Stu Bykofsky: Bitter taste in Roxborough: Corbett's food-stamp plan

JOHN MANTON offers me a bowl of potato soup as I take a seat in his tight Roxborough home.

He's made a pot that will last for a week. It must. Manton's learned to stretch his food, a frugality demanded by the $37.25 worth of food stamps he receives weekly. He supplements that small amount with $20 from his meager savings.

Through no fault of his own, Manton's been unemployed for a year, and Gov. Corbett wants to snoop into his bank account before approving the food stamps that keep Manton from starving.

He's not the only Pennsylvanian living on the sharp edge of hunger. One in seven of our Delaware Valley neighbors relies on food stamps.

Corbett seemingly awakened one morning last fall and asked, "What can I do to make myself look heartless and damage the Republican brand?" On a radio show Wednesday, Corbett denied being heartless, but actions speak louder than words.

By his May 1 order, the Department of Public Welfare will begin means-testing Pennsylvanians to help thwart fraud and abuse, a problem that barely exists. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates the Quaker State fraud rate as an amazingly low one-tenth of 1 percent.

Under the policy, families with as little as $5,500 in assets - $9,000 for seniors or people with disabilities - would be barred from getting benefits, potentially cutting off tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians. At first, the minimum was going to be a ridiculous $2,000 for families and $3,250 for seniors, but howls forced the governor to raise the minimums.

The plan is still a pointless obscenity and Pennsylvanians now realize what's happening.

Saturday morning the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger hosts a 5K walk and run starting at the Art Museum to raise money for food banks and pantries. The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia is recruiting celebrities, politicians and community leaders to try to feed themselves for a week on $5 daily, the average Philadelphia food-stamp benefit.

A widower whose wife and only child were killed in a 1984 car crash, Manton, 64, sees means-testing as self-defeating and punishing.

Manton did all the right things. He went to college and earned a master's in library science from Drexel University; he was trained in cataloging and research, specialties that evaporated with the advent of computers.

His highest salary was $25,000 a year, and he then took lower-paying jobs out of necessity. He now applies for office jobs but can't land one, perhaps because they think he's too skilled, perhaps because they think he's too old. He's in a bind.

He has a shrinking nest egg. He lives on $195 a week in unemployment compensation, beneath the federal poverty line.

He has no TV, no car, no dishwasher, no cellphone. He uses 25-watt bulbs in his home to save electricity, keeps his thermostat at 58 degrees and wears sweaters indoors. Corbett needs to means-test him?

Manton's utility bills - light, heat, water, telephone - average $275 a month, his annual real estate bill is $2,211 and his home-insurance is $900 a year. Although fixed costs, they keep rising. He is struggling to make it to 65, when he'll collect $895 monthly in Social Security, but his jobless benefits will end before then. He faces a terrifying gap with no income.

If he puts aside money to bridge the gap and exceeds $9,000, his food stamps end. "It's an impossible catch-22," he says.

Corbett's policy seems to say, "We will help you with food - after we destroy you financially."

It is cruel, and fiscally unjustifiable, that Corbett serves cuts in Harrisburg while Manton eats potato soup in Roxborough.