Priorities

"I call it misplaced priorities. How can you justify doing something like this, while at the same time giving people like Herb Kohl huge tax cuts?"
-Senator Herb Kohl on President Bush's proposed cuts to a senior food program

Misplaced priorities indeed. President Bush's budget wants to eliminate a program that provides free food to seniors on a tight budget. The program helps 5,ooo seniors here in Wisconsin alone.

The program provides a monthly food box with powdered milk, veggies, proteins like meat and peanut butter, juice, cereal, fruit, cheese and starches like pasta and potatoes. The Bush Administration would like to shift these seniors to $20 a month of food stamps because they say it will be easier to administer for the agencies that deal with this program.

There are two problems with this plan. One, the local groups, like the Hunger Task Force in Milwaukee, that distribute the food can get the individual seniors a lot more food than $20 in food stamps can buy because they can get food in bulk cheaper. That means the seniors in this program will have less food each month and will have to make some tough choices. Two, how many seniors do you know in the current generation of seniors that would take food stamps to the grocery store and use them? They are too proud to do that. I'm sure it is hard enough for them already to have to be in this program the way it is now.

No one wants to work their whole life and then have to get free food to make ends meet. They are faced with this because the high cost of heating their homes and skyrocketing prescription drug costs that they never could have foreseen while they saved for retirement have emptied their savings.

Let's not make their retirement any harder than it already is for them.