DOESNT BLESS THE HUNGRY: U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton opposes nutrition aid.

  • DOESN’T BLESS THE HUNGRY: U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton opposes nutrition aid.

Ernie Dumas provides next week’s column early this week and it’s a good accompaniment to news that Sen. Harry Reid says the Senate won’t bail out the runaway radical U.S. House with a stopgap farm spending bill. The House, with Cotton in the vanguard of greedy Republicans, defeated a farm bill because, though it grievously damaged nutrition assistance,it didn’t damage nutritional assistance to hungry children enough.

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The Sermon on the Mount is decidedly out of fashion with House Republicas, Dumas writes. He chronicles the big number of people — two-thirds of them children and elderly — who depend on federal food assistance in difficult economic times. In the poorest counties of Cotton’s district, nearly half the children receive nutrition assistance. Dumas says in part:

The case against the poor was that the government’s food aid encouraged them not to get jobs. The government’s food assistance has soared since the financial and job-market crash in 2008. Millions remain unemployed or holders of part-time and less remunerative jobs than they had before the crash.

But the argument is all wrong. Two-thirds of food aid goes to children, the elderly or disabled. The overwhelming majority of recipients who are able to work hold jobs, though they may be part-time and minimum-wage jobs. The percentage of recipients who work has been increasing for a dozen years.
The poster child for my Beatitudes theme was Congressman Stephen Fincher across the river in Tennessee, who recited Thessalonians to show why most poor people shouldn’t get food aid: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” (Paul actually was chastising the nuts who were refusing to work while awaiting Christ’s imminent return and Judgment Day.)

But, unhappy as he was, Stephens, unlike Cotton, at least voted for the bill that carried less-than-draconian cuts for the poor so that the rest of the bill—the producer subsidies and federal crop insurance—would be funded.

Why? Congressman Fincher’s farming enterprises took in $3.48 million from the taxpayers between 1999 and 2012. Last year, the government gave him only $70,574, which was still $193 a day. The average poor Tennessee moocher gets $132.20 of grocery vouchers for a full month.

Full column follows.

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