For conservatives to support any farm bill, Congress should adopt the House’s reforms to require more work-capable recipients of food stamps to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving benefits.
We have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to deal with poverty. Is it not time to try something different and not look the other way when the principles of personal responsibility and accountability are brought up?
“It’s immoral. It’s un-American,” Varney concluded. “In this country, you want money, you work for it. You don’t just take it from the government as a handout because that is dependency.”
This may come as a surprise to some, but the farm bill should really be called the food stamp bill. Food stamps account for about 70 percent of farm bill costs. The Senate farm bill doesn’t do anything to reform food stamps. It doesn’t reduce dependency on welfare assistance.
Historically, the Vermont welfare bureaucracy has promoted “thinking about getting ready to work” programs, and has stoutly resisted meaningful sanctions for able-bodied people who want benefits but do not want to work.
The story of a work-capable young adult mooching off of his parents has become all too common, and unfortunately, many of these people are allowed to mooch off of taxpayers, as well. Consider the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
We have spent $28 billion on welfare programs since the War on Poverty began, yet the ability of the poor to achieve self-sufficiency has actually decreased. Government spends $1.1 trillion annually on the same failed programs while hoping for different results.
The number of Los Angeles’ homeless in the past six years greatly increased by 75 percent from 32,000 to 55,000. The number grows to 58,000 if Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach are included in the statistics.
The Vermont Poverty Council began ten years ago and its tenure is up. Now it faces a crossroads, and lawmakers must decide if it has a future, and what that future might be.
The number of food stamp dependent Americans hit a six-year low in President Donald Trump’s first year in office, reflecting an improving economy and falling unemployment, according to a U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) report.
Back in 2007 the Vermont Legislature set a goal to cut child poverty in half in 10 years. A fourteen-member panel was charged with getting this done. The deadline passed on June 30, 2017. How’d we do?
President Donald Trump on Wednesday reversed an Obama administration policy that undermined one of the most successful domestic policy reforms in the last half-century.