What are your views of the food-stamp program and the proposed cuts to it?

In a time when we passionately debate whether to increase the taxes of the rich or only the super-rich, how easy it is to tax the very poor — women, men and children, white, black and Hispanic — by cutting society’s aid to them. It is easy in part because, unlike Medicare or Social Security, no officeholder or candidate will point to his or her parent or child or grandchild who depends on Food Stamps. Indeed, most of us who write here cannot either, thank God. And there is no super-PAC insisting that the program continue as is.

Is it immoral or short-sighted to cut food stamps in a time of increased need? Let’s just say that every major scripture and religious tradition I know of speaks of feeding the poor.

But the debt and the deficit are real concerns. A thought — how about withdrawing from Afghanistan a few weeks earlier than planned? The proposed budget for that war in FY2013 was $88 billion — not to mention the cost in life, limb, mind and spirit. Leave the war early and feed the poor. It might be, in moral and religious terms, a “win-win” solution.