This week at progressive state blogs: Food stamp recipients treated like crooks; Cory Gardner hides

This week at progressive state blogs is designed specifically to focus attention on the writing and analysis of people focused on their home turf. Here is the July 1 edition. Inclusion of a blog post does not necessarily indicate my agreement with—or endorsement of—its contents.

Nath Pizzolatto at The Bayou Brief writes—Garret Graves Wants To Treat Families On Food Stamps Like Felons On Probation:

On June 26th, Congressman Garret Graves, a Republican from Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District, announced the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Reform Act of 2017, a bill which seeks to introduce work requirements for certain adults, and remove exemptions from those requirements for others, in order to receive SNAP benefits (more commonly known as food stamps).

Put simply, Graves proposes treating families who rely on food stamps like convicted felons on probation.

While Graves, in a press release, claims that this bill will both “protect resources” and “get capable people off the sidelines and involved in building America’s future,” the likelihood it will do either seems scant.

This program will obviously need agents to monitor it and verify that recipients are sufficiently seeking a job, creating more unnecessary bureaucracy and wasting precious public dollars.

If the goal is to help people on food stamps find jobs, why not spend this money on job training programs, instead of on giving more hoops for our most destitute to jump through to get the help they need, and punishing them if they can’t do it?

This comes back to what “food stamp fraud” and “welfare reform” are really about: race.