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When the U.S. House of Representatives passed a $26 billion jobs bill last month that supporters say saved 300,000 jobs across the country, including 4,900 Ohio teacher positions, it was partially paid for by cutting food stamp payments by $12 billion, beginning in 2014. This at a time when food stamp use hit a record of 40.8 million Americans receiving the assistance in May, including 1.6 million in Ohio and 9,945 in Athens County.
Jack Frech, director of Athens County Job & Family Services, said that a lot of working-poor families end up getting hurt by decisions such as this.
"(Legislators) will get away with that because they know there is no political constituency for poor people," he said. "(The poor) don't donate to political campaigns. Nobody (that has any money) lobbies on their behalf."
Frech pointed to the recent "Dateline NBC" program featuring poverty in Athens County and showing many residents asking for assistance.
"This is how our leaders are answering these pleas for help, by taking food away from poor families who already do not have enough food to make it through the month," he said. "If the president and Congress feel there is somehow 'extra' money in the food-stamp program, they need to expand benefits and eligibility rules so that families do not have to depend on food pantries to feed their children."
Both Congressmen who represent areas of Athens County U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, D-St.Clairsville, and U.S. Rep. Zack Space, D-Dover voted in favor of the jobs bill.
Frech pointed out that Gov. Ted Strickland, who himself grew up in poverty, said he would never support cuts in food programs. And yet, he added, Strickland advocated the legislation that did so.
"To me, that just shows that when push comes to shove the people who are going to be protected in the budget are already politically protected people who have money, people who can defend themselves, people who can lobby, people who contribute to political campaigns." Frech said.
Frech said he is a strong believer in the importance of education because it helps people be better parents, be better citizens and make better choices.
"The reality is, at the ground level, that they're fighting over the same money to pay for education as they are to help these families survive," he said. "But you can't learn, you can't do anything, unless your basic needs are met first."
He said poor children are so focused on day-to-day survival that by the time they get to school they aren't going to be able to be educated.
"You have to fix the family problem first, so these kids are able to be educated," he said. "We have a struggle every two years in the budget over money for education versus money going directly into the pockets of these poor people. And education people are better organized."
Frech said education has more lobbies, unions and organizations to promote their interests than the poverty-stricken have, so education wins the money every time.
"That's just a really unfortunate dynamic out there," he said. "We know that in order for these people to get living-wage jobs they need to be educated... But we also know they have these basic needs that need to be met to be able to get an education."
THIS IS A SITUATION FAMILIAR to Cindy Birt, administrator of the Athens County Family & Children First Council.
She said Friday that the state of Ohio is very good at funding programs that will benefit a child, such as preschool and the like, but then it fails to adequately help the child's family.
"So they might have daycare, but they don't have adequate housing, food (and/or) clothing to have a better quality of life," she said.
Poor people can't guide their own destiny because they aren't a voting bloc with any organization, she noted, so their needs aren't represented the same.
She said that on a public-policy level the country needs to first get back to the basics in addressing poverty.
"You want to build a quality of life for every individual," she said, "and that would be to establish minimum guidelines for public assistance, food stamps, health care... nutrition, wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, things like that."
From there, resources can be built to support these basic needs by establishing daycare, adequate public transportation and so forth.
Massive amounts of money go toward rehabilitation for people after problems arise, Birt said, instead of investing in the family while a given child is still young enough to prevent those problems from coming up in the first place.
"I get a little tired of putting out hundreds of thousands of dollars in local community resources for problems we didn't help the family deal with when it would have been a lot cheaper and easier to do so," she said.
Frech also laid out some suggestions to public policymakers including possibly creating public works projects that allow Americans who are otherwise unemployed to earn assistance. He mentioned renovation of housing projects, assistance to the elderly, building low-income housing and work in public parks.
"There are a lot of things that people could do out there that improve the community," he said. "There are a lot of different things that are more labor intensive that we should be hiring people to do, instead of bailing out the banks for $700 billion. Could you imagine if we had taken $700 billion and created public jobs out there for people to fix their communities up?"
Frech said that cash welfare in the national budget totals between $20 and $24 billion, while food assistance totals $70 to $80 billion. With the $700 billion bailout of the banks, Frech asked what that says about this country's priorities.
"You could have spent half of what they spent on the banks and made a massive, massive improvement in the lives of real people," he said. But again, he stressed, it goes back to political power in the form of lobbyists and campaign donations, which banks have to rely on, but the poor don't.
The largest amount of government money addressing poverty, Frech said, is in Medicaid, which provides health care for poor people. But all of those funds end up in the pockets of Medicaid providers, who have powerful lobbyists.
"They always talk about how huge the Medicaid budget is," he said. "Well, it's not because so many people are getting services. We pay the doctors, hospitals, Medicaid providers and health insurance companies a bagillion dollars. And they get out there and lobby for increases for themselves. And (the government) dumps millions or billions more into Medicaid and they say we're doing this for poor people. Well, kind of, sort of, maybe, but not really."
While profits increase for the doctors, hospitals, providers and health insurance companies, he said, services remain the same for those receiving the assistance.
But there still are some lobbies out advocating on behalf of those in poverty. In Ohio, these include the Ohio Empowerment Coalition and the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks.
The Ohio Empowerment Coalition website states that the group is made up of grassroots groups from across the state of Ohio that have united to get the voices of low-income people heard by policymakers. The OEC has membership from Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, southeast Ohio, Cleveland, Toledo and other areas.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks states its mission as providing food and other resources to people in need and pursuing areas of common interest for the benefit of these people.
Locally, the Second Harvest Foodbank of Southeastern Ohio is a large warehouse operation that receives surplus food donations from major food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers and then channels this food to charitable feeding organizations throughout 10 counties in southeast Ohio including Athens.
This is the fourth article in a series focused on working people facing financial hardship in Athens County. This is the story of residents who have had to take on low-wage jobs to make ends meet, and the difficulties they face. This story focuses on the public policy paradox of education competing with poverty-assistance programs for funding when both play an important role in addressing this issue.
A future article in this series will feature area government leaders discussing these public policy issues.
