Florida Republican Socialists Piss Off Los Angeles Over Food Stamps

Florida Sen. Ronda Storms is causing an uproar all the way to L.A. -- as seen in today's Los Angeles Times -- with her proposal to forbid Florida food stamp recipients from using the program money to buy junk food.

Storms' bill was approved by the Senate Committee on

Children, Families, and Elderly Affairs, a result of concern over the

health of poor children in particular, she claims. That, and it's just

not fair: "If we're going to be cutting services

across the board," she said, "then

people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies,

without their sodas."

And yet. According

to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of

Agriculture, almost 1 million individuals who are eligible for SNAP in

Florida have not applied for assistance, which translates to $417.3 million in funding for food assistance that goes

unused.

When a fellow legislator pointed out that if passed, Storms' legislation would prohibit a mother from buying her kid a birthday cake with food stamps, she said, "They can have cake. You can buy flour, eggs, and sugar, and that makes a cake. I make my kids their own cakes."

The L.A. Times rails against this "socialistic" legislation in today's editorial.

"The notion that poor people have

any more time to cook from scratch than other Americans who rely on

prepared supermarket 'junk' food is clearly absurd, and infantilizing

them by restricting their choices in this way is demeaning." The paper

is critical of the Big Brother approach over providing nutritional

information.

Florida joins California, Illinois, and a handful of states in states trying to restrict food stamp purchases. Forty-six million Americans were on food stamps in 2011, up from 26 million in 2008.