Kansas Governor Justifies Kicking 15,000 People Off Food Stamps

BY ALAN PYKE APR 25, 2016 11:50 AM

For over five years now, Kansas has served as an economic policy experiment for anti-tax, small-government conservatives. Their lab work is costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars, crippling public service budgets, and making life harder for low-income families without reducing the state’s poverty rate at all.

With his political star beginning to tarnish, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) came to Washington on Wednesday to discuss his poverty policies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. At one point, the embattled governor justified his policy of forcing people off of food stamps if they can’t find a job by likening low-income and jobless people to lazy college students.

The event was convened around a policy he pioneered: Reinstating a rigid 20-hour-per-week work requirement that federal law allowed him to waive because unemployment was still high at the time in his state. The rules are duplicative — federal law requires the able-bodied adults targeted by the move to accept reasonable job offers at all times, even when a weekly work-hours waiver is in place — and run counter to a lot of policy thinking about how best to get jobless food stamps recipients back to work.

“You probably went to college. You had a lot of papers you had to write. When do most people do their papers in college? My guess is most of you, if I polled you, you would say the night before it was due,” Brownback said. “That’s just kind of who we are as people. And the work requirement is much the same thing.”

When ThinkProgress asked Brownback how one person’s decision to write a paper is equivalent to a second person deciding to offer her a job, he insisted that jobless Kansans can keep their food stamps just by applying for jobs or enrolling in state work training systems.

But that’s not really how his food stamps policy works.

Brownback was the first of several governors to decide to reinstate a hard and fast 20-hours-per-week work requirement for able-bodied adults with no dependents. The Kansas economy was still in rough enough shape that federal law allowed Brownback to waive those rules, as nearly every state had done during the Great Recession.

Read more
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2016/04/25/3772113/brownback-aei-food-stamps-college-paper/