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The elderly and disabled shouldn't be a top priority anyways. Terrible thing to say I know, but true..the other 39 mil are largely comprised of unmotivated people.
Cuts to the nation’s food stamp program hit 48 million Americans this week, including more than 9 million elderly and disabled people.
Nearly one in seven Americans uses the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which has doubled in cost since 2008 when Congress increased the benefits as part of the economic stimulus bill. Both Democrats and Republicans allowed the temporary benefits boost to expire on Nov. 1, and Republicans are pushing for far steeper cuts to the $80 billion program.
The average monthly decrease for a one-person household is $11. That doesn’t sound like much, but the vast majority of food stamp recipients say the assistance runs out in the first three weeks of each month, leaving them to cobble together food from other sources in the final week. The cuts amount to 16 meals a month for the average family of three, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Thrifty Food Plan.
“Even though it might sound little, for some people that’s a couple of meals that they have to choose whether they eat or don’t eat,” said Bobbie Sackman, the director of public policy at the Council of Senior Centers and Services in New York City, which helps elderly people sign up for assistance. “They have to go elsewhere to find food or they’re not going to have food.”
People can turn to food pantries for additional assistance. But it’s harder for older and disabled people to fill in the gaps left by the food stamp program, since going in-person to various soup kitchens and food pantries is not an option for many of them. About 9 percent of all food stamps go to households that include senior citizens. In New York, which has a large elderly population, it’s double that.
Marc Wolfson, a disabled 62 year-old who lives in Brooklyn, spent his Tuesday afternoon calling around to various food pantries to see if any of them would deliver meals to his apartment.
One food pantry, called “God’s Love We Deliver,” told him they could drop off groceries at his apartment, but only on days when Wolfson is undergoing dialysis for his kidney disease. So the pantry had to turn him down. “They ain’t delivering it to me,” Wolfson joked.
Wolfson has diabetes and anemia, so his diet must be low in sugar and carbohydrates and high in iron-rich foods like red meat. The first two weeks, Wolfson can manage that diet on food stamps, but then the money runs out. “The doctors want me to eat all protein,” he said. “The last two weeks the only protein I’m getting is eggs.”
Nationally, one in seven seniors lives in poverty, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. In New York City, as many as one in three elderly people are poor. As many as half of elderly people who qualify for food stamps in New York do not apply, and surveys have shown that older Americans in particular feel there is a stigma associated with the program.
Sackman said the elderly, who are often living on fixed incomes, can become “invisible” in these debates, which often focuses on why young and healthy people need assistance.
House Republicans hope to cut the $80 billion annual program further, by kicking off 3 million people each year for 10 years. Under their plan, adults without minor children must enroll in a job training program or be employed to receive the benefits. The AARP, the powerful seniors group, opposes the proposal.
“We’re really worried,” Sackman said of the proposed cuts. “This is just the start. We’re looking at a rapidly growing senior population here and across the country and a lot of poverty.”
Wolfson said he tries not to worry about whether steeper cuts could be in the pipeline. In the meantime, he plans to scour the grocery store for sales to make up for the $11 less he gets per month.
“I’ll deal with it as it’s happening,” he said. “I’m not going to dwell on it.”
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http://news.yahoo.com/food-stamp-cut...164547526.html
The Republican war on the poor continues unabated.
The elderly and disabled shouldn't be a top priority anyways. Terrible thing to say I know, but true..the other 39 mil are largely comprised of unmotivated people.
Poverty in America Is Mainstream
Few topics in American society have more myths and stereotypes surrounding them than poverty, misconceptions that distort both our politics and our domestic policy making.
They include the notion that poverty affects a relatively small number of Americans, that the poor are impoverished for years at a time, that most of those in poverty live in inner cities, that too much welfare assistance is provided and that poverty is ultimately a result of not working hard enough. Although pervasive, each assumption is flat-out wrong.
Contrary to popular belief, the percentage of the population that directly encounters poverty is exceedingly high. My research indicates that nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period ($23,492 for a family of four), and 54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line).
Even more astounding, if we add in related conditions like welfare use, near-poverty and unemployment, four out of five Americans will encounter one or more of these events.
In addition, half of all American children will at some point during their childhood reside in a household that uses food stamps for a period of time.
Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans. For most of us, the question is not whether we will experience poverty, but when.
But while poverty strikes a majority of the population, the average time most people spend in poverty is relatively short. The standard image of the poor has been that of an entrenched underclass, impoverished for years at a time. While this captures a small and important slice of poverty, it is also a highly misleading picture of its more widespread and dynamic nature.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...me&ref=general
America's Greatest Shame: Child Poverty Rises and Food Stamps Cut While Billionaires Boom
There are 16.4 million American children living in poverty. That's nearly one quarter (22.6%) of all of our children. More alarming is that the percentage of poor children has climbed by 4.5 percent since the start of the Great Recession in 2007. And poor means poor. For a family of three with one child under 18, the poverty line is $18,400.
Most amazing of all is the fact that 95 percent of the so-called "recovery" has gone to the top 1 percent who have seen their incomes rise by 34%. For the 99 percent there's been an undeclared wage freeze: the average wage has climbed by only 0.4 percent.
To add to the misery, Washington has decided that the best way to tackle childhood poverty is to have poor kids eat less.
And more cuts are coming. The Tea Party House passed a bill to cut food stamps by $4 billion a year, while the Senate calls for $400 million in cuts. How humane! And since it will be part of the omnibus Farm Bill, President Obama will sign it.
It gets even more revolting when we realize that the financial billionaires who are profiting so handsomely from the recovery are the very same who took down the economy in the first place. They were the ones who created and pedaled the toxic securities that puffed up and then burst the housing bubble. Those financial plutocrats caused 8 million workers to lose their jobs in a matter of months. Those bankers, hedge fund honchos and fund managers are directly responsible for the rise in child poverty rates. Washington bailed out those billionaires and is now asking the poor and the middle class to pay for the ensuing deficits with further cuts in social programs at every level of government.
http://www.alternet.org/hard-times-u...age=1#bookmark
Meanwhile, Pete Petersen, a billionaire, of course, wants to privatize SS and steal $Ts in "management fees"
Cuts? Or, the expiration of extra money given per the 2009 stimulus?
expiration for you, cuts to the recipients
okaaay, so what should our "top priorities" be then?
"the other 39 mil are largely comprised of unmotivated people."
evidence? proof? or just your psychopathic bias?
my goddess once said: "Sharing food is one of life's pleasures. On a global scale, we don't share fairly. Close to a billion people go to bed hungry every night. The fact is: the global food system is a broken one. All of us, from Kentucky to Kenya, deserve enough to eat."
Anything other than people who have outlived their usefulness.
Oh sweet, delicious, savory irony.
disabled i can relate to.
but elderly? didn't they pay into SS like everyone else? and what about raising children and having a family to support you? i guess it's hip nowadays to have children then ostracize them because of selfish reasons and popular culture. oops.
the feeling of civic responsibility dies not always extend to parents, let along to seniors in general.
http://www.caintv.com/census-bureau-16-percent-of-amNEW NORMAL - According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of poor people in 2012 was 49.7 million, or 16 percent. That exceeds the record 46.5 million, or 15 percent, that was officially reported in September.
They should have been aborted...
Hittin the bottle early, I see.
spelling smack?
And a sensitive little beeyatch, too.
... and how do we tell who those people are?
They look old and/or disabled
The elderly did pay into the system. Just not as much as they are now taking out.
The NPV of all the money they put in, compared to the NPV of all the money they will be taking out, is small, i.e. money current elderly put in < money current elderly are taking and will take out.
They paid in when the benefits were a LOT less generous, and the payments matched that.
The Rules of the Game
The path dependence dynamic accelerates when, as in the U.S., investment returns (capital gains and dividends) are taxed less than wages. Why would that be? The argument is that taxes discourage "investment" (which is often not investment at all, but speculation or gambling). However, why have higher taxes on wages to discourage work even more than investment?
The answer: The "Rules of the Game" are fixed. The old saying, "He who has the gold rules." is true. John Sterman describes this self-reinforcing feedback process in Business Dynamics, Systems Thinking for a Complex World:
The "Rules of the Game" evolve to favor those with wealth & power to give them even more wealth & power.
The larger and more successful an organization, the more it can influence the ins utional and political context in which it operates. Large organizations can change the rules of the game in their favor, leading to still more success-and more power. [The Figure at right] shows the resulting golden rule loop R1].The golden rule loop manifests in many forms. Through campaign contributions and lobbying, large firms and their trade associations can shape legislation and public policy to give them favorable tax treatment, subsidies for their activities, protection for their markets, price guarantees, and exemptions from liability.
Through overlapping boards, the revolving door between industry and government, and control of media outlets, influential and powerful organizations gain even more influence and power. In nations without a tradition of democratic government, these loops lead to self-perpetuating oligarchies where a tightly knit elite controls a huge share of the nation's wealth and income while the vast majority of people remain impoverished (e.g., the Philippines under Marcos, Indonesia under Suharto, and countless others). T
he elite further consolidates its control by subsidizing the military and secret police and buying high-tech weaponry and technical assistance from the developed world to keep the restive masses in check. Even in nations with strong democratic traditions these positive loops can overwhelm the checks and balances designed to ensure government of, by, and for the people.
For more on how the system is biased toward the wealthy: Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) by David Cay Johnston (2007).
I've lost all hope of trying to convince such ideologues. No amount of facts and logic will suffice to penetrate such strong ideological blindness. The worldview that sees only individuals, in which they've invested so much, would collapse.
What's your solution, RG? More food stamps?
Living wage.
food stamps are a symptom, not the problem.
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