Opinion

Tread carefully when cutting food assistance to poor

TBO.com
Published: September 16, 2012

Everyone is looking for budget cuts these days, and reasonable people understand that it's necessary. What's maddening, however, is where some of these cuts are being made.

The U.S. House and Senate want to slash funding going to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. The Senate would cut $4.5 billion over 10 years and the House would cut $16 billion.

Proponents of cuts say there are too many loopholes in the system and people not really needing the assistance are mooching off the system. We agree that if there are people improperly using SNAP for financial gain who could otherwise afford to put food on the table, then by all means cut it. But if one person or family truly needing food assistance is out of luck due to these cuts, the House and Senate will have failed miserably.

Florida religious leaders have spoken out about these cuts and the devastating effect it will have on churches that do their best to help feed hungry people.

"Our elected leaders need to understand the resources for handling the needs of the vulnerable and the poor are not within the church itself," the Rev. Russell Meyer, executive director of the Florida Council of Churches told reporters. "And to ask the church itself to do that would be to put a tax on people of faith that would not be shared by the rest of the public."

Meyer is exactly right about this. Our churches have provided an amazing amount of assistance, and lawmakers seem to think they can do a lot more. Ask any church about the donation amounts during the past few years and a very different story is told.

The fact of the matter is that more than 3.5 million Floridians are participating in the SNAP program. We're sure there's waste, just as there is in everything, but the vast majority of these people are just trying to find enough food for their families.

If only the House and Senate would be so stringent on rooting out waste on corporate welfare, Big Oil tax subsidies, defense contracts and numerous other areas where basic human needs won't be affected, we wouldn't even be talking about this.

No person needing food in this country should be denied assistance. We're better than that as a society. It's frustrating to see people like our own U.S. Rep. Tom Rooney fight to cut these benefits when many of his constituents are the ones depending on this.

Cut the corruption and waste in SNAP, and while you're at it, focus just as hard on cutting unfairness and waste in all those special interest subsidies. Oh, that's right, they're the ones pumping campaign coffers full of money.

It's despicable what some of our members of Congress are willing to do, and none so more than cutting food assistance to people needing it.