For Less Than A Cup Of Coffee A Day, GOP Governors Could Feed Kids In Their States. They Won't.

Can't have the children being welfare queens.

Screenshot: Sally Struthers Save The Children commercial

We have spent much of the last year documenting Republican efforts to outlaw abortion across the United States, with many of the draconian measures being based on the point at which there is fetal pole cardiac activity. You know, the insipidly titled “Heartbeat bills.”

But what may come as a surprise to many of them is that, believe it or not, living human children also have heartbeats. Actual heartbeats, even, because of how they have actual hearts and other developed organs, like stomachs. And because, unlike a six-week-old fetus, they are larger than a grain of rice, they need food to fill those stomachs. Food that costs money.

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Alas, even with their well-developed organs, Republicans simply don’t care as much for human children as they do for six-week-old fetuses, which is why some of them are making the choice to not fund summer EBT programs aimed at curbing childhood hunger. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds made her proclamation on the Friday before Christmas, just to make it extra Dickensian.

“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,” she said in a statement, clearly unaware of the fact that children enrolled in this program tend to eat healthier foods, because their parents can afford it, rather than cheaper foods that tend to be less nutritious.

Al Bundy eats a Tang sandwich

This program would allot about $30 to $60 for each child participating in a state’s subsidized lunch program for the entire summer. So, at most, about $120 to feed a child for an entire summer. I don’t know if you have been to a grocery store lately, but $120 does not get you a huge amount of food.

Remember when Sally Struthers used to stand around starving children in developing nations and say, “For less than a cup of coffee a day, you could feed this child and others like her”? That is literally true in this case, because coffee, even at a diner, is going to run you at least three dollars these days.

Iowa is not an outlier, either. Salon reports that “according to the Alliance to End Hunger, less than half the eligible states and U.S. territories have signed up for Summer EBT as a Jan. 1 federal application deadline looms.”

Via Salon:

In a Wednesday statement to Salon Food, Eric Mitchell, the president of the Alliance to End Hunger, said that for millions of children, the end of school meals during the summer months means losing out on their main and most consistent source of nutrition. 

“For these children, access to Summer EBT can be the difference between getting the meals they need to stay healthy and thrive, or going hungry,” Mitchell said. “That’s why Congress recently made the program permanent, and why every state should participate.” 

He continued: “It is deeply concerning that, with the January 1 deadline approaching for summer 2024, more than half of states have yet to commit for this summer. In a time when food insecurity in the United States is increasing, we need to do everything in our power to ensure that no child goes hungry. The Alliance to End Hunger hopes that states will do the right thing and make the proper investments in this critically important program.”

“No thank you,” they say, “we do not want any of your federal money to feed the children in our state and would prefer to watch them starve over the summer.”

I’d love for that to be a huge, snarky exaggeration, but it’s not too far off from what Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen said when he turned down the money.

“In the end, I fundamentally believe that we solve the problem, and I don’t believe in welfare,” he told the Journal Star. Pillen then explained that his plan was to feed children while they were not at their homes, because eating food at home is bad and welfare-y somehow.

“We’re gonna take care of every one of these kids through the summer, feeding them,” he said. “We just want to make sure that they’re out. They’re at church camps. They’re at schools. They’re at 4-H. And we’ll take care of them at all of the places that they’re at, so that they’re out amongst [other people] and not feeding a welfare system with food at home.”

Pillen is talking here about the Summer Food Service Program, which, through the Department of Agriculture, provides “schools, camps, parks, playgrounds, housing projects, community centers, churches, and other public sites where children gather in the summer” with meals for eligible children. That is very nice, it’s a great program, but not all parents are able to drive their children back and forth from these things all day, every day during the summer. Day camps usually seem to last about one to three weeks and frequently cost money. 4-H camps in Nebraska cost $275-$550.

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This program, by the way, is also a form of welfare, which is defined as “statutory procedure or social effort designed to promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need.” Republicans have so warped the definition of the term in order to turn it into this evil thing that makes people bad and lazy that they have absolutely no idea what it even means anymore. In other countries, people are even proud of the fact that they take care of people.

There are, actually, no “long-term solutions” to childhood hunger in this country that would please Republicans — because let’s be clear on what it is that they do want. They want to force women to give birth and have babies; they want businesses to be able to pay their employees poverty wages if that is what they feel like doing; they do not want working class people to push for higher wages on the grounds that it might make their hamburgers super expensive; they don’t want to look at homeless people; and, as Pillen said, they don’t want welfare.

Oh! And of course, they don’t want any crime, either. Naturally.

They cannot have all of those things at the same time. It’s not possible. I would argue that every one of those things (other than not having crime) is bad on its own, but together, they are simply not logistically possible.

The only way to “solve the problem” of child hunger is to feed children. The children don’t need to work, they don’t need to spend months brushing horses and smelling poop before finding out that they were never going to get to ride them anyway and quitting, they don’t need to “leave their houses” in order to prove to Governor Scrooge that they aren’t “lazy” in order to “deserve” food.