EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, the Opinion page adds former Northampton Mayor Clare Higgins as a regular monthly columnist. Her column will appear on the fourth Saturday of the month.

NORTHAMPTON - I have been glued to the coverage of the Republican primary debates over the last few weeks. It has been fascinating to watch the candidates try to differentiate themselves from each other by coming up with even more new and exciting ways to denigrate President Obama.

I have also been interested in their straight-faced defense of current tax policies that benefit the rich while vilifying programs that help put food on poor people's tables.

I can dismiss the characterization of President Obama as a socialist (as do most real card-carrying socialists) and I am not worried that he wants to turn us into a European social welfare state that would drain all individual ambition out of us.

But I am taken aback by the description of Obama as the "food stamp" president. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich has repeatedly used this characterization to link the president with what Gingrich seems to think is a program for people who don't want a job.

What he has been saying is, "More people are on food stamps today because of Obama's policies than ever in history. ... And so I'm prepared if the NAACP invites me, I'll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps."

In fact, the first "food stamp president" was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He understood that a system to distribute food to those in need benefited farmers, grocers and the people that received assistance. The original food stamp program was under the Department of Agriculture, where it remains today.

Renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2008, the program grew by 14.7 million participants during the Bush administration. During the Obama years, the increase has been an additional 14.2 million.

There are a number of reasons for the growth in SNAP, including the increased outreach done by the states since 2000 and the massive economic downturn that began in 2007, causing the highest unemployment rates since the early 1980s (43 percent of all unemployed workers have been out of work for more than half a year; the previous post-World War II high was 26 percent in 1983).

More recently, an unprecedented string of hurricanes, tornadoes and floods devastated people's lives and allowed them to qualify for SNAP benefits.

Who receives SNAP benefits? Well, 48 percent of the beneficiaries are children; 8 percent are over 60; 31 percent are disabled. And 41 percent lived in a household with earnings from a job - the so-called "working poor." Only 10 percent of households that receive SNAP benefits receive "welfare."

If you are a single mother with three children working full time at Staples as an associate, you might earn $2,080 per month. That could qualify you for a SNAP benefit of $1.89 per day per person to spend on food. If you are an elder living on $1,177 per month from Social Security, with prescriptions that cost you $243 per month, you could receive $69 in SNAP benefits each month. The majority of people who have qualified for SNAP through Community Action are working.

Why has Newt Gingrich made SNAP a target?

Well, it certainly makes for a better sound bite than "My tax plan cuts taxes for the top 0.1 percent by 2.9 million and I'll reduce the corporate tax from 35 percent to 12.5 percent." Or, "I support personal savings accounts as the fix for Social Security!" Instead, he perpetuates the myth that people choose to be poor and that others, by virtue of their hard work alone, have succeeded in our society.

Every day, across our region, people get up and go to work in jobs that don't pay enough to live on. CNAs, janitors, grocery clerks and childcare providers work hard to care for our parents and our children, to clean our workplaces and to sell us the food that we enjoy.

Every day, seniors have to decide whether to buy medications, heat or food. More than 20 percent of the households in Franklin and Hampshire counties live on less than $25,000 per year. Their reality is not the reality that is being argued on debate stages or in Congress.

To question why our tax code favors those with the most money is not class warfare or the "politics of division and envy," as Speaker John Boehner has said. To support programs like SNAP is not to promote a "lifetime of dependency," as Gingrich has said. Americans want to know that everyone is paying a fair share and that we are not the kind of country that lets people go hungry.

We deserve a serious discussion about these matters, not buzz words calculated to divide us.

Clare Higgins of Northampton is executive director of the nonprofit Community Action! of the Franklin, Hampshire and North Quabbin Regions.