Tuesday, January 15, 2019

END THE SHUTDOWN. GOOD GRIEF.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled break to bring you this public service announcement. If you, like me, are not financially affected by the government shutdown, you may not know that the Department of Agriculture has found a way to pay February SNAP benefits (the program commonly known as food stamps, which are now paid out on debit cards), but they can only do it by distributing those funds early-- this week, in fact.

If the shutdown continues, those funds are the last that SNAP recipients will receive for the foreseeable future. At our local food bank today, I listened to the staff try to plan for the inevitable result of this news: an enormous increase in people needing the food bank. It's not pretty. This affects millions of people nationwide, including well over 100,000 in Montana.

You can claim the moral high road for awhile, and I certainly have my opinion on which side has it (hint: if you ask me, building a wall would be a huge waste of taxpayer dollars). But that time has ended. Get your butts back to the table and figure this out. This is about children being able to eat.

If both sides compromise and present a plan to the president (which I sincerely hope does not include funding for a wall, but at the moment, that's not my highest concern), it will be clear that the problem is the president. He will sign. And one suspects that he will figure out a way to call it a win, because he always does.

That's all. This has to stop.

1 comment:

BarbN said...

Since there has been some renewed interest in this post, I should point out that this was well before the COVID shutdown. I was addressing the government shutdown over some kind of budget negotiation, I don't remember exactly what.