Florida Republican Socialists Piss Off Los Angeles Over Food Stamps
Categories: Buyer Beware
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Storms' bill was approved by the Senate Committee on Children, Families, and Elderly Affairs, a result of concern over the health of poor children in particular, she claims. That, and it's just not fair: "If we're going to be cutting services across the board," she said, "then people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies, without their sodas."
And yet. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, almost 1 million individuals who are eligible for SNAP in Florida have not applied for assistance, which translates to $417.3 million in funding for food assistance that goes unused.
When a fellow legislator pointed out that if passed, Storms' legislation would prohibit a mother from buying her kid a birthday cake with food stamps, she said, "They can have cake. You can buy flour, eggs, and sugar, and that makes a cake. I make my kids their own cakes."
The L.A. Times rails against this "socialistic" legislation in today's editorial.
"The notion that poor people have any more time to cook from scratch than other Americans who rely on prepared supermarket 'junk' food is clearly absurd, and infantilizing them by restricting their choices in this way is demeaning." The paper is critical of the Big Brother approach over providing nutritional information.
Florida joins California, Illinois, and a handful of states in states trying to restrict food stamp purchases. Forty-six million Americans were on food stamps in 2011, up from 26 million in 2008.
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