What’s
Wrong Today:
Congress
is back and working for the American people. Well, not for those people who are
broke and hungry in America. For many of those people, the food stamp program,
known as SNAP, has been the one
thing between them and starvation. House Republicans, with Majority leader Eric
Cantor (R-VA) leading the charge, want to cut food stamps. That effort is described on Cantor’s Blog:
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has ballooned since President Obama took
office with one in seven Americans now receiving food stamps. As SNAP has
grown, working middle class families are footing the $80 billion bill for a
safety net gone well beyond assistance to children, seniors, and the disabled.
That is why, with Chairman Lucas, a working group of our conference came
together to address the major problems to reform SNAP while still preserving
the safety net for those who truly need it.
The Nutrition Reform and Work Opportunity Act that Cantor
wants to enact would limit SNAP eligibility to only 3 months in three years,
plus demand the SNAP beneficiaries work or get into a job training program of
at least 80 hours a month. It cuts $40 billion from SNAP over the next 10
years.
The
current plan is to couple this three-year nutrition bill with the House’s
five-year “farm-only” farm bill that passed in July and send them to conference
with the Senate-passed five-year farm bill, which includes $12 billion in SNAP
cuts.
Some data
for you fact hounds: According to the USDA, 46.6 million
Americans are on SNAP assistance, averaging
$133.41 in benefits per month. The total cost of this program is $78
billion/year. Yet, House Republicans along with some Democrats want to deny food stamps to more adults.
What’s worse is the implication that there is work or job training out there for
these people. That is actually a lie. There
is no additional funding for jobs or job training to be provided under this
bill.
In
addition, many people receiving food stamps also are working, but their wages
are so low they still qualify for food stamps.
Eric
Cantor is pushing this in the House without holding a single
Congressional hearing. The GOP leadership even bypassed the Agriculture Committee, even though food stamps
are under their purview. This
week, the House is expected to vote on legislation to cut SNAP by roughly 5%.
The Center on
Budget and Priorities showed just how much harm to millions of Americans
the Republican attack on food stamps would cause. The people the proposal would
cut off SNAP include:
- 2 – 4 million poor, unemployed,
childless adults who live in areas of high unemployment — a group that has
average income of only 22% of the poverty line (about $2,500 a year for a
single individual) and for whom SNAP is, in most cases, the only
government assistance they receive; - 1.8 million people, mostly
low-income working families and low-income seniors, who have gross incomes
or assets modestly above the federal SNAP limits but disposable income —
the income that a family actually has available to spend on food and other
needs — below the poverty line in most cases, often because of high rent
or child care costs. Some 210,000 children in these families also would
lose free school meals; - Other poor, unemployed parents
who want to work but cannot find a job or an opening in a training program
— along with their children, other than infants.
As of September
2013, 46.6 million people are on food stamps. That’s about 15.1% of the US
population, or 1 out of 6.6 people today need food stamps. Additionally, about 20% of Americans, one in five, has trouble affording enough
food. The ranks haven’t swelled because America is a bunch of slackers. The
reason is wages have not grown and there are not enough jobs.
The
average food stamp benefit per person is $133.41 a month, or $4.45 a day. Assuming
most people need three squares, this amounts to $1.48 per meal. Think
about making a meal for $1.48.
The real
question is why, when America just saw the top 1% get to the point where they earn 19.3% of all income,
a level not seen in a 100 years, why are Republicans in the House so hell bent on attacking the hungry in the United States?
In July, the
Wrongologist wrote
about the Republican motivations passing the farm bill, which contains the SNAP
provisions:
version of America, food stamp spending is not higher than in the past because
more people are poor and hungry after Wall Street’s shenanigans brought on the
Great Recession. Rather, food stamp use is up because the Obama European
Socialist Machine is deliberately trying to build a bigger, stronger,
government-supporting coalition.
Food
stamps are actually only about 2% of the overall federal budget. So making sure
a segment of America’s population suffers cannot be simply due to budget cost-cutting
reasons. So where does this desire to screw the poor come from?
It seems
the battle where the hungry are pawns is over proposed cuts to farm subsidies
and the attack on food stamps is in retaliation for efforts to cut subsidies to corporate
farmers. The same conservatives pushing starvation in America happen to
live in districts where farm subsidies pull in $3 billion a year. Additionally,
farm subsidies are a boon to Wall Street. So please quit calling agri-business
corporations “farmers.” These businesses that collect
millions of our tax dollars in corporate welfare are not farmers, they are
welfare queens.
Ferd Hoefner,
policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said:
House farm bill increases crop insurance subsidies by $10 billion without even
modest common sense reform, it is astounding the nutrition proposal would cut
the premier anti-hunger program by $40 billion and include radical extremist
reforms
The poor are
always first up for attacks by government. They do not make any campaign
donations, and they don’t have lobbyists. Isn’t any Congressional agenda in the
last 20 years simply a matter of following the money?
After all
is said and done, the move by Cantor and his gang on food stamps doesn’t add
up, except for the farm subsidy lobbyists.
When it
comes to the Congress doing the right thing, the only moral code House
Republicans seem to know is the pass-code
to their bank accounts.
