Kansas House tells poor people to work more hours. Maybe they should try it. | Opinion
The Kansas House of Representatives thinks persons ages 50-59 should have to work at least 30 hours a week to get food assistance.
I respectfully submit they ought to try it themselves sometime before accepting their government checks.
While lawmakers do put in longer hours at the end of session, like this week, most of the session proceeds at a much more leisurely pace.
Let’s take a typical week of the Legislature for example. I randomly chose March 20 through March 24.
I went back to the video record of that week and tallied up how much time they spent on the House floor. It was to six hours, 33 minutes for the entire week. And, an hour and eight minutes of that was ceremonial, honoring high school athletes and whatnot.
Legislators do have committee work, some more than others. Some committees meet regularly, others rarely. The committee meetings in our test week averaged an hour or so, so let’s credit 10 hours a week for that.
There are partisan caucus meetings on some mornings, where lawmakers get briefed on pending legislation and the party’s positions on it. That runs about half an hour to an hour. Those aren’t recorded, so let’s give them a generously estimated four hours for that activity for the week.
It adds up to about a 20-hour work week, not counting lobbyist lunches and evening receptions.
Some lawmakers put in more time than that, but there are a lot that don’t.
And they all took advantage of the Friday in our test week, one of the frequent “pro-forma” Fridays at the Capitol.
Pro-forma is a Latin term meaning, “nobody shows up, but everybody gets paid.” In this case, that’s $245.66 a day — salary plus expense allowance — enough to feed a displaced older worker for three weeks.
It’s like if one guy showed up and clocked in everybody at the factory for a whole day. Try that at your job and see how long you get to keep it.
As the regular session ends, lawmakers have been working extra hours. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Bills are being constantly and hastily combined, rewritten, renumbered, and gutted and replaced, in a live-action demonstration of Brownian movement that brings to mind that famous Nancy Pelosi quote: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.”
The final “legislative day” of this regular session began Thursday morning and it was still going on — no end in sight — when I went to bed at 3:30 a.m. this morning.
It’s like watching 165 high school students who started working on their team semester project the night before it’s due.
So they’ve got one hell of a nerve telling impoverished 50-59 year olds to work 30 hours a week or starve.
It flies absolutely in the face of the experience of being an older worker in the year 2023.
Ask yourself this: In your own experience, how many people do you know who voluntarily left the workforce for a life of poverty in their 50s, versus how many were laid off or pushed out to make way for younger and cheaper workers?
The bill at hand, House Bill 2140, requires those 50- to 59-year-olds to be assigned to job training if they can’t cobble together 30 work hours a week. That seems like pretty much a waste of everyone’s time and money, because who’s going to hire a novice carpenter, auto mechanic or computer programmer in their 50s?
And please don’t tell me they can just go flip burgers.
If they do, they’ll make just enough money to lose their health coverage, because the bozos who run the Legislature steadfastly refuse to close the gap between too much income to be eligible for Medicaid and too little to qualify for Obamacare.
In legislative hearings, HB 2140 was opposed by the Kansas Department for Children and Families, the Association of Area Agencies on Aging and Disabilities, the AARP and a host of food banks and charities.
Its sole proponent is the Florida-based Opportunity Solutions Project, a Koched-up front group that works to make the poor more miserable to please its billionaire donors.
It’s a couldn’t-be-more-stark demonstration of who our elected “representatives” actually listen to.
HB 2140 has been sent over to the Senate, where on Tuesday it was referred to the Committee on Public Health and Welfare.
May that committee live up to its name, and let HB 2140 rot forever like the garbage that it is.
