Missouri, Kansas and, to varying degrees, other states are considering legislation to restrict how recipients of government aid can spend their benefits. While at first glance these efforts may seem reasonable, they are in fact attempts to humiliate and degrade the poor. They have no basis beyond cruel hypocrisy.
A state representative in Missouri has introduced what is being called the “surf-and-turf law.” It would ban the use of food stamps to buy, among other things, “seafood or steak.” Never mind that “seafood” can include inexpensive and nutritious fish or that “steak” can include cheap cuts of meat. The lawmaker told a Washington Post reporter that he had “seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs” with food stamps.
One has to wonder if that lawmaker has priced crab legs lately, let alone filet mignon. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average per person benefit from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in Colorado for 2014 was $126.32 per month.
Likewise, Kansas is considering a law forbidding the poor to use their benefits for a expenses such as casinos, spas, fortune-telling parlors, swimming pools, sexually oriented businesses or cruise ships.
The inclusion of cruise ships is funny. Kansas is landlocked, and $126 or so would probably not make it to the sea. But why add swimming pools when swimming is healthy exercise, especially for kids, and municipal pools are often inexpensive?
Including casinos, however, was the really gratuitous touch. The stated idea, of course, was that government benefits should only be used for wholesome purposes. But at the same time, government-tax policy allows gamblers to deduct their gambling losses up to the amount of their winnings – thus not only subsidizing their risky behavior, but also encouraging it.
The difference seems to be whether the individual has the moral and intrinsic worth to be wealthy to begin with.
That is seen throughout these kind of laws. And it can be seen in the language. The strict definition of an “entitlement” is something to which one is entitled by law. The term is usually applied to programs that overwhelmingly benefit the broadest measure of middle-class America – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Entitlement programs that benefit the wealthy are more often referred to as tax deductions. Ones that aid the poor are typically called welfare.
As The Washington Post’s Wonkblog column points out, deducting the cost of a high-priced dinner for 10 executives as a business expense could generate more in tax savings than the average household would receive in food stamps for a month.
What is the point, then, of drug testing food-stamp recipients – as several states want to do – if not those 10 executive diners? No politician would want to shame Social Security or Medicare recipients, although those programs are entitlements no less than food stamps. Why then treat a young woman trying to feed her child as a criminal?
Agricultural subsidies make no economic or societal sense. But we do not tell farmers they cannot spend their money in “sexually oriented businesses.” Somehow, we do not assume they would.
Lots of people get tax breaks or money from the government, often for no good reason. Why is there such as thing as a tax deduction for yachts? And why is that not welfare?
Americans owe ourselves a broad discussion of entitlements. But it should not include shaming the poor. They have enough problems. And if we feel the need to humiliate them, we have problems of our own.
