File under: Republicans will use any flimsy excuse to hurt low-income families. North Carolina state Sen. Ralph Hise wants to take food aid away from 133,000 people, including 55,000 children … and he says it’s about fairness. Hise would strip Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program eligibility from people who qualify for food stamps automatically as a result of qualifying for other aid programs, because he says it’s not fair to people who don’t qualify that way.
“You’ve got a family of four making $40,000 who can’t qualify because their children are school-aged, but you’ve got another family that maybe makes more, but who qualified for child care subsidies and therefore qualified for food stamps as well,” Hise said. “What we are eliminating is that fact that another program automatically qualifies you for food stamps.”
Taking food out of the mouths of 133,000 North Carolinians is the only fair thing to do. Aside from the sheer cruelty and immorality of Hise’s plan, there’s another small issue, Alan Pyke reports: North Carolina’s only cost for SNAP is administrative, and:
By forcing state aid workers to return to case-by-case evaluations for families seeking food stamps who are currently eligible categorically — a change that requires state workers to spend working hours conducting asset tests on applicants — Hise’s measure will drive state costs up.
Pennsylvania’s recent experience is instructive: The state abandoned asset tests for SNAP in 2015 after the governor’s mansion changed hands, a move that helped drastically speed up processing time for applications — thereby doing more work with fewer staff hours, saving taxpayers money.
But of course it’s not about fairness, or saving the state money. It’s about hurting people who are already hurting. It’s about saying that if you don’t make much money, you—and your kids—deserve to suffer, not just from hunger but from politicians using you as scapegoats.
Because Republicans are just that cruel.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2qx0i67
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