OldLady
Diamond Member
- Nov 16, 2015
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I've been working with a lot of those people who lost benefits here in Maine. Quite a few were self-employed seasonal workers who do VERY well for part of the year and managed to collect food stamps in the off season by cleverly reporting their income. Not anymore, and that's good. They can save and budget like everyone else. The biggest obstacle where I live is (1) lack of agencies 'approved' for volunteering and (2) the fact that many, many poor people don't have a car. There is no public transportation here in our county which is twice the size of Rhode Island, not even a taxi. So what's happened is that our food banks are overwhelmed and our local schools ran lunch programs over the summer so kids would have at least one meal a day.Maine Drops 9000 From Food Stamps After They Refuse To Comply With Work Requirement
Republican Gov. Paul LePage recently began enforcing Maine’s volunteer and work requirements for food stamp SNAP recipients to keep their benefits. The end result was more than 9,000 non-disabled adults getting dropped from the program.
The rules prevent adults who are not disabled and do not have dependents from receiving food stamps for more than three months, unless they work at least 20 hours a week, participate in a work-training program, or meet volunteer guidelines for 24 hours out of the month. Any one of those three getting met will not result in the loss of their SNAP food benefits.
Liberals have sold government dependence so deliberately well, that even doing 24 hours of approved volunteer work a month for a capable adult became too much for more than 9,000 people. If it seems like I’m parroting these numbers again and again, you must realize the implications are staggering. Who in their right mind would turn down such a deal? Actually wanting a member of society to be productive in some reasonable way shouldn’t be too hard to meet!
Maine Drops 9000 From Food Stamps After They Refuse To Comply With Work Requirement -
The governor's changes sounded good; the thing that should have happened along with those changes is to address the obstacles keeping people from working in the first place. If other states want to try it, they should give some thought to what happens in more rural areas (if their state has large rural areas).