Maine Has Kicked 6,500 People Off Of Food Stamps So Far This Winter

[sheshe2]

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R)

CREDIT: AP

snip

Gov. Paul LePage (R) decided last year to prematurely reinstate tougher eligibility rules requiring food stamps recipients to work. The state agency that maintains SNAP in Maine launched the change in October, and reports that 6,500 of the state’s roughly 215,000 SNAP beneficiaries had been booted from the program as of the end of 2014, WGME’s investigation found.

A Maine official portrayed the decision as “complying with federal requirements” in an interview with the station, but the federal government offered to waive those requirements for Maine and 36 other states back in May. In those 37 states, economic conditions are so bad that the federal government invited state officials to suspend the work requirement that usually applies to able-bodied adults without dependents who want SNAP benefits. When the economy is healthy and jobs are plentiful, a person with no disability and no one to look after must demonstrate that they are working or in job training at least 20 hours a week in order to get food stamps for more than 90 days in any three-year period. If economic conditions are dire, though, federal officials allow state administrators to waive the work rules for SNAP.

Three of Maine’s 16 counties, home to about 100,000 of its 1.3 million residents, are designated “labor surplus areas” by federal labor market monitors. That means there is a serious imbalance between the number of people willing to work and the number of jobs available — an imbalance that stripping away food assistance will do nothing to correct.

snip

Similar decisions by political leaders in Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, Indiana, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Delaware have put tens of thousands more people on the chopping block. Two governors who have exited the SNAP waiver program early are facing lawsuits. New Mexico Gov. Susanna Martinez (R) decided to reconsider her work requirements push in light of a court challenge, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) is being accused of violating his poorest citizens’ civil rights by allowing waivers to continue in rural, mostly-white counties but ending them in the urban counties that house most of his state’s minority population.

Read More http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/01/21/3613618/lepage-snap-waivers/

[shenmue]

1. Cheap bastards

Mean-spirited, tiny-minded, Social Darwinist cretin.

[atreides1]

5. You mean the voters too?

Because those voters that supported these people are just as mean-spirited and tiny-minded...actually the voters are worse!

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

2. GOP official position is kill the poor...there is historical precedent for this...

[Pacifist Patriot]

3. Would it be putting to fine a point on it to refer to him as a mass murderer?

At the very least an attempted mass murderer.

[grasswire]

4. his buttons are nearly popping off his shirt over his belly

Looks like he is eating all the food he's taking away from poor children.

[closeupready]

6. He's high-fiving because this means more food for him and his cronies there.