So after we’ve given hundreds of millions of tax dollars to the Falcons and hundreds of millions more to the Braves, and while we’re trying to lure Boeing to Georgia with a giveaway package that perhaps totals in the billions, U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston steps up to suggest that if poor kids want a free lunch or breakfast at school, we ought to make them work for it.
Great. Maybe Kingston’s Senate campaign commercial will feature a bunch of poorly dressed, hungry fourth-graders with “I’ll Work For Food” signs draped around their necks. And by “a bunch,” I do mean a bunch. In Kingston’s congressional district alone, some 22 percent of children live below the poverty line. According to the Georgia Department of Education, some 1 million children statewide eat lunch at school either for free or at reduced prices. For too many of them, those are the only real meals they will get.
Are we really going to put brooms in the hands of more than 1 million kids? No, we’re not. Kingston was engaged in “signaling”, pandering to the sense among many voters that there’s nothing wrong with the national or Georgia economy that can’t be fixed by being meaner to poor people.
In other areas, though, that “signaling” is having real-life human consequence. Kingston and his fellow Republican House members have refused to extend benefits for the long-term unemployed, which means come next week, some 40,000 already-strapped Georgia households will lose most of their remaining income, with tens of thousands more affected in the coming weeks. Congressional Republicans are also insisting that food stamps be slashed, even as they increase subsidies for multi-millionaire cotton farmers, peanut farmers and others in Georgia and across the country.
Here in Atlanta, Gov. Nathan Deal continues to bar some 400,000 to 600,000 Georgians — most of them lower-income people with jobs that don’t offer health insurance — from participating in Medicaid even though the entire cost would be covered by the federal government for the first three years, declining gradually to a permanent federal share of 90 percent.
The result will be lost lives, closed hospitals and lost economic growth, but at least the right signals will have been sent to the right people.
And while our elected leaders like to brag about how much they’ve cut spending, they flee from its real-life consequences. Per capita state spending on education, for example, has fallen by 21 percent since 2008, according to Carolyn Bourdeaux of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, but state officials refuse any responsibility for the resulting plight of school districts.
And in an era of rising caseloads and families under pressure, we cut 900 child welfare case workers since 2007 and slashed state spending in child welfare by 27 percent (inflation adjusted), according to figures compiled by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. With numbers like that, it was inevitable that dead children would start showing up.
In the wake of those recent tragedies, Gov. Nathan Deal quickly announced the hiring of 500 additional child welfare case workers, which gives you an idea of just how dire the situation had become. Pictures of pretty little girls in princess costumes who end up starved, burned and dead in a trashcan have a way of focusing a politician’s attention.
The thing is, the damage caused by such budget cutting is probably just as severe in other important state agencies. It’s just harder to capture the impact in a single heart-rending picture.
