Kansas Governor Likens Destitute Food Stamps Recipients To Procrastinating College Kids

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.”

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