Plan only serves to patronize the poor

Several words came to mind when I considered the budget that President Trump submitted to Congress recently. One of them was “sanctimony.”

Sanctimony used to be synonymous with holiness, but in modern usage, it refers to “affected or hypocritical holiness.” So sanctimony is to holiness as self-righteousness is to righteousness, that is, the hypocritical version of a desirable attribute.

Thus, in the Trump budget, the generous act of helping other people get enough to eat provides an opportunity to criticize and patronize the poor for their bad food choices and to congratulate ourselves for making better choices than they do, even though our president’s favorite food appears to be Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Under the proposed plan, citizens who get food support from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would receive half of their benefits in the form of a “Harvest Box,” which would contain foods selected on the basis of their supposed nutritional value, as well as on their economic benefit to American farmers.

According to the New York Times, the “Harvest Box” was conceived by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue as part of a program to cut food assistance by $214 billion over the next decade. Perdue described it as “a bold, innovative approach to providing nutritious food to people who need assistance feeding themselves and their families—and all of it is grown by American farmers and producers.”

Budget director Mick Mulvaney was enthusiastic about the idea, comparing it to the Blue Apron grocery delivery service.

In practical terms, “Harvest Box” has a close-to-zero chance of approval. The idea was immediately dismissed by the Republican chairs of the agriculture committees in the House and Senate, and it was never seriously discussed in hearings. No one even bothered to calculate the logistical challenges and costs of putting boxes of food into the hands of the 46 million Americans who used SNAP last year.

No, instead of a serious policy proposal, “Harvest Box” feels more like a mean-spirited opportunity to stick a finger in the eye of people who are short on resources. It supports the myth of the “lazy poor,” whose poverty serves as testimony to their innate irresponsibility and untrustworthiness.

“Harvest Box” is an impractical version of other efforts—such as imposing work requirements and drug testing on recipients of public assistance—to generate more responsibility and better behavior in the poor. Accountability is a worthy goal, but efforts such as these serve to stigmatize and demean the poor while shifting blame for their plight in their direction rather than toward public policy that works to their disadvantage.

And such efforts always ignore data. For example, according to Forbes magazine, 77 percent of SNAP recipients are children, elderly or disabled non-elderly. And non-disabled adults between 18 and 49 who are living in a childless home can receive only three months of benefits during any three-year period, unless they are already working 20-plus hours per week.

In short, SNAP serves people who are having a hard time getting enough to eat in the richest country in the world. Sanctimonious restrictions on such programs may make us feel better about our responsibilities and obligations, but they also make it easier for candidate Mitt Romney to categorize 47 percent of Americans as “takers.” That simply isn’t true.

Here’s the point: As long as the increasingly small segment of our society that holds an increasingly large share of the money and power can keep the middle class’s anger and blame directed downward toward the poor rather than upward at rich, and as long as they can keep the rest of us convinced that the poor, rather than the rich, are draining our culture of its resources, we don’t need Russian agents working among us to sow hatred, discord and social fragmentation.

We’re quite capable of doing that, ourselves.