BALTIMORE, MD—Recently a friend sent me a story called “Don’t Feed the Animals.” All National Parks have signs warning against feeding the animals because the animals will get use to free handouts and lose their ability to gather food from their natural environment. The moral of the story was we should quit giving people food stamps because they will forget how to work for food. My friend is one of many hard-working job holders who feel government “handouts” are taxing him unfairly for people who are “too lazy to work.”
I used food stamps to feed my family several times over the past forty years so I looked up some facts to help talk about these ideas. Most of the people who get food stamps are in households where people work, they just do not earn enough money to pay their bills and food. One half of the people on food stamps (provided through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program called SNAP), are children. The capitalist economic collapse of 2008 eliminated millions of jobs that have not returned. Almost seven million people applied for unemployment insurance in the month of May, 2009. Almost one half of these people are still out of work. Each month three million more people apply for unemployment insurance because they have lost their jobs. The rising unemployment has pushed 50 million people, one out of seven of us, into poverty.
The real question is this: Are people not working because there are fewer and fewer jobs or because government and church handouts are making them lazy? Wake up and smell the coffee. We live under capitalism, a system where profit rules. It is more profitable in the short term to hire the robot. Just last month an assembly line robot was made available for only $26,000. This is less than it takes to hire a worker for a year. Under capitalism, we workers have to work to live. When robots take the jobs, it is the end of capitalism because the workers have no way to live.
When I moved to Baltimore in 1977 there were 15,000 shipyard, 50,000 steel worker and 6,000 vehicle building jobs. Today there are 600 shipyard, 2,000 steel worker and 600 vehicle assembly jobs. I cannot believe that anyone would trade a good job for $130 of food stamps.
How is a person going to live if there is no ‘good job’, one you can live on? If the unemployed are so lazy then why do they line up around the block every time a job with benefits has an opening? Food Stamps are not taking the job: robots, computers and capitalist greed are taking them.
Corporate profits have never been higher, corporate executives earn hundreds of millions and yet the corporations cannot make employment for all of us. Taxing corporations to provide help for the unemployed and poor is just the first step. Society must be reorganized to benefit everyone, where everyone can work, contribute and live well.
