When did education and work become bad things?

Why would anyone in a country built on hard work and self-reliance argue that able-bodied adults age 18 to 59 who don’t have dependents shouldn’t either work 20 hours a week or get 20 hours of education or training?

Isn’t this a country built on improving your lot in life? And yet there are those who are fighting that exact requirement in the U.S. House of Representatives’ proposed version of the farm bill to get SNAP benefits.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is a food assistance program that aids millions of low-income families and individuals. It costs taxpayers around $70 billion a year. Households are eligible for SNAP if their net monthly income falls below the poverty line; the amount they receive monthly depends on the number of people in the house, the amount of money they spend on utilities and rent, and expenses such as child care and medication.

And if they are in good health with no young children at home, why shouldn’t they be required to work at least part time or get schooling or training to pull themselves out of poverty?

Economist James Ziliak, founding director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky, argues that “we don’t really have the compelling evidence to say that these work requirements (actually) work” to get people out of poverty. That would lead you to believe the alternative is to have healthy adults not working or getting an education because … others are doing it for them?

A better argument is made by Robert Doar, resident scholar in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who says, “The increased attention to employment for nonworking recipients of food stamps would help those families and is more likely to lead them out of poverty than to keep them in poverty. … Increased work, as a result of work requirements, could lead to less deep poverty, not more. … A lot depends on the economy, and right now the economy is very strong.”

It is. The national unemployment rate is 3.9 percent. Folks who had given up on looking for a job are back in the market, with 600,000 joining the ranks in June. The national news is full of employers saying they can’t find enough people to hire — NBC reported this week that a record 6.7 million jobs are open in the United States and that nearly one-third of small businesses can’t fill their openings. And The Washington Post argues that “when previously idle people return to, and stay in, the labor force, they can acquire new skills and enhance their capacity to take on employment in the future.”

And yet Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. and ranking member of the Senate Agricultural Committee, says, “We know the conference committee is going to be a wild and woolly debate as we go forward,” because the Senate has no work requirements in its version of the farm bill.

Since when is expecting healthy, able folks to get an education and/or work cause for debate, much less a wild and woolly one? SNAP, like other safety net programs, was supposed to help folks out of a tough spot, not trap them in one. Americans should know better than anyone there’s nothing wrong with getting an education and honest work — and asking folks to do either in return for taxpayer-funded benefits isn’t asking too much.