Food Stamps Ending in Some Areas

The program is being ended for some:

As many as 1 million Americans will stop receiving food stamps over the course of this year beginning on Friday, the consequence of a controversial work mandate that has been reinstated in 22 states as the economy improves.

The 20-year-old rule — which was suspended in many states during the economic recession — requires that adults without children or disabilities must have a job in order to receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for more than three months, with some exceptions. Many states have begun to reimpose the federal rule as the economy recovers, with the largest group reviving it at the beginning of this year. As a result, many recipients’ three-month limit expires today, April 1…

“Making people hungrier isn’t going to make them find work faster,” said Rebecca Vallas, who is the managing director of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “One of the most helpful things for someone looking for work is helping them not worry about putting food on the table.”

While state officials have mailed out notices and news media covered the change, food bank staff around the country are worried that those affected by the rule will only learn about it when government assistance doesn’t arrive this month.

“This is something we are watching very closely,” said Margarette Purvis, who is the president and chief executive officer of the Food Bank For New York City. “I think a lot of people don’t know about the rule. I’m worried a lot of people will be surprised when they don’t receive their food stamps.”

It is amusing how to rabbits, those free resources are the foundation that gives you the energy to get up and work. That is how innate these assumptions are to our psychologies. Eliminate the free food, and in their mind the world will end, and then nobody will have a job. Likewise, conservatives can’t imagine a world where resources aren’t limited.

You have to wonder if this is really a measure of a booming economy, or if it is some sort of preparation for the belt-tightening, designed to get the savage hordes acclimated now to the idea of potential resource restriction, before the real fun begins.

Either way, it is one more click up on the amygdala stimulation which is roughly paralleled by the Misery Index, the Conservative Policy Mood, and the rising tide of rage and intolerance that has only begun. Some of those affected will grow more conservative. Others will turn to crime, driving still others more conservative.

And off in the mist, out of sight but directly on our path, is possibly a complete Soviet-esque economic dissolution of the entire federal governmental structure that provides these benefits now. Imagine.

To think that six or seven years ago idiots were writing about the death of conservatism for a generation. It was merely the last gasp of an artificial glut that was going to make everything much harsher for a decade or more when it hit.