Column: My Point of View, by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Do you know who needs to get off their duffs and start earning their keep? Children.

That’s right — when they’re young, they suck their parents dry and expect to be fed night after night after night. The family is a breeding ground for dependency.

This idea is nonsense, or at least outdated, but this is how Congress is treating children — as if they have some responsibility to feed themselves if their parents can’t.

Cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka SNAP, just kicked in, and it’s a terrible austerity measure to implement when we’re still in recession. Wages are stuck, and unemployment remains stubbornly high.

To make things worse, most of the money distributed as part of food assistance programs goes right back into the economy, so we’re losing some of its much-needed multiplier effect. Furthermore, food shelves are already stretched thin, and they will have to double their volume in order to fill the gap created by the 5 percent cut to the SNAP program.

At such a time — arriving just ahead of the feast days of Thanksgiving and Christmas no less — it is morally strange to cut food assistance programs, and many people, including millions of children, are feeling the hurt immediately.

That doesn’t bother Congress, which appears to be auditioning for the role of Ebenezer Scrooge en masse as politicians debate additional reductions to food programs in the new farm bill. There are some people who are so wealthy they have never experienced a devastating loss of income, housing or steady food at any point in their lives, and Congress seems to be rife with them.

When people in power are in a privileged bubble and insulated from hard luck, their politics are impoverished. They are capable of doing harm to those less fortunate because they fail to imagine what it’s like to lose one’s safety net, and it’s easier to assume the worst of people needing help.

I get that a subset of the parents have been irresponsible, but how is it wise to deny children protection from hunger because of it? Childhood experience of poverty has been linked to so many negative outcomes, including emotional scars, behavioral problems, lower school achievement and early death in adulthood. Cutting food programs puts more children at risk. This has many implications for our country’s future.

One of the first places it hits us all is in the education system. A wide gap exists, on average, between the performance of disadvantaged students and advantaged students. When they start school, disadvantaged students have about half the working vocabulary of their advantaged peers. Most recently it has been fashionable to hold teachers accountable for closing the gap, but the problem is much deeper than what teachers can erase, and the disadvantage usually carries on into adulthood. Making more children food insecure only exacerbates the problem. Poverty itself must be targeted.

Instead of cutting food assistance programs, we should be focusing on job creation. One obvious avenue: Our aging infrastructure is falling down in chunks across the United States, and we could put a significant number of people to work rebuilding it. That will add to the debt, but it’s smart debt because the return on the investment is good, and it’s going to cost us even more if we don’t replace it. The argument that the government should be like a household and only spend as much as we take in is fallacious — for both households and the country.

Households can spend more than they take in, but it should be for sound investments like education rather than frivolous things like expensive cars that depreciate quickly in value. We must have an eye to the future and consider the long-term payoff rather than just the upfront cost.

Our country decided almost a hundred years ago — with the Keating-Owen Act of 1916 — that children are too valuable a resource to send to the mines and factories. The thinking was that households should forego the income children bring in and invest in their education instead. It’s almost impossible to believe that today we are debating whether kids — 1,200 on SNAP in Freeborn County alone — should get steady access to food.

 

Albert Lea resident Jennifer Vogt Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.