Republicans Preying on People

I believe Hawk is calling for the reactivation of the CCC worker programs, RAB.

btw my current theory is that you are an American (were?) vietnam draft dodger who fled to Canada, and is wanted by the US military for prosecution. would you like to confirm or deny?

Do you ever look to see what the Republican Party is doing? Especially the Teaparty faction. It's criminal.

Do you ever look to see what the Republican Party is doing? Especially the Teaparty faction. It's criminal.

The conservatives dident support government work programs during the great depression. What makes you think they would support them now?

Rep. Steve Southerland (R-Fla.) departed the Capitol to address his most wary audience yet: the people whose government benefits he hoped to curtail.

“Stick to your talking points this time if you can,” said a staff member, handing him a sheet of those talking points minutes before they left for the event.

It’s too late to start being cautious,” Southerland said, folding the paper and leaving it on his desk. It was already late summer, and he hoped to pass the most significant food stamp overhaul in decades by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

The event was listed on his schedule as a “Poverty Tour,” and Southerland had invited a dozen Republican policy experts to join him. They boarded a bus provided by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and traveled across Washington to a job training center, where three homeless men idled outside. Southerland stood at the front of the bus to address his colleagues. He looked like the funeral director he had been before running for Congress in 2008 – shoes polished, suit pressed, eyes solemn, head bowed as if in prayer. “This is an important moment for us,” he said. If only his tough-love message could resonate with the unemployed, then maybe he could win over a divided Congress.

“What we are fighting for is a cultural shift,” Southerland told his colleagues on the bus. “The explosion of food stamps in this country is not just a fiscal issue for me. This is a defining moral issue of our time.”

Southerland’s food stamp proposal, which on Thursday the House narrowly voted to approve, would require able-bodied adults to work or volunteer at least 20 hours each week in order to receive government food assistance. “It’s the simple solution,” he said in March at a news conference introducing the idea. But in the months since, he has learned that no idea is simple in Washington, especially not one that would fundamentally alter a program that has tripled in size during the past decade, growing to support a record 47 million people at a cost of $80 billion each year.

In a divided Congress, few debates have been more fractious than the one over food stamps and few proposals have been as contentious as Southerland’s. Republicans say his idea would encourage people to find jobs, decreasing government spending while adding workers to the economy. Democrats say it would leave millions of the most vulnerable Americans hungry at a time when food insecurity is already approaching historic highs.

Southerland’s proposal passed the House despite receiving no Democratic support, as part of a bill that would cut 3.8 million people and $4 billion from the food stamp program next year