Say What?

I know I just posted an article a couple days ago. And we all know that too much of a good thing can be bad for us. In fact too much of a bad thing is bad for us as well. Can’t win. But friends, I saw an article on the front page of the Delaware State News that has me baffled. Maybe you all can help me figure this one out.

First a couple of mighty important disclaimers are in order. My first disclaimer is this; I am not against food stamps or other programs that help to feed needy folks. Do you have that? People that need help with putting food on the table should be helped. Okay. I am not, in principle, against other kinds of financial aid, be it welfare or unemployment insurance or other worthy programs. It would be better, in my opinion, if folks could work and earn their own money but it doesn’t always work out that way and we need to help those that truly need help. There you have it. I had to put those disclaimers in because you need to know that I’m not some programmed right wing robot person spouting off about every liberal program that comes down from Washington or our state capitals.

Now here’s the information that was in the article I mentioned in the first paragraph. In Delaware the public assistance folks sent out checks for $20.01 to about 11,000 as a supplement for heating costs aid. They sent these checks out, not because they wanted to help with heating costs, but because they wanted to circumvent some rules and reinstate some potential cuts in food stamps for those folks that got the checks. By putting these 11,000 people into a higher heating aid program they qualified them for more food stamp money. The article goes on to say that by spending some $300,000 dollars the state is able to pick up something like $6,000,000 in federal food stamp aid. The money for the heating aid checks came out of a three quarters of million dollar surplus in that particular account. And how did that surplus happen, by the way?

If all the information in that last paragraph makes sense to you then maybe you can explain it to me. The cuts in food stamp money were an Obama administration initiative not something the other guys cooked up. But, and here’s another little known bit of information, the School Nutrition Program was jacked up so that qualifying underprivileged districts can now provide breakfast and lunch to all the kids in their schools, five days a week. The families of those kids don’t need to be on food stamps or other government assistance. They just need to show up at school. It would seem that if the kids are getting ten meals a week at school then the grocery bills of families on assistance would go down by a considerable percentage, thus negating the small cut in food stamps that has been enacted. Or am I wrong on that bit of logical thinking?

Now I could go into a big old rant about the empirical evidence I’ve gathered in various grocery stores, regale you with many stories of folks who were using food stamps and yet were buying hundreds of dollars’ worth of cigarettes, beer, pet foods, and soft drinks, cakes from the bakery and on and on. But I won’t. That would seem like knee jerk right wing ranting and I’m trying to avoid that. I just can’t understand how the people in government can arbitrarily use loopholes (they call this one the “heat and eat” tactic) to get around properly enacted legislation.

That front page article said that as many as twelve other states were using this loophole to avoid some cutting of food stamp monies. It didn’t say if the lawmakers in Washington were aware of this glitch in the law. My guess is that they were aware and that just solidifies my opinion of those folks as lying, cheating, and duplicitous thieves. But that’s just an opinion and once again it borders on knee jerk right wing conservatism.

So friends if you can help me to understand this one little government thing I’ll be mighty grateful. And then both you and I can have a fine day.