It's Not About the Food Stamps; It's About a Job At a Living Wage

Got this in an e-mail from my brother, Hal:

“June food stamp Recipients Hit All Time High As Three Times As Many Americans Enter Poverty As Find Jobs, bringing the total to a new all time high of 46.670 million and once again rising fast.”

This headline, circulating via e-mail, seems to be picked up from Zero Hedge by merging the title of one its posts [1] with a phrase from the body of the blog post. The way it's constructed can easily be misinterpreted as suggesting that 46.670 million are now receiving Food Stamp assistance. But actually that's the BLS number for the number of people in poverty. The Food Stamp number is 22.4 million households.

Apart from wondering about the accuracy of the headline being circulated, and noting the sky is falling tone of the whole thing, I had the following brief reaction.

Those Republican bastards want to cut food stamps as part of their continuing program to make the middle class poor and get the poor people to die quickly (h/t Alan Grayson of course).

But, the Government safety net including Food Stamps is the bread and butter of people who have fallen on hard times; and there's only one primary reason for unemployment: [2] there aren't enough jobs.

You want to get rid of unemployment? Then, quit yer complaining about the Food Stamps and make the jobs! [3]

Doesn't matter if they're public or private: who gives a shit besides neo-liberal, Ayn Randian ideologists?

The only thing that matters is that people who want them get jobs at a LIVING wage, [4] which means: Make sure those new jobs aren't at Walmart or McDonald's!

And, yeah, we can afford it! [5]

(Cross-posted from Correntewire.com [6].)