Jackson Free Press

A few days ago, Mississippi's Republican congressional delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of cutting the federal food-stamp program, aka the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to the tune of $40 billion over the next 10 years.

"Nobody wants to see children go hungry because their parents cannot or will not provide for them," Rep. Alan Nunnelee, R-1st District, told The Hattiesburg American. "Unfortunately, the program has grown out of control, doubling over the past five years. Even as the economy has slowly recovered, spending has not declined."

In other words, we're not picking on people, Nunnelee rationalizes; it's the wasteful government program we're cutting—as if actual, flesh-and-blood people will not be hurt. Of course, poor people are easy targets—they're not campaign contributors or lobbyists, after all.

Once the party of "No," national Republicans now seem to be becoming the party of plain garden-variety mean and nasty.

Nunnelee is accurate that the federal food-stamp rolls have increased—from 26 million in 2007 to almost 48 million now—not quite doubling over six years. Last week, Darrin Webb, Mississippi's state economist, provided a huge clue to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee about why that's happening. In Mississippi, the state added 25,000 jobs in the past year, but Webb believes most of those jobs are low paying, part-time or temporary.

Mississippi isn't alone with its lousy jobs picture. Economists say that while income for the top 1 percent of Americans increased by 31 percent between 2007 and 2012, incomes for the poor and lower middle-class—the bottom 40 percent—have fallen by 6 percent. Ordinary working people who lost jobs during the Great Recession replaced them with whatever they could find and, on average, those jobs pay less and may not provide full-time, permanent employment.

Food stamps are hardly extravagant. In Mississippi, the average monthly benefit in 2012 was $123.76 per person, a little more than $4 a day—not exactly a lobster-and-caviar food budget. Children, the elderly and the disabled make up almost two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries, and most of the rest are adults with children.

SNAP is one of the nation's safety-net programs that helps keep families from falling off the edge into poverty. In Mississippi, the proposed cuts would affect about 52,000 people out of roughly 670,000 recipients—folks with the least economic resilience because, for them, every financial setback brings them closer to disaster.

"There are lots of folks who will claim we don't care about the poor," Rep. Steven Palazzo, R-4th District, told The Hattiesburg American. "That's simply not true."

What Palazzo, Nunnelee and the rest of the Republican cabal in Washington fail to understand is that it's nigh impossible to see it any other way.