Iowa will not participate this summer in a federal program that gives $40 per month to each child in a low-income family to help with food costs while school is out, state officials have announced.
The state has notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it will not participate in the 2024 Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children — or Summer EBT — program, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education said in a Friday news release.
“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds said in the news release.
I wish the media wouldn’t give politicians that say ‘x costs too much’ a free pass. Often, not doing x can cost more than doing it and rhetorically hiding behind ‘it costs something’ leaves the reader to assume it’s reasonable to not do x because of cost.
For example, it costs something to put a homeless person in an apartment and give them time with a social worker- and the alternative to doing that (which involves paying cops to move them around and destroy their stuff, to investigate the crimes homeless people are perpetrators and victims of, to process them in and out of local emergency rooms, etc) costs substantially more than putting them in housing.
If feeding kids at a rate of $40/month is too expensive, what is the cost of not feeding them? (There’s the expenses of being sick, of acting out and involving disciplinary action or just taking class time, and let’s not forget that opportunity cost from not developing kids to their potential if they aren’t getting proper nutrition) It’s well-understood that nutritional poverty involves foregoing brain development to a child’s full potential, and that in turn costs society whatever capacity that kid doesn’t get to fulfill as a consequence. Not feeding kids is a way to keep your country under-performing and given the GOP’s politics I honestly think they need that in their voters.
I agree with you, but the elite capitalist counterpoint is that they want to keep many people poor and uneducated. They are then less powerful fighting for more rights and demanding more, and because they’re desperate they’re willing to work for less money. See also restricting abortion = a bigger cheap labor pool. Your point of view is caring for people, theirs is caring for profits.