Not to Be Woke But I Think Kids Should Eat
If feeding kids is political, then politics has lost the plot.
As the president prepares to choose between silver and gold faucets for his new ballroom, 16 million children who rely on SNAP to eat woke up this weekend to find their benefits gone because he couldn’t keep his government open. The irony writes itself: the man dining under chandeliers can’t seem to feed the kids he was elected to protect.
As the internet is filled with people who will tell you that SNAP benefits go to lazy people, the truth is that 39% of all SNAP recipients are children, and nearly 86% of benefits go to households with a minor child, elderly adult, or disabled person. This isn’t welfare for the lazy, it’s how this country makes sure its most vulnerable citizens don’t starve. SNAP reduces food insecurity, keeps kids out of the hospital, and is linked to lower rates of abuse and neglect. Children in households receiving SNAP perform better academically and have fewer developmental delays than kids without benefits. In other words, SNAP is pro-life. Not the slogan kind, the actual feeding-children, keeping-kids-alive kind.
And it’s not like there’s no money. SNAP costs about $8.3 billion which is less than what this administration casually wired overseas in “strategic aid.” Just last week, $40 billion went to Argentina. So there’s money for geopolitical chess moves, for ballrooms, for optics, but not to keep American children from going hungry.
The real question is why so many working Americans still need food stamps to survive. The scandal isn’t that people need SNAP. It’s that full-time workers can’t live without it. You shouldn’t need government assistance to afford dinner after a full day of work, but in America, you do. Roughly 23% of cashiers and 19% of food service workers rely on these benefits. These are people with jobs, people working full shifts in grocery stores and restaurants, yet they still can’t afford to eat. The minimum wage in this country keeps people trapped on assistance instead of helping them off it. For a party obsessed with the idea of picking yourself up by your bootstraps, they seem uninterested in making sure hard work can actually buy a meal.
So yeah, not to be woke, but I think kids should eat. If wanting hard-working Americans to be able to feed their families makes me the problem, then maybe the problem isn’t me.
How do you feel about a government that can fund a ballroom but not breakfast?
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Liz-
if you’re pro-life prove it
As a former child protection worker, I only have to see the way the President, dressed as a MAGA chump, and partner in a designer space dress behaved with the children trick or treating at the White House, to know how they view children. If they behave like that with children for their entertainment, in front of cameras, one wonders how they behave behind closed doors. Maybe that explains his children. So how on earth can we expect him to care about the country's vulnerable? Call in child protection and have him charged for not providing the necessities of life for the country.