Along the Mississippi
Gov. Reynolds should get little credit for throwing a nominal amount of cash at a problem created by her party. Ed Tibbetts wrote about it on his Substack yesterday. Excerpt below.
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Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds would devote up to $1 million in state funds to food banks now that the Trump administration has stopped making payments from the food assistance program SNAP. The administration blamed the government shutdown for the lapse.
Reynolds’ PR department dutifully bragged about the governor’s largess in matching Iowans’ donations. But how generous is it, really?
That $1 million amounts to about $4 for every Iowan on SNAP. It covers less than a day of regular SNAP funding in Iowa.
The shame is that Reynolds could do so much more.
We spend $340 million per year on private school expenses.
The Republican flat tax scheme gives $1 million every year to just 15 millionaires.
Democrats in the state Senate encouraged the governor to tap into the $107 million in interest that has accumulated from Covid-related funds the federal government sent to the state years ago.
They also urged Reynolds and Attorney General Brenna Bird to back lawsuits seeking to push the Trump administration to live up to the law and use the more than $5 billion in SNAP contingency funds available to help these families while the shutdown persists.
They didn’t do that. In fact, Reynolds called the lawsuits “ridiculous” and a “waste of time,” according to KGAN-TV in Cedar Rapids.
After Reynolds made those comments, the plaintiffs actually won those lawsuits. Two federal judges, in separate cases Friday, ruled the administration was obligated to keep paying SNAP benefits.
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