Molly Ivins December 2

AUSTIN — Numbers, numbers. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison now has $4 million stockpiled in her war chest for the election of 2000. According to published reports, she raised more than $1.9 million in the first six months of this year for a race that will not take place for another three and half years. Through the end of June, Hutchison had raised more money than any other senator, including 30 colleagues who are up for re-election next year, according to The Dallas Morning News.

On the other hand, Hutchison and Sen. Phil Gramm were not among the six Republicans who last week urged President Clinton to pressure Congress to restore food stamps to poor legal immigrants, particularly to the disabled, the elderly and children. Even though Texas is among the hardest-hit of all the states by this cut-off, neither Hutchison nor Gramm favors granting any help to legal immigrants. Texas has 121,000 legal immigrants who are no longer eligible for food stamps because of the welfare "reform" bill. Of these, 28,000 are seniors or handicapped, and about 13,000 are children.

Six weeks after the seniors and handicapped had their food stamps cut off, Gov. George W. Bush changed his mind and set aside $18 million to help them out, after food banks in the Rio Grande Valley reported that they were swamped. Bush said the federal government was shirking its responsibility, but neither Hutchison nor Gramm is willing to help move the feds.

If you divide $4 million by 13,000, it comes to $307, which would be enough to cover food stamps for all those kids for about four months, by my figuring. Just a thought. Not that we expect Hutchison actually to do such a thing. Why should she? They're not her kids. And I bet that none of her contributors is a handicapped, elderly, legal immigrant or a poor child. What do they expect? You don't feed the fund-raising kitty, you don't get the votes. That's how politics works now.

It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to get something like the $50 billion special loophole for tobacco companies in the last budget deal. You have to give as much as the telecommunications industry in order to write the laws affecting you yourself. We all understand that's how the game is played now. Nobody holds it against Hutchison or Gramm. Except I'd just as soon not hear either one of them carry on about how much they care about "the children of Texas" any time soon.

The Dec.

8 issue of The Nation contains a report, "Hunger on Main Street," on the growing strain on food banks. "Last month, we suddenly had a ton of young singles," said one volunteer. "I thought we were seeing the tip of the iceberg headed toward our Titanic." Childless, unemployed adults are now limited to three months of food stamps in three years. In Portland, Ore., in the area of single-room-occupancy hotels, the number of singles coming to food banks has jumped by 50 percent.

Emergency food demands are also running high in rural areas. Christine Valdimiroff, president of Second Harvest, a national umbrella organization for food banks and soup kitchens across the nation, says, "Poverty is increasing at a faster rate outside the urban areas."

In addition to cutting off food stamps to legal immigrants and to childless adults, the welfare "reform" bill also reduces food stamps to families. Among those most direly affected are the working poor.

Bill Minutaglio of the Morning News, who has done a consistently excellent job of covering the effects of welfare deform in Texas (not a subject that many other papers here have followed at all), wrote a wrenching report from the Valley on Nov. 9. It includes the following item of unintentional hilarity: David Beshear, spokesman for the Texas Workforce Commission, opined: "I'm not sure that welfare reform ever envisioned the problems we have in the Valley. It's a tremendous challenge to put people into jobs where there are no jobs."

Yo!

But precisely because conditions in the Valley are so drastic (18 percent unemployment in Hidalgo County), they tend to obscure the effects of the new law on Texans in other parts of the state. The media live in a state of denial about poverty in this country that's just as acute as any denial by an alcoholic, so it is dangerous to foster the easy dismissal, "Oh, it's just a bunch of people who can go back to Mexico" (a phrase actually used in some recent discussions on the subject). Gramm's endlessly repeated mantra that immigrants should come here "for work, not welfare" is one of those pat put-downs that prevents us from seeing what is actually happening. Obviously, most of the working poor are not immigrants at all, and even those who are legal immigrants pay their taxes just like everybody else.

This is not one of those stories like Afghanistan or Bosnia that's too far away for you to care or do anything about; if you volunteer just one day at a local food bank, you'll see what's happening for yourself. And since this is the season when many of us donate to local food banks, please keep in mind that baby food is especially welcome.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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