Not so long ago, America was a country committed to allowing no person to go hungry within its borders, but that’s changing thanks to mean-spirited Republican policies.
North Carolina is one of the states where the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is also the state minimum wage. No one can live on that, even working full-time, and millions of America’s so-called “working poor” have to rely on government programs like food assistance to survive. For the unemployed, who can’t get jobs because of the weak economy, the problem of survival is even more acute.
But now, North Carolina is moving to restrict food stamps to working-age (18 to 50) single people without children to just three months of every three years. The state is also imposing a 20-hour-a-week work requirement, which will freeze out the unemployed from food assistance entirely. Read the story here.
Never mind the fact that many food stamp recipients are already working, and need food stamps because their jobs pay obscenely low wages. The ideal solution, of course, is to raise the federal minimum wage to subsistence level so working people won’t need any government welfare to survive. But Republicans are fighting tooth and claw against any increase in the federal minimum wage (and state minimum wages, too).
They would rather moralize about “lazy poor people.” It gets even worse: some communities are even making it a crime to give food to hungry people. Needless to say, it’s not Democrats who are running those places or enacting such laws.
Photo: You can look, but don’t touch; under Republican ideology, food is a perk of affluence, not for lowly wage slaves.