Tuesday, March 28, 2006

13 Hours in Iraq

This isn't actually about Iraq. This is about San Francisco. And the District of Columbia. And 32 states and two tribal reservations. It's about places where Americans who live in poverty are getting a little extra help from the government.

And now that help is going to be taken away:

Ola Mae White, who retired 30 years ago....lives on $819 in monthly Social Security benefits and a tiny pension from her days as a cafeteria worker. Once a month, like thousands of seniors in the city and around the country, she picks up a supplemental food box packed with canned juices, milk, meat, vegetables, fruit....

But starting next month, about 1,000 low-income seniors in San Francisco will lose their monthly food boxes as cutbacks in a U.S. Department of Agriculture program trickle down to beneficiaries. Tens of thousands of other seniors across the country are also losing their boxes.

More than that, pending before Congress is a Bush administration proposal to completely eliminate the food program in the coming fiscal year. It is a move administration officials say is necessary in tight budgetary times....

Last year, the Commodity Supplemental Food Program provided food packages to about 512,000 people each month, including 57,000 in 11 counties in California.
Senator Feinstein and others are pushing for legislation to continue the program...but in this Congress, the prospects seem pretty bleak.

The rationale for eliminating the program is that it's 'duplicative'. The beneficiaries could get the same benefity by collecting foodstamps...or so the story goes. Even if they were all eligible, though (and apparently, quite a few are not), foodstamps introduce one more bureaucratic hurdle to the process, and put the burden of shopping on the recipients--a burden many seniors are ill-equipped to handle.

There are other concerns. The food boxes cost the USDA $18 apiece, but have a retail value of $42; getting equivalent nutritional value with food stamps would cost a whole lot more, even without factoring in the inflated prices typical of markets in low-income areas. The food is nutritionally balanced--better balanced than the equivalents most people would be able to buy.

But the outrageousness of this goes way beyond the merits of the program, to the completely surreal budgetary worldview used to justify it. 'Tight budgetary times'? The people who cut revenues by nearly $300 billion per year in order to give free money to the ultrawealthy are talking about tight fucking budgetary times? The people who decided to throw $1 trillion down the rathole in Iraq, who haven't even bothered to keep an eye on how that money is spent, say this program is just too expensive to keep going?

Because that's the punchline here: the food box program costs a whopping $111 million. We're spending that much on Iraq in 13 hours.

Thirteen fucking hours. Think about it.

[That's all, folks]