My modest income of under $700 a month is bolstered by $132 in food money each month. That is the maximum determined to be needed by an adult that is disabled apparently. If I had no income at all I would get slightly more than $200 a month. Usually I and most that depend on food stamps spend them all in the first week. Sometimes if I'm very cautious I can make them last three weeks but never the entire month.
Apparently that is not enough of a challenge for us that depend on help to be able to eat. The Republicans have decided to cut by 20% food stamp benefits. what will that mean to me? $105.60 a month. $3.52 a day. $ 1.17 a meal.
Can you feed yourself for an entire month on $1.17 a meal?
I can't and I've been told I'm smart.
How about someone that can't cook?
People will die from this.
Most unemployed people will get cut off. Many working poor, who rely on food stamps to make ends meet, will go hungry. So, too, will countless military families – a separate disgrace in and of itself. Far too many homeless families and individuals will find their chair at the dinner table yanked away just as they are sitting down to eat, a sight gag that hasn’t been funny since it was pulled on Fatty Arbuckle in some of his movies back in the Twenties.
“Churches and charities can take up the slack,” harrumphed Robert Royal on an episode of Moyers & Company not long ago. Royal runs The Faith and Reason Institute, a right-wing group loosely affiliated with conservative elements in the Catholic Church.
But Royal, an avowed supporter of the Gekko-Galt Romney-Ryan ticket, was shocked into dumbfounded silence when Sister Simone Campbell, organizer of the “Nuns on the Bus” anti-poverty tour, pointed out that Bread for the World did a study and found that every last cathedral, church, synagogue, mosque, temple and meeting hall in America would have to raise an additional $50,000 every year for 10 years to compensate for the GOP plan to eliminate food stamps.