Pennsylvania to impose asset test for food stamps

[caseymoz]

87. You have to eat your 2002 Toyota Corolla to qualify for food stamps?

This is the old Republican complain: "The poor just aren't pathetic enough. Too many have refrigerators and TV's. They haven't lost everything, yet."

I'm curious if Repubs fantasize that they'll be more humane as soon as the 99 percent are living in mud huts and eating newspaper from landfills. Obviously, GOP just need more time to accomplish this; they're working hard on it. Somehow, I doubt the poor will qualify for help even then. I think the wealthy will just impose caste system and write us off as subhuman.

So, is PA ready to see people starve due to this decision?

And what will PA do then? Does the legislature have a "safety-net" of their own, a contingency plan, in case their suspicions about gougers are proved paranoid and their faith in free market wildly exaggerated, and so they starve people instead of motivating them?

The limit on the car value is baffling. What of a person with a $5,000 car? Are you supposed to certify that you ate it first to qualify for real food? Would PA want the owner to sell it or trade down to a less reliable car, thus decreasing their chances of getting a job? That car could be the one advantage that they have that digs them out. And after the person sells the car at a cut-rate, since the states obvious presumption is that they'll be buying food with the proceeds, would PA give them food stamps for a longer, or perhaps indefinite period since they crippled the family's ability to have a breadwinner, or even travel for necessities?

And what does the car somebody bought two years prior to going poor have to do with it? If a person is in trouble, it should be good that they still have some advantage, some to help dig them out, or help them deal.

For people who hate communism, this is the most irresponsible excuse for creating a famine since Josef Stalin's.