Millions of children from low-income households will benefit from a federal food-stamp program this summer. Thirty-five states plan to administer Summer EBT, which provides cards worth $40 a month per child to families that qualify for free or reduced lunch during the school year. Although all 50 states already run the Summer Food Service Program, which establishes sites where kids eat for free, Summer EBT is designed to reach anyone who may slip through the cracks. Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, told CBS News that the Summer Food Service Program may not “provide the help for all the children no matter how well intentioned it is.” Without Summer EBT, some kids could still go hungry.
But some states are opting out of the program. Vermont has said it doesn’t have the IT capacity to run Summer EBT this year and hopes to administer it next summer, which makes it something of an outlier. In other instances, Republican governors have cited ideology — or childhood obesity — as a reason to opt out.
“Federal COVID-era cash-benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” said Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. In Nebraska, governor Jim Pillen said, “In the end, I fundamentally believe that we solve the problem, and I don’t believe in welfare.” Kids can attend church camps or 4-H for meals, he added, without “feeding a welfare system with food at home.” A spokesman for South Dakota governor Kristi Noem warned that federal dollars “often comes with strings attached, and more of it is often not a good thing,” while Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, sounds like Pillen: He too rejects “attempts to expand the welfare state.”
There may be more to Reeves’s spin. According to Mississippi Today, a spokesperson for the Department of Human Services said that the state lacked the resources to implement Summer EBT. That, too, can be explained by ideology. Under the oversight of Reeves’s predecessor, Phil Bryant, the state’s welfare agency “misused and squandered at least $77 million in federal funds meant to assist the state’s poorest residents,” Mississippi Today reported last year. Money earmarked for needy families went instead to the powerful. An athletic foundation at the University of Southern Mississippi received $5 million in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds after retired football star Brett Favre lobbied state officials. Favre himself received another $1.1 million in TANF funds for speeches he never made.
Mississippi is an extreme example, but Republicans there help clarify conservative priorities and goals. Across the country, they are making a lot of noise about parental rights, but their records offer no proof they care for the welfare of children. Summer EBT ought to be inoffensive. If properly administered, it will help prevent child hunger a year after food insecurity in households with children spiked following the expiration of COVID-era aid from the federal government. “For the life of me, I don’t see why 50 governors aren’t doing” Summer EBT, Vilsack told CBS. But the problem is relatively easy to understand. A program like Summer EBT uplifts low-income households, which threatens a class-and-race hierarchy the right seeks to protect. Despite its rhetoric, children are not fully people to the right wing. Neither are the poor. The fate of a poor child earns little attention from conservative officials.
That may sound brutal, but so is class war. Children are casualties in a much older right-wing campaign to keep the poor in their place. That campaign can be bipartisan, as some conservative Democrats wring their hands over “personal responsibility” and the imaginary threat of government dependence. Programs like Summer EBT cut to the heart of the matter. When states don’t expand the welfare state, kids go hungry (and so do their parents). Summer EBT isn’t perfect. It very likely doesn’t go far enough with $40 a month for each child. Yet there’s a need to defend it, along with welfare itself, as a basic social good. Welfare keeps kids and their parents warm and fed. We need more of that — more humanity — in our policy, not less. The alternative is surrender.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.
The Class War on Kids
8
0
17.01.2024
Millions of children from low-income households will benefit from a federal food-stamp program this summer. Thirty-five states plan to administer Summer EBT, which provides cards worth $40 a month per child to families that qualify for free or reduced lunch during the school year. Although all 50 states already run the Summer Food Service Program, which establishes sites where kids eat for free, Summer EBT is designed to reach anyone who may slip through the cracks. Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, told CBS News that the Summer Food Service Program may not “provide the help for all the children no matter how well intentioned it is.” Without Summer EBT, some kids could still go hungry.
But some states are opting out of the program. Vermont has said it doesn’t have the IT capacity to run Summer EBT this year and hopes to administer it next summer, which makes it something of an outlier. In other instances, Republican governors have cited ideology — or childhood obesity — as a reason to opt out.
“Federal COVID-era cash-benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the........
© Daily Intelligencer
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Tarik Cyril Amar
Rami G Khouri
Dr Ramzy Baroud
Mort Laitner
Bradley Blankenship
Michael Kwet
