As Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman eloquently points out, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, or, food stamps), meager though it may be, keeps millions of Americans out of poverty and has saved hundreds of thousands of jobs. The evidence shows that ensuring adequate nutrition for kids makes it less likely that those children will be poor and need public assistance when they grow up, making SNAP public policy at its best. So, of course, those “meanspirited class warriors” (the Republicans in Congress) want to starve the program and the 48 million Americans who depend upon it, so they can give additional tax breaks to billionaires and giant transnational corporations. Yes, it’s twisted and depraved, but that’s what happens when greed is unregulated and the foxes get to guard the henhouse. In his 1941 State of the Union Address, Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed four fundamental freedoms that people “everywhere in the world” ought to enjoy, and among those Four Freedoms was the Freedom from Want, i.e., the right to an adequate standard of living, which includes the right to food, clothing, education, medical care and housing, as a fundamental human rights.
Do we really want to live in an America where 17 million children live with “food insecurity” and go to bed hungry at night?