Oh SNAP

By Antjuan Seawright, Columnist

November 1st is upon us and, as most of you know, that means 42 million Americans are going hungry as the Republican Majority refuses to fund the SNAP benefits that working people rely on to eat and to feed their families.

Of course, President Trump doesn’t think that’s a particularly big deal and said as much on his way to a Palm Beach vacation Friday arguing that “When you’re talking about SNAP, if you look it’s largely Democrats, they’re hurting their own people.”

There’s so much that’s blatantly false and misleading in that statement that I don’t know where to start.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this is the same Republican Majority who voted to defund SNAP in their big nasty bill earlier this year cutting $186 billion from SNAP, the largest such cut in American history.

But I for one think we should expect better. I would hope that the folks who like to brand the GOP as “God’s Only Party” would have at least read the same Matthew 25: 35-40 I did growing up in the AME church.

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

“Whatever you did for the least of these, my brethren, you did for me.”

But apparently they don’t care about that. They don’t care that even folks making six figure salaries are having to take out loans to pay for groceries. They don’t care that Trump’s inflation keeps driving up costs, transforming the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) into the Survival Nutrition Assistance Program.

They don’t care that Trump’s inflation driving up costs to the point where even folks making six figure salaries are having to take out loans to pay for groceries,

Apparently they don’t think that the 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP every day are “my brethren.” Folks like Ann Coulter are out there saying they should get a job but, apparently, she doesn’t know the simple fact that 80% of SNAP households are actually working households with working class jobs. In fact, a 2020 study pointed out that companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon and Dollar General pay their employees so little that they have to rely on SNAP despite working full time.

They also want to pretend that SNAP is a “blue state” program for Democrats. But that’s an outright lie. In fact, more than half a million SNAP recipients live in deep red South Carolina. Nearly 3.2 million SNAP recipients live in Texas where Republicans control the House, Senate and Governor’s Office.

The Republican crowd likes to point out that 15% of folks in California rely on SNAP. But they leave out that it’s the same in Alabama where 15% of the population relies on SNAP and it’s worse in GOP-controlled West Virginia (16%), Oklahoma (17%) and Louisiana (18%).

Of course, not everyone who receives SNAP has a job. Nearly 70% of them are children, seniors or have a disability. Of all the SNAP households in America, 47% have children, 39% include an elderly member and 48% include someone with a disability. Military families count on SNAP. Soldiers in our National Guard, reservists and 1.2 million veterans count on SNAP and, contrary to the GOP talking points, white families make up the largest SNAP beneficiary demographic.

Interesting. That doesn’t look like some lazy bunch of freeloading slobs gaming the system. That looks like our families. That looks like our friends and neighbors. That looks like America today. With companies like John Deere, UPS and Amazon laying off more and more workers as the Trump tariffs continue to drive up the costs of groceries, it looks like all of us.