The House just voted to drug test SNAP recipients

Poverty isn’t caused by a lack of character – it’s caused by a lack of money. Instead of demonizing poor people, let’s do more to build more industry, create more jobs, make minimum wage cover a basic cost of living, and encourage corporations to focus a little more on boosting middle-class wages, than just maximizing shareholder returns. Our middle class average wages already rank 27th among modern nations – and that’s after decades of us compromising to employers who told us cutting our wages is critical to competing in a global economy.

We Americans did our part to help our nation grow and prosper – or so we thought. After decades of allowing our wages to stagnate while corporate profits grew exponentially – along with corporate welfare payments, and corporate tax breaks – we, the middle class and poor people, have been left barely able to feed and shelter ourselves.

We gave them permission to be more greedy, and they used that greed to take away our dignity, to treat us with disrespect, and make us work even longer hours with fewer vacations and less benefits than anyone else in any industrialized (and even some “second world”) nations.

Higher wages might mean some individual companies can’t (or won’t) hire as many workers, but the overall increase in middle class wealth will help more people save more, buy more stuff, and open more businesses to hire more people who couldn’t get that lucrative position at Walmart.

I’d love to see more ideas and debate over policies that promote the general welfare – but this Congress is completely incapable of policy.

And regardless, back to the topic at hand, even if some of us want to continue thinking all poor people are completely responsible for their own circumstances, that still doesn’t justify allowing children to go hungry.

House Republicans today voted to let kids starve, if one of their parents smokes some weed.

The conservative “vision” apparent in all their proposals these days is so far removed from reality and our own history that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. But I do know, the America they want to create is something none of us would ever recognize.

You don’t let kids go hungry for any reason. Period.