Iowa governor says it's 'not sustainable' to give $40 per month to kids from low-income families for food
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.
https://fortune.com/2023/12/25/iowa-governor-kim-reynolds-40-per-month-food-costs-federal-program-pandemic-non-sustainable/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
Just tell them if more poor kids survive until adulthood there's more cheap workforce around.
The kids generally survive anyway, just with stunted cognitive growth....which helps maintain a cheap
underclassworkforce.And full prison system.
Feed a kid instant ramen for all their meals -> iron deficiency -> behavioral problems. Believe a poor kid like this was featured in A Place at the Table (2012), or a similar documentary. An example who opened my eyes to the fact that… well, it’s not bad to consider thinking kindly, even when it seems like an adult just sucks.
Remind me of this old Babylon 5 scene.
That was fucking awesome. If this were reddit, I'd give you a silver.
Yeah... but if you feed those kids they'll just expect government handouts for the rest of their life. What do you just expect the government to give them money when they're old or something? You have to save for retirement!
Now where's my social security check?
I guess she'd rather they just starve...
Of course, what this is really all about is a refusal to pay taxes.
As a lifelong Iowan I am ashamed that we continue to employ this woman. Paying her a salary is not sustainable for Iowa, she is holding back this great state from so much potential it's enraging.
She is continually undermining our health (can't have high COVID numbers if we stop reporting it), and stripping away at our public schools (voucher program for private schools).
I may be just a transplant but I don't think I can get anymore pissed at this person. Can't believe she won the reelection.
In the same speech she talks about how kids don't need money for food and conflates issues of hunger and obesity. I do not trust your "states rights" bs to actually feed children. That money will absolutely go into a donors pocket of not strictly allocated (which is exactly why they don't want to be told how to spend it).
Just like the COVID funds she mis-spent and had to return.
Iowa forces women to have children against their will, then denies them the resources needed to raise them. This means unwanted, unafforded children, born to suffer. They pretend this is a good deed. Monsters.
How else will they fill for profit prisons if they don't deny benefits to children that are unwanted and unloved?
They claim it's the will of their lord and savior who literally preaches the opposite and the brainless just eat that shit up without a second thought.
Iowa has a budget of $8.5B. This program has about 93k eligible families in the state. At $40 per month, assuming 3 months for summer, the total cost is about $11M. Or 0.10% of their state budget. It's a rounding error...
The suffering is the point.
"Let them eat cake"
-Jesus
"The cake is my body. Enjoy"
Also Jesus
"My hips are a lie"
Anti-Shakira Jesus
The power is the point. The suffering is just something that doesn't bother them.
It's not even Iowa money, it's a federal subsidy right?
Who does this clown think she's saving money for? The federal budget doesn't truly exist, we just use numbers for fun.
Iowa's cost would only be $2.2M for admin fees.
So... In order to score cheap political points and attack the Biden administration, she's blocking food for hungry kids that her state doesn't even have to pay for.
What a disgusting creature
States now do bear an amount of the cost of EBT programs, but it's pretty negligible. I think I saw on another thread that she's basically only saving $2.2m doing this, when IA is already ending the year with an enormous budget surplus (because she and the GOP have cut everything to the bone and then started sawing).
You didn't even need to click into the article to see that's not true, it's in the body of the post.
I recognize your username from other threads, and based on your answers there as well, you're either really bad at trolling, or really bad at sarcasm, and not one of your posts is very convincing at pointing to either answer.
See? That right there. Pick a lane dude, are you coming or going? I'm starting to think you're just not good at anything.
The people who claim to be the most christ-like are usually the least christ-like.
Nebraskan gov is a piece of shit too. Only wants to help the children if they get sent to indoctrination camps. Fucking trash. They're not even pretending to be human.
Why, there are no children at the 4-H club either!
Am I so out of touch!?
...
No
It is the children who are wrong
All those examples are non-government, and do not last the entire summer
Exactly. The whole Conservative ethos is "government bad"(unless is our government). They want kids in programs that are almost all religious indoctrination programs.
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.
it aligns with the republican way of governing.. "not my problem. let the next person/generation deal with it"
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.
This is a summer program, so specifying costed month is probably misleading
We will never get better than this, think about it. It's been years and years of seeing this same shit over and over. Iowa chose this out of touch POS for themselves and they will continue to.
Reynolds is the least popular governor in the country. Her first election she only won by .1%. Her landslide victory this last election was mostly due to no one showing up to vote.
There are a LOT of people in Iowa who didn't choose her and never would.
I don't think they should get off the hook so easily. By choosing not to vote, they made thier choice.
The choice was made for them. There was no primary, only one Democrat even ran, and she had some significant problems fundraising. Even if every person that voted in the previous rejection voted for the Democrat, Reynolds still would have won, albeit by a much slimmer margin.
Republicans were prohibited from voting for a Democrat in the general election?
They chose her instead of a Democrat. That's completely their fault.
I'm specifically talking about the roughly 45% of the state that you've condemned to suffer for the crime of living in a state that has a few more Republicans than Democrats.
Oh but it's sustainable to give billionaires and corporations tax cuts? It's sustainable to own multiple million dollar plus homes? Allowing private jets is sustainable? An entire economy devoted to weapons manufacturing in a country of starving, struggling workers is sustainable?
These fucking boomers never progressed beyond their teenage years. I can't help but see our leadership as highschool students that need to grow the fuck up, abandon their awful, failed special interest policies, and start doing their fucking job; which is providing the average person with the means to live a fulfilled life. Every. Single. Politician. Is an abject failure that should have been cast to the wolves decades ago.
Billionaires and corporations have value because they can afford to bribe politicians. Poor, starving children don't. Simple as that in their eyes.
Fuck her. What an absolute joke. I know I'm not adding anything of value to this conversation, but I'm just so mad.
This is an argument that is used all the time in politics and business when a (partial) solution to a big problem is presented.
"Well there may be unintended consequences to this solution so we can't do anything until every single potential problem that may arise sometime in the future is completely worked through and solved."
I mean if you are going into space then that is probably the way to do things but trying to solve childhood hunger? Yea you got time to fix the problems as they arise.
Republicans only understand the politics of cruelty these days.
paying a salary to the Iowa governor is not sustainable.
Letting billionaires live is not sustainable
Jesus: "Then go broke."
Well put
"Don't give them lil chonkers any more lunch money!!" - The governor of Iowa.
Starving the children is certainly a solution to the childhood obesity epidemic I suppose
Okay, how about UBI, then? That's been proven over and over to be an effective soluti—
No? Something something bootstraps? Oh, then go fuck yourself with a cactus!
An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition because the prices of food are skewed towards making low income families only afford junk food. The government has the power to fix this with subsidies and other things I'm aware of but forget the names of but they choose not to.
That would be a perfect solution to the whiners that lament the people using EBT for like steaks. Healthy stuff could have a discount applied if using EBT that is reimbursed to the store so they get the same amount.
she simply wants to hurt poor people.
it's not a 'covid-era' thing anymore, it's a permanent program now--one paid for by the feds, who will also reimburse states for half of their expenses to distribute those funds to those eligible.. which really isn't that much seeing how that most of the recipients probably already applied-for or are receiving other benefits for low-income households.
Ok, so should the Federal Government slash Iowa's emergency response fund by the same amount? Iowa, bootstraps, etc.
The Federal Government should just fund the other $2.2M and shame them. "Okay Iowa, if you can't feed your state's children, we'll pick up the slack for you. Please remember who cared about you in November."
If they dems had ANY testicles at all they would, call it "Feds Feed Iowa," and rub it in their citizens faces that they can get free money from a democrat program, but they won't, because they are equally spineless.
If the money goes directly from the federal government to the people why does the state get a chance to say no? Why not just give it out anyways?
The cruelty is the point
If ever it seems like there's not enough to go around, blame the people who have too much.
The issue is more complex than what is printed. There are shortages of workers at restaurants/bars and slaughter facilities. We need these children to get to work. /$
Damned freeloaders
But I'm sure she tried to get bezos to open Amazons corp office through massive tax breaks.
Starve her
GOP say silly things non stop.
She wants donations from big Agriculture firms and Nabisco. You may not know this but food stamps are corporate welfare for all the companies that make the cheap food poor people spend it on.
This is basic eugenism. What she says is that poor should not have kids as they can't afford them.
Worse. They're rejecting free federal money of $40 PER KID. For no reason at all except 'the money won't be there forever'
Republicans are literally starving children. For no reason.
Torturing children to own the libs
But also making it difficult to obtain birth control and abortions. Something doesn't add up here.
But they need the poor to have kids for the next generation of military service... Gotta keep them starving so MRE's look gourmet!
This is because the GOP is purposefully garbage at actually governing.
if you're a Conservative, little kids just don't work hard enough to deserve food
She's right all those small subsidies aren't going to fix anything it's just going to complicate the system. Minimum wage should be raised
UBI would be great for those who are working or not.
Yeah but all these small subsidizing plans that require people to fill in forms are a giant waste of time. Both on the governments side and the people demanding them.
It's sticking band aids on an open wound.
Just a generic UBI for everyone would indeed fix a lot of these issues but it would take a century to get there so raising minimum wage is a lot more realistic.
In the meantime though…
These clowns better be happy i am not a billionaire. I’d be sending a check to every damn household with kids in the state.
That's why you're not a billionaire
Billionaires don't spend their money. If they did, they wouldn't be billionaires.
They spend their money on investing in oil and gas companies, then buying lawmakers to write subsidies for oil and gas companies.
with all that going on, not surprising they find it impossible to care about the well-being of citizens.
Yeah right
$120m is all you need to give that same $40 to literally everyone in her state each month.
Article says that the program is estimated to cost Iowa $2,2 million, the rest covered on a federal level.
They can't find 2,2 million.
That's fuckin sad.
https://governor.iowa.gov/contact-office-governor
Loading them up on a bunch of HFCS from those Iowa corn fields will be great for them though I'm sure...
Oh, but it is. It's proven in the 12th economy of the world, why one state of the first economy of the world couldn't sustain it?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
“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.
Some state lawmakers, including Democratic Sen. Izaah Knox of Des Moines, quickly voiced their opposition to the decision.
“It’s extremely disappointing that the Reynolds administration is planning to reject federal money that could put food on the table for hungry Iowa kids,” Knox said in a statement.
States, territories and eligible tribal nations have until Jan. 1 to notify the Department of Agriculture of their intent to participate in the program this summer.
The original article contains 520 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Imagine the really awesome "lectern" you can buy with that much
Honestly, I don't get this. Call a spade a spade. Use words like "absolutely unconscionable". Use "inexcusable". Use words that get the gravity across of just how asinine and ABSOLUTELY deadly this will be. Mark my words, despite whatever safety nets exist in the state of IA, kids will starve to death because of this. Make a statement saying EXACTLY that, and point out that the blood will be on Governor Reynolds' hands.
Iowa is a barren field devoid of intellectualism so OF COURSE the election hinges on it
Another example of "once they're out of the womb, fuck 'em". Disgusting.
What a poverty state, I’d he embarrassed if I lived in a place that had so many poors or so little money that that’s not affordable
Quick, somebody call "Moms for Liberty" and get this fixed!
oh....
I see. Right. OK then, never mind.
You know what else does nothing for kids? Kim Reynolds. She’s, an arrogant, hypocritical, and ignorant douche baby.
Too bad those kids aren't Fetuses. Then Republicans might actually CARE about them!
Yeah, okay and just what are these supposed "long term solutions then you evil cunt? I'm sure she's spent every day in office trying really hard to tackle the problems of childhood obesity and low income families looking for this long term solution. Get wrecked you shithead
Her fucking salary and expenses are not sustainable.
She even looks evil.
If that’s not sustainable for Iowa then Iowa shouldn’t exist.
cue up sound bite in 6 months of her blaming federal democrats for not providing for hungry kids
It actually is extremely sustainable to provide stimulus to your economy that is 100% matched by the federal government. Her problem is that it helps the poor.
Beau of the fifth column made an excellent video on this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1AZfOfBHps
What a dumb slut.
Why is that your stance, Governor? Are there a lot of food-insecure children from low income families in your state?