Keep your stinkin’ benefits
Iowa will not participate this summer in a federal program that gives $40 per month to each child in a low-income family to help with food costs while school is out, state officials have announced.
The state has notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it will not participate in the 2024 Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children — or Summer EBT — program, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education said in a Friday news release.
“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,” Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds said in the news release.
Some children are overweight, therefore no low-income children will get help with food costs while school is out. How kind and compassionate and helpful.
Some state lawmakers, including Democratic Sen. Izaah Knox of Des Moines, quickly voiced their opposition to the decision.
“It’s extremely disappointing that the Reynolds administration is planning to reject federal money that could put food on the table for hungry Iowa kids,” Knox said in a statement. “This cruel and short-sighted decision will have real impacts on children and families in my district and communities all across Iowa.”
Nonsense, those kids should be out there learning how to play the stock market.
What the actual fuck? Providing money for low-income families does nothing to promote providing food for children? Providing money to low-income families will make children of low-income families fat? WTF?
Disclaimer: OK, I’m Canadian. Not that we’re necessarily any better, but could any USians explain this reasoning as logical? Or is it really as absurd as it sounds?
It really is as absurd (and callous and evil) as it sounds.
Was this even a thing that would happen while Reagan was still president? The money is allocated, but nope we’re not taking it?
If they would rather die, they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population
This could turn around and bite Iowa Republicans in the butt. The EBT cards not only help kids, they are a boon to farmers because they can sell their wares if people can buy it. In fact, that’s one of the reasons food stamps (now EBT) got through in the first place…to help farmers.
Oh, but I forgot. Not much farming in Iowa, right? /s
Yes, Ophelia, they can all become hedge-fund managers, as people with high IQs all aspire to do nowadays (rather than do something worthwhile in the sciences or the arts), and get obese in another epidemical sort of a way: obesely wealthy.
I wonder what the state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education is doing in the way of providing long-term solutions to “promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”
Bugger all, I suspect. After all, if you’re born into a poor family, it’s your own fault; and as we all know, the lower classes are a feckless, skiving lot with low IQs and so are their kids. Why bother?
So wait, this is a federal program right? Doesn’t that mean it doesn’t actually cost Iowa’s state government anything? It is all funded by the Fed?
So these same guys who earlier this year tried to ban abortions because they’re so “pro life”, are blocking food aid to children that wouldn’t actually cost them anything?
Fight obesity by starving poor kids? Sounds like peak Republican.
As our Lord and Savior said, “Blessed are the poor for they shall be screwed by the government.”
Yep that’s what it means.
It seems like the conservative mindset is that if a few people abuse a program by buying unhealthy food, then the whole thing is an example of government waste. I knew a guy who was always talking about a neighbor on disability who had a big screen television (back when they cost thousands of dollars.) Or there was a Facebook post from a woman who saw a family using an EBT card and loading their groceries into an Escalade. So, fat kids eating candy bars paid by the gubmint is reason enough to not participate in a program.
It’s just kind of weird how Minnesota borders Iowa, and our government thinks feeding kids is important enough that they institute free school lunches for all kids without income limits, and many of the city rec centers in St. Paul provide summer meals for kids.
If legislators really wanted to prevent kids from eating junk food, they would quit subsidizing it. Even with the subsidies, it costs more than many healthy foods, but people don’t realize that. Keep the subsidies on things like rice, beans, chicken, milk, but cancel them on potato chips and so forth. Then the prices would reflect the true cost.
Or…just let people make their food decisions, even if you think the decisions are ‘wrong’. Frankly, if I had my way, no one would be able to buy peanut butter on EBT, because it’s nasty, inedible stuff better used for wallpaper paste (except for the smell). Only I kid. I think feeding kids is important, even if it’s feeding them less than healthy food.
Mike @10 covered most of what I was going to say. I would add that there is an awful lot of micromanaging done by conservatives who think that any benefit or charity provided to people comes with the right of the donor to monitor any and all decisions to see if the recipient is still worthy.
Re federal versus state: the program web site says that the program is federally administered, with states determining eligibility and handling applications and documentation. So the money comes from the feds, but the states decide who can get it. There are a lot of programs in the US like that.
Bruce Gorton: Okay, so here’s the ‘thinking’: “Obesity is the result of indulging in too much food. Cutting food stamps will lead to less food being consumed. Ergo, obesity will go down.” This, of course, is inane, because it ignores that poor folks’ diet isn’t bad because of too much food, but because of too much unhealthy food–generally, it ends up being high-carb and high-sodium.
iknklast: Actually, if you do a time + money budget, ‘healthy’ foods are way more costly than junk food, especially if you’re poor enough to live in a food desert, where you have to travel extra time to get to anyplace that sells fresh produce and the like. Healthy alternatives also generally require more prep time, which single-parent and two-full-time parent households have a lot less of. So the kids get ramen and other highly processed foods with tons of carbs and sodium, because that’s all they can manage directly.
Hell, we could tackle obesity by dropping a government-run supermarket in the middle of every food desert, keep the prices at-cost, and allow SNAP cards to be used, while letting nutritionists just dictate what’s sold there.
Freemage, that may be part of the thinking, but from what I’ve seen a lot of it is simply: poor people can’t be trusted to give their kids healthy diets, so we shouldn’t subsidize their food. I’ve seen people rant about people using SNAP/EBT funds to buy junk food, and about kids not being given enough to eat while the parents are overweight, and anything else that allows making a quick judgment of someone from a visual scan of a single grocery purchase. Heck, people complain about poor people buying good food with SNAP funds (or even with their own money while buying other things with SNAP funds) because it’s too expensive and they don’t deserve it.