Schakowsky cuts food stamps, offers earmark

Even as she offered a $250,000 earmark to a local food pantry, Jan Schakowsky voted for $12 billion in cuts to the federal food stamps program earlier this month. Aside from the inherent wrong of earmarks, which allow politicians to treat public money as their own, the gesture is simply pathetic: the earmark is 48,000 times smaller than the amount of funding Schakowsky voted to cut from a program that feeds millions of Americans.

The number of Illinois residents on food stamps has risen nearly 12 percent in the past year. The stimulus, which Schakowsky claims was so wildly successful, did little to help them–except expand the food stamps program. Suddenly, to fund irresponsible state budgets, Schakowsky found something in the stimulus bill to cut–a program that helps the poorest and most vulnerable among us to afford basic necessities. It’s a disgrace.

The local food pantry is a worthy cause. Yet we ought not resort to slipping earmarks into transportation bills to pay for them, as my opponent has done. The same spending bill that Schakowsky used to fund the food pantry was also used by Luis Gutierrez to give $1 million to the National Council of La Raza for “Capitalization of a Revolving Loan Fund to be Used for Nationwide Community Development Activities.”

That is nothing more than a handout to a political lobby group. It is a typical example of the kind of corruption that earmarks allow. There are many worthy causes, and if federal funding is to be spent on them–which is increasingly in doubt–we should weigh them openly and fairly, not in the corrupt earmark process. And a $250,000 earmark cannot possibly make up for $12 billion in cuts to food stamps in the midst of a deep recession!