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Letter: GOP insult citizens with vote to gut SNAP


To the Editor:

Once again the GOP has shown its true colors by passing a bill which cuts $40 billion out of the SNAP (food stamps) program over a 10-year period.

The GOP claims that the approximately 30 million Americans that will lose food stamps over the next 10 years are “slackers who should get jobs.”

But the actual truth is that about 45 percent of these single men and women, who are going to lose their benefit, have children and either has a job or cannot afford to work because the cost of child care consumes the majority of their minimum wage paycheck.

Are there people scamming the food stamp system and abusing the privilege? Absolutely!

But my question to the GOP: Is your zeal to cut off the ‘slackers’ (less than 5 percent of the programs clients) so great that you forget the downtrodden, those in their later years, or children?

The GOP completely disregarded any attempt to soften the blow to millions of Americans and the result is a bill the not only kicks families with children in the teeth, but it also tosses the mentally ill and seniors under the GOP corporate bus as well. This bill is an insult to any American (regardless of political affiliation) who believes that we, as a nation, should be grateful for the gifts that we have received and that “paying it forward” or random acts of kindness are part of the responsibility of being a citizen of our great nation.

What really is upsetting is the fact that the GOP will literally take the food out of the mouths of babies, the mentally ill and seniors, and give it to their big rich donors and we sit idly by and do nothing.

This pattern of stealing from the poor to give to the rich has to stop.

The reverse Robin Hood economic policy that the GOP is practicing is destroying the middle class and driving more people into poverty and driving more people to work multiple minimum wage/low wage jobs just to get by.

Is this really what we want?

Steve Murphy

St. Paul