UPDATE — courtesy of Rep. Carney’s office: The Congressman started his SNAP challenge yesterday, meaning I jumped the gun here relaying info from other sources. In any event, Representative Carney started reporting on his progress with the SNAP challenge via his Facebook page. According to that page, he’ll be meeting with various people in Delaware and DC to highlight the challenges of people who live on the SNAP program.
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The House of Representatives is getting to vote on its version of the Farm Bill — this GOP led version cuts 2.5% of SNAP funds. It is estimated that this might throw about 2.5M Americans who need food help off of the program. As a protest — 26 Democrats in the House have started a week-long SNAP Challenge (some reports have some of their staff joining them), where they pledge to live on the $4.50/day subsidy SNAP provides. Our representative, John Carney, is on the list of Democrats doing this challenge.
Representative Carney’s own webpage (or his Facebook page) doesn’t have anything about his commitment to this yet, and we’ll link that when it happens. In the meantime, I commend Representative Carney for taking up this challenge, and really, each legislator should have to live only on the “safety net” for a month before they are allowed to vote on a thing. Living on $4.50 a day is hard, especially if you are trying to maintain some semblance of a healthy diet. But I wonder about the effectiveness of this as a protest. No doubt there will be much attention to their efforts over the week (complete with Twitter hashtag — #SNAPChallenge), which is a great way to inform people, but will this change any GOP minds? I read this comment (or a variant thereof) someplace, recently:
It takes a coward to ignore the poor, it takes a monster to steal their food, it takes a Republican to ridicule their misery.
Fewer people would need food assistance if they could work at jobs that paid them enough to put food on the table. Because it isn’t just people who don’t work who get food assistance — it is people making minimum wage for few hours at the Walmarts of the world, too. Helping to push back on the so-called jobs that don’t even allow these workers to stop accessing these benefits would help too. Which isn’t to denigrate Rep. Carney’s challenge here — this is plenty tough — I just wish it was a better protest.