10.05.11

Failed State: As defined by food stamp use

Posted in Decline and Fall, Predator State at 4:57 pm by George Smith

The party of the plutocrats is marked by its loathing for many things, among them food stamps. If you search the public record over the past two years it’s clear the Republican Party, as it exists now, thinks people on food assistance are vermin.

From Newt Gingrich to Ted Nugent, it is abundantly clear.

DD came up with some eye-popping statistics to frame the astonishing number of people on food stamps in our nation.

By itself, the number is huge. Still, it becomes even more depressing when the magnitude of it is put in context.

Food stamp usage in the US is a symbol of national economic failure so systemic it takes your breath away. It is rock solid proof the US economy does not provide jobs which earn a fair living for a polyglot cohort that dwarfs entire western nations.

If food stamp distribution were disrupted in this country, the result would be hunger. Hunger great enough to cause riots. And the immediate loss of the vast pool of money food stamps inject into private sector food sellers would trigger yet another severe economic collapse.

Between 44 and 45 million Americans use food stamps.

Let’s look at the populations of selected western countries:

Population of Norway 4.8 million
Sweden 9.3 million
UK 61.8 million
Spain 45.9
Greece 11.2

Three quarters of England fit in the US basket of food stamp recipients. Or Sweden, Norway, and Greece combined with a good surplus left over. Or 99 percent of Spain.

If you add up the populations of the 50 states, starting with the least,
the number of people on food stamps in the US is a number that roughly includes the summed populations of:

Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas,
Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kentucky.

That’s 26 states.

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Food stamp use cuts across a wide swath of American society.

This shows that even when one excludes the unemployed, a mass of jobs large enough to fill foreign nations provide work which is not compensated well enough to make a decent living.

“Working hard but still struggling to make ends meet?” reads a food assistance website run by the state of New York. “Food stamp benefits can help you put food on the table … Food stamp benefits help low-income working people.”

Such jobs are essentially slave labor in which ruinous corporate wages are offset by government subsidy.

One can look at it as a process in which corporate America depressed wages for a fair day’s work, maximizing profit by shoving part of the cost of a barely subsistence wage onto the government, and by extension, the taxpayer.

This can only be seen as entrenched predatory behavior.

Take, for example, the national security machine. Since the onset of the war on terror, US defense contractors enjoyed an immense boom. They are among the biggest and wealthiest companies in the world.

But here we read something on the number of families of US soldiers on food stamps (from the Newman Times-Herald, Newman, GA):

Lately a lot of complaints have been made about the food stamp program. Let’s take a look a one group that gets food stamps — 14,000 military families were on food stamps in 2000.

The Pentagon does not keep track of any military families that are on food stamps. President Bush in 2001 decided to authorize a $500 subsistence pay increase that was taxable in order to help military families get off food stamps. It did not work. Military families increased on food stamps because food stamps are non-taxable.

From 2008 to 2009 military families were using food stamps at twice the rate as civilians, 25 percent to 13 percent. About $31 million of food stamps were used in nationwide commissaries.

From July 2009 to March 2011 in Oklahoma, where there are four military bases — Fort Sill, Tinker AFB, Vance AFB, Altus AFB — $1.8 million in food stamps was spent.

President Obama, in the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, increased the food subsistence program for military families to $1,100 and made it non-taxable to help get families off food stamps. But will it?

The military pay scale does not match cost of living anywhere in America. So if the U.S can only pay men and women who volunteer to serve and protect our freedom a wage that reflects poverty, how can anyone complain about someone else getting food stamps?

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15.9 percent of the population of Texas is on food stamps. If you believe the opinions of the GOP, they are all leeches.

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The GOP’s view of food stamp use can be summed in various repellent quotes from Ted Nugent.

Here he is on CNN, with Piers Morgan, earlier this year:

Nugent: The America [Obama] doesn’t … people are using food stamps for something other than good nutrition. You gotta be kidding me. We got a bunch of idiots out there that are absolutely raping and pillaging an otherwise positive humanitarian system.

Morgan: My issue about you and the welfare thing is it showed — to me it showed no sense of compassion for people who have genuine problems. Who genuinely need it.

NUGENT: Well, you see –

MORGAN: Your judgment, if you don’t mind me saying, is all encompassing. All sweeping. You think they’re all on the fiddle.

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From a column, in January of this year, at the Washington Times:

Food stamps are for wusses, and the master wussy Democrats have seen to it. It’s easier to be a lazy lump …

[Wusses] need to be weeded out and excommunicated. America needs hard-charging warriors, not weak wusses.

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Historically, food insecurity is linked to civil unrest and conflict.

The food stamp program in the US serves a great purpose. And as a result not too many Americans think of ours as a place where violent food riots could erupt.

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