From Charles M. Blow’s New York Times column:

Not only is our education system being starved of investment, but many of our children are literally too hungry to learn.

A survey of kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers released this week by Share Our Strength, a nonprofit that seeks to end child hunger, found that 6 in 10 of those teachers say “students regularly come to school hungry because they are not getting enough to eat at home,” and “a majority of teachers who see hunger as a problem believe that the problem is growing.”

The report quotes a teacher in the Midwest as saying, “The saddest are the children who cry when we get out early for a snow day because they won’t get lunch.”

It is in this environment that Representative Paul Ryan proposes huge cuts to food assistance programs. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, Ryan’s plan “includes cuts in SNAP (formerly known as the food stamp program) of $133.5 billion — more than 17 percent — over the next 10 years (2013-22), which would necessitate ending assistance for millions of low-income families, cutting benefits for millions of such households, or some combination of the two.”

Representative Todd Akin, he of “legitimate rape” infamy, even said earlier this month that the federal government should stop financing the National School Lunch Program altogether. That man is just a font of humanity.