Food Stamp Benefit Card
We can’t refuse to help children.
There are parents who resent our First Lady’s suggestion that our children should eat good food and exercise -- if they can. My Mom told me to eat well and exercise. My teacher and coach, John Lyttle, at Fordham Prep taught us how to eat well and exercise. When I was young, President Jack Kennedy inspired the nation to be fit and vigorous -- though he had severe disabilities. We should welcome, not resist, a First Lady who re-visits these worthy values of good nutrition and exercise and invites our nation to embrace them anew.
Consider that we have 21 million children in school, receiving federally subsidized lunches. At lunch, they consume 40% of all the calories they eat in a day. Fully a third of all these children are overweight or obese.
Congress looked the other way recently, favoring its monied contributors over our children, when it rejected the USDA’s proposed nutritional guidelines and treated pizza with tomato sauce as a vegetable, and approved a diet of French fries, starchy vegetables, and salt for our children. Congress refused to help our children – so now we must do what Congress failed to do.
We have many other children who are not in danger of being overweight. They are in danger, however, of going hungry. We have gone from 18 million children eating lunches in 2006 to 21 million students today. Layoffs have meant more families qualify for the free lunch program. A family with an income that is 130 percent of the poverty level, $29,055 for a family of four, can receive free school meals. A family with an income of $41,348 can receive a lunch for a 40 cent charge.
Nor does this problem end with the school day. More families now qualify for the USDA food stamp program to feed their children and to feed themselves after school. Not that they get stamps any more. It’s more like a debit card. The USDA grants money to poor households to buy food and – since the recession – the ratio of poor to the rest of the population went from 130 per thousand in 2007 to 153 per thousand in 2010, an increase of 18 %.
Only a few days ago, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican presidential contender, attacked the food stamp program, criticizing President Obama for feeding the hungry so well, wrongly charging “You don’t get food stamps, you get a credit card and the credit card can be used for anything. We’ve had people take their food-stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii.”
Gingrich scapegoats the poor with lies to win political support from the unwary and the well fed to advance his presidential primary bid. We should know three things. First, there is no “credit” card; there is instead an electronic benefits card – EBT card – and it creates an audit trail of expenditures, like your debit card, and bars the card holder from buying any items that are disallowed. Second, you can’t buy restaurant meals, beer, wine or liquor, nor vitamins, food that you’d eat at the store, nor hot food, and most certainly not any plane tickets to Hawaii or any place else. Third, Gingrich told another whopper when he said that “they give food stamps now to millionaires.” Nonsense. You can’t get food stamps if you earn more than 130 percent of the poverty line.
Speaker Gingrich attacks the poor, as he proclaims in the most reverential tones, his Christian faith. Perhaps Gingrich follows a different testament than other Christians for Jesus “cursed into everlasting fire” those who gave no meat nor drink when he “hungered.” Matthew 25:41-42. Of course, Jesus was not talking about his hunger but of his brothers and sisters. Jesus explained, “When you refused to help the least of these my brothers, you were refusing to help me.” Matthew 25:46. Plainly, Speaker Gingrich wants only to help himself; his soul is as empty of charity as is a vacuum of air.
Unlike Congress and Gingrich, we must not refuse to help our children who are hungry. Nor refuse to help children to eat better. If we are truly a family, then we must act like one – and help each other.
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