Food Stamp Recipients To Lose One Weeks Meals $5billion in cuts - TopicsExpress

Food Stamp Recipients To Lose One Weeks Meals $5billion in cuts to SNAP program kick in Friday. “If you look across the world, riots always begin typically the same way: when people cannot afford to eat food,” Margarette Purvis, the president and CEO of the Food Bank for New York City, told Salon Monday. The fact that they’re going to lose what’s basically an entire week’s worth food each month, said Purvis, it’s pretty daunting. She told Salon that while policymakers are attempting to punish people for being poor, and people are comforted by believing that they know that a person has to have done something wrong in order to be poor, in reality, I can tell you that more and more folks have more than one job and are still needing help. (As [Salon] reported last week, audio recorded by a McDonald’s worker-activist showed a counselor on an employee hotline encouraging her to sign up for food stamps because it takes a lot of the pressure off how much money you spend on groceries.) Purvis added that cutting food stamps was not even good business sense, because each dollar of food stamps infuses over $1.70 of spending into the economy. Some prominent conservatives have questioned the significance of public assistance cuts for the poor. Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kistol contended during the government shutdown that it’s not going to be the end of the world, honestly, even if you’re on nutritional assistance from the federal government. The state of Arkansas can help out, localities can help out, churches can help out, I believe no one is going to starve in Arkansas because of the shutdown. Asked about such claims, Purvis said that citing the efforts of groups like hers as a reason not to worry about public assistance cuts was one of the most ill-informed arguments on the planet. salon/2013/10/28/riots_always_begin_typically_the_same_way_food_stamp_shutdown_looms_friday/ Photo: AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez ~gw