Food Stamps

LANCASTER - A Garrard County grand jury handed up an indictment Aug. 17 against Sherry Preston, 33, of 104 Woodland Ave. Preston is charged with making a false statement or representation about her household income to receive more than $1,800 worth of food stamps. The alleged crime occurred between May and November 2006. Preston's bond was set at $5,000 cash. She will be arraigned Sept. 21 in Garrard Circuit Court.

When Laura Matherly pulls up to the checkout with her groceries, she pays with her plastic card like so many other people do. But Matherly's card isn't a credit card ? it's an Electronic Benefits Transfer card, EBT for short. Matherly is a food stamps recipient, though no one gets actual stamps anymore. She said she is legally blind and supports herself and her son on a disability check. "Disability doesn't make ends meet," she said. "If there wasn't food stamps, I would have to do something to make ends meet.

The Kentucky Department of Education recently released the 2011-12 income and household size criteria for school meals program eligibility. The new schedule replaces the 2010-11 criteria. Each year, the federal government revises guidelines for school districts to follow when implementing free and reduced-price meals. All school districts offer free and reduced-price meals to students from eligible families. Studies show that children who eat breakfast and lunch have better attendance rates, longer attention spans and improved academic performance.

I am writing to offer my full support to State Rep. Lonnie Napier and his proposed House Bill 208, which would require drug testing for those seeking public assistance, food stamps, or help from the state medical assistance program. While I fully support the proper use of government assistance and aid to those in need, the abuse of government programs should not be tolerated. In the midst of this great recession, no one should be forced to support the bad decisions of others. Tax dollars should not be used to fund any drug habits.

Oh, the indignation at HB 208! Horrors! Horrors! We have a nation of makers and takers. Oh, there is a small percentage who need a hand up (not a handout), but if you do the research, you will find that it’s a perpetual and generational blight for the vast majority of welfare recipients. So many people in this nation just can’t seem to grasp the fact that every dime they take (the takers), someone else (the makers) had to go out and work so the takers could take it. The welfare fairy simply doesn’t come down and sprinkle welfare checks and food stamps to those who choose not to work for their necessities.

Dear Editor, I was shocked to hear Mike Harmon, in his debate with David Sparrow for state representative, say he was against raising the minimum wage for the poor wage earners in Kentucky. It's the same with Mike Harmon and most of the Republican Party clear back to the times of Dwight D. Eisenhauer. Give the working poor commodities, food stamps, C.C. camps and the barest living wage and expect him to be cheerful and happy with his circumstances. Baloney. I wonder if Mike Harmon would run for state representative for Kentucky's minimum wage?

Dear Editor: I really enjoy reading the newspaper about the migrants and their hard work. I've had quite a few friends that were migrants, and they were nice folks. But it appears the American workers are being discriminated against. We do extra work to make money and if we get food stamps, disability, social security, etc., we have to report it and get deductions from our wages. With this messed up deal, the migrants work and even send money to Mexico. Do they not pay taxes?

To the editor: Let's stay a "dry" county - no alcohol. Alcohol brings more spouse abuse and children abuse, more divorces, more rape, more robberies, speedings, no morals, more disease, more knifings. What I call for higher taxes for: more police, bigger jails for holding criminals, bigger court load, more public defenders, larger prisons for life, more bail, more social services for mental abuse, more medical cards, more food stamps, housing for abused children and women, unemployment.

A well-known Republican representative from Lancaster is at it again — picking on us, we the poor people eking out an existence on welfare. He is desiring a law to be passed requiring poor people to pass a drug test before receiving food stamps and other welfare benefits. Well why not, as they say, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. So now in the meantime let’s pass a law requiring every elected official to pass a drug test before they can hold elected office.

Dear Editor, Recently I went to Community Action in Stanford for some assistance. The woman told be to come back the first of May - like that's going to help now. The InterCounty Energy bills are out of hand. You sit in your house afraid to turn the heat up because you can't afford to pay the bill. You go for help and they tell you what they'll pay, maybe, but you can call two or three other places and they'll help. If you had money for phone calls and money for gas you wouldn't need to run all over for help.

School location complicates busing Dear Editor, Recently, articles were published about many hundreds of bus incidents, accidents that occur in-state, annually. Planning for schools may be as bad statewide as it is in this county. The site chosen for the new high school under construction is bad. All students, except some living in the southwest part of the county, will be forced through city traffic to reach the school. Travel time, bus time, will be increased for those who live in the extremities of the county.

A few days after the election, my husband and I were driving in a rural area of Kentucky when we passed a young woman standing in her front yard holding a Romney/Ryan sign. The house was small and needed a coat of paint. The yard was bare of landscaping and the car in the front was pretty beat up. This was not a wealthy family.   The look on the face of the woman was a mixture of disgust, sadness and disbelief. “How could this happen?,” it seemed to say. After all, she had been told that Romney couldn't lose.  As an Obama supporter, my first reaction was to laugh, but then I realized how poignant this sight was, how completely this woman had been duped.

California has Nancy Pelosi. Nevada has Harry Reid. Delaware has Joe Biden and here in Danville we have Eric Mount. Yet, they all seem to be singing from the same song book - “If the Republicans win the election the poor will lose all their health benefits and little old ladies will be thrown over cliffs in their wheelchairs.” Do these people really believe this nonsense?  In last week's letter, Mount predicted all sorts of doom for thousands of Kentuckians should Romney/Ryan win in November.

On Aug. 12, 2012, a story appeared in print about a couple in Manchester (Clay County), who were arrested after taking their 11-month-old baby to the Manchester Memorial Hospital, claiming that the child had choked on a piece of meat. To start with, most responsible parents know that 11-month-old children do not eat pieces of meat of a size sufficient to choke them. Then, an alert local law enforcement officer, sniffed the baby's breath and determined that the real reason for the child's breathing dilemma was most likely the result of inhaling toxic chemicals used to process methamphetamines.

At a school-board hearing to set the tax rate in August, Donna Fizer of Nicholasville held up a newspaper article about nearly 21 percent of Jessamine County children living in poverty in 2009, imploring the body not to raise the tax. Fizer will have an even stronger argument next year. After a 3-percent spike in child poverty from 2008 to 2009, the rate jumped nearly 3 percent again last year. A total of 2,905 children in Jessamine County lived in poverty in 2010 - 23.6 percent of that population - according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, released Tuesday.

What is poverty? In today's time it's no different than lower middle class. I have worked all of my life and, according to guidelines, I'm still in poverty. But there is a big difference. I don't let someone else support me. In poverty, you can receive up to $800 a month in food stamps, get 80 percent of your rent paid, get free medical care, help with your utilities, and now because you're poor, you can receive a free cell phone with 250 free minutes per month. Sounds like the poor do pretty well.

The Kentucky Department of Education recently released the 2011-12 income and household size criteria for school meals program eligibility. The new schedule replaces the 2010-11 criteria. Each year, the federal government revises guidelines for school districts to follow when implementing free and reduced-price meals. All school districts offer free and reduced-price meals to students from eligible families. Studies show that children who eat breakfast and lunch have better attendance rates, longer attention spans and improved academic performance.

This year, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida pushed through his state legislature a bill requiring that all welfare recipients be tested for illegal drugs. Their findings are very interesting. Approximately two in 100 of those persons tested showed evidence of illicit drug use. That compares with an approximate 8 percent rate in a randomly chosen sample of the Florida population at large. So, at this point the governor has proven that drug use in the welfare population is significantly lower than that of the general population, and the state of Florida is on the hook for the cost of thousands of dollars of unnecessary drug tests.

One of my pet peeves as an editor is having to remember the plethora of name changes for programs that are part of the bureaucratic morass known as the federal government. It may be a misperception, but it seems to me that in the past 20 years, there have been more new names invented for programs than in all the decades before, going back to the New Deal, when the welfare state was born and many of the programs were created. What really gripes me, though, isn't just that the names change, but that names that are simple, easy to remember and known by almost everyone have changed to long, ridiculously complex names that no one except government workers (and, I hope, some political reporters and copy editors)

I read the article in your newspaper about the legislation passed in Frankfort to add an amendment to the state constitution. Sounds great to me, and I will vote for it if it’s on the ballot in 2012, and I’m still around. But before I do, I want to write a letter addressing all the bleeding hearts out there, including that “doctor” the article refers to from California. For starters: Folks, Bambi’s gonna die, and there ain’t no getting around it. It may be that the bleeding hearts may very well be bled out from bleeding so much during the last century.