownback, but he’s working hard to make sure Wisconsin ties Kansas for the most dysfunctional economy.
The Wisconsin GOP’s bogus health claims for the SNAP cuts are belied, the Huffington Post observes, by the fact that the amended law now allows the purchase of any and all dairy products, thanks to the power of the state’s dairy lobby. Theoretically, a SNAP recipient could spent the whole month’s allotment on “Dippin’ Dots,” one legislator notes. “The ‘ice cream of the future’ is now on the list of what’s acceptable to pay for, but a bottle of ketchup is not,” he noted.
But of course this isn’t about the keeping the poor healthy; it’s about punishing them. The fact that the cuts almost certainly won’t be enacted makes them more cynical, in a way. This is how you tell the Kochs, and scared white people, that the slackers and moochers are being punished. It accomplishes nothing, but it’s good politically. That’s still the core premise of Republican politics, and it will remain so through the 2016 election, at least.
Scott Walker Is Making MASSIVE Changes To Welfare – Will Impact Freeloaders Harshly "....".....Walker's drug test isn't simply a play to restrict the number of people who will be eligible to receive welfare, it's also a giant step forward in changing unemployment payments from helping freeloaders live off of the work of others to payments which will actually help others prepare to receive employment.
Walker's reasoning is solid. Most, if not all, employers will require a drug test for new employees and by letting people know that unemployment and welfare are just a stepping stone for those who want to receive funds...."
But advocates for FoodShare recipients say the state is being overly aggressive, punishing needy people who make innocent mistakes.
“There’s a lot of judgment going on by white, middle-class people and a lot of assumptions and disqualifications based on these assumptions,” said Pat DeLessio, an attorney with the Milwaukee office of Legal Action of Wisconsin, a federally funded nonprofit agency......”
Wisconsin FoodShare fraud crackdown questioned MADISON—Under Republican Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin has seen a nearly 12-fold increase in the number of people suspended annually from the state’s food stamp program for fraud.
The suspensions for “intentionally violating program rules” are part of a larger get-tough approach to people receiving federally funded nutrition assistance, called FoodShare in Wisconsin. Walker has also introduced new work rules for some FoodShare recipients, and proposes to seek a federal waiver to begin requiring all adult participants of the program to undergo drug testing.
In 2011, Walker’s first year as governor, 102 people were suspended from the FoodShare program for violating program rules, according to DHS. That number has increased each year, to 1,184 in 2014........."
Just the headline communicates to me, these people are batsh#t crazy.
I like it though, some of my liberal friends who read these will be put off, because they will know this is crazy talk and start to doubt the author.
The main “debating” point of the left is hyperbole.
This article is Bull Shite and I didn’t even read it.
Wow. The incoherent screed of a stuck pig.
No one else can get these liberals to overreach like Walker can.
And you are right, it lets people see exactly where they’re coming from
This article summarizes what we are up against, politically speaking.
The liberals look at any changes to welfare and public assistance programs as taking food out of children’s mouths and all that. And then, politically speaking, that ends the discussion, as the GOP is branded by liberals and the media as cruel and heartless to innocent children.
It’s the same concept when we see ideas such as Paul Ryan proposing changes to Medicare. Ryan is portrayed as wanting to throw grandma off the cliff. We just can’t have rational discussion about certain subjects. And it’s due to the mindset of liberals, that somehow the GOP wants people to starve and be left scrounging for food in a dumpster.
Just like the Demorats who show pictures of granny being pushed down the stairs in a wheelchair. Nothing said for two years when the COL in SS payments didn’t happen. If it was during Bush’s term you’d hear the howl all the way to Pluto.
Interesting. First article I’ve seen in ages by a leftist defending “the poor.” For some odd reason, in recent years they’ve switched almost entirely to talking about how policies will hurt the middle class.
“The main “debating” point of the left is hyperbole.”
That and censoring and shouting down their opponent so their opponent cannot speak or be heard. That’s Alinsky 101.
Walker KICED THE LEFTY BUTTS in Wisconsin, and the lefties will NEVER get over that!
This commie moron conveniently forgot BJ Clinton was riding the dot-com bubble that burst leaving Bush his recession.
feh...
yeah I stopped reading anything with the word salon in the title a while ago. There’s no coherent thought in any of their articles.
Well, truth be told I would not be sad if leftists starved or ate out of garbage cans. Leftists are users and takers. They provide nothing of benefit or substance. That’s why they go ballistic on issues such as this. They know deep down that they are literally incapable of survival without us, and that they are wholly dependent on us. It must really suck to be them.
Oh, the horror of it all.
We’ve had a 30-plus year experiment in Republican approaches to the problems of poverty and declining economic opportunity – and it’s turned out abysmally.
Never has a more laughable sentence been written by anyone who was not a comedian.
wow. That title almost beats the one from CNN a few months back which was something very close to: 'the economy is in the toilet, BUT ITS NO BIG DEAL"
This is your mind on drugs!
It is very close to blood libel now.
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