Bootstraps? SNAP, Medicaid, and Pell are the bootstraps

When Americans have food, shelter, education, and good health, they can thrive and become the taxpayers who more than make up for the help that got them out of poverty.

Let’s talk about who’s really getting hurt by Republicans shutting off food aid through SNAP — something that has never happened in any previous government shutdown. It’s BS to say that poverty is some kind of choice that is rewarded with a lavish lifestyle… of a whopping $6 a day in SNAP support.

Kids get hurt the most. Kids don’t get a choice — to grow up poor, to grow up with only one parent, to grow up with a parent who doesn’t always make good decisions, to grow up in a place where parents have a hard time finding a job paying more than poverty wages. Kids like me, once upon a time — growing up with a single mom and siblings, including a little brother with health problems for the nine years of his short life. 

As a kid, I stood in that line at the local welfare office where booklets of food stamps were distributed. Life of luxury? Give me a break. More like a mark of shame. But we didn’t starve, though goodness knows food was in short supply, especially at the end of the month. I’ll never drink powdered milk again, trust me.

In time, with her kids in school, my mom could wait tables overnight at a truck stop and then work her way into better shifts and jobs. But for those years when that wasn’t an option, there were always a few so-called Christians and other politicians who would have preferred we go hungry and somehow “learn a lesson” about using bootstraps to feed ourselves instead of becoming “dependent.” What a crock. 

SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8 rent assistance, and college financial aid like Pell Grants are the bootstraps, the financial breathing room to eventually escape a cycle of poverty. My mom, my sisters, and I have paid back exponentially in taxes what we received during those critical years. That’s a return on investment. Cutting those programs doesn’t result in savings any more than a farmer eating their seed corn. 

So you can imagine my frustration when politicians like GOP Rep. Derek Van Orden talk about being raised by a single mom, eating “government cheese,” being on food stamps — then, after pledging not to balance the budget “on the backs of some of our most vulnerable populations, including hungry children,” he opted to pull up the very ladder that helped him climb out of poverty. Talk about forgetting your roots. 

Van Orden knows the real problem is that we have an economy where parents can work a full-time job and still not make enough to afford rent, health care, and food for their kids. And yet he voted to move trillions of tax dollars away from struggling families and into the tax shelters of multimillionaires and the corporations that get away with paying wages low enough to require public assistance. Aren’t they the real parasites that the politicians should be weaning off the public dole?

Everyone who works hard or cares for a family deserves more than just a decent living — they deserve a decent life. That means no child goes hungry in the wealthiest nation on Earth. That means keeping families together and giving them the support they need to build something better. It means respecting those who have worked and are now elderly, and those who could never work due to disabilities. 

Having “family values” means actually valuing families. Using, in Van Orden’s words, “some of our most vulnerable populations, including hungry children” as political pawns is just sick.