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Missing: The Food Stamp
Program
by THE EDITORIAL BOARD
JULY 12, 2013
“We’ll get to that later.”
That was the dismissive answer of Speaker John
Boehneron Thursday, when asked if the
House would restore the food stamp program it had just coldly ripped out of the
farm bill. “Later,” he said, Republicans will deal with the nation’s most
important anti-hunger program. “Later,” maybe, they will think about the needs
of 47 million people who can’t afford adequate food, probably by cutting the average daily subsidy of $4.39.
But right then their
priorities were clear, as a bare majority rushed to provide $195.6 billion over
10 years to Big Agriculture. Most of the money went to subsidies for crop
insurance and commodities, demanded by the corn, rice and sugar barons who fill
campaign coffers.
The choice made by the House in cutting
apart the farm bill was one of the most brutal, even in the short history of
the House’s domination by the Tea Party. Last month, the chamber failed to pass
a farm bill that cut $20.5 billion from food stamps because that was still too
generous for the most extreme Republican lawmakers. So, in the name of getting
something — anything — done, Mr. Boehner decided to push through just the agriculture part of the bill.
[Emphasis added.]
For decades, farm subsidies
and food stamps have been combined for simple reasons of political expediency.
Farm-state lawmakers went along with food stamps to keep the crop subsidies
flowing; urban lawmakers did the reverse. The coalition may have been an uneasy
one, and it cost the taxpayers untold billions in wasteful payments to growers,
but that was the price for helping the hungry.
As the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities has repeatedly showed, the food stamp program (now known as
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program, or SNAP) has long been one of the most effective and
efficient anti-poverty programsever devised. When counted as
income, SNAP benefits cut extreme poverty nearly in half, a new study shows. Most families who get the aid have an adult who is working.
Now that coalition has been
sundered, and the future of food stamps is threatened. If the program is not
returned to the five-year farm bill, it will have to be financed through annual
appropriations, which puts it at the mercy of the Republicans’ usual
debt-ceiling stunts and government shutdown threats. House leaders said they
would submit a food stamp bill “later,” but that will probably include the
right wing’s savage cuts and unprecedented incentives for states to
shut out poor families. Neither will get past the
Senate or the White House.
The only way forward is for a
Senate-House conference committee to restore the food stamp program to the farm
bill (the Senate bill contains a far more modest $4 billion reduction in food
stamps). Since compassion is no longer an incentive for the House, the threat
of a cutoff to the big lobbyists will have to work, just as it always has.
^^^
As Congress debates food stamp cuts, moms fret about
feeding kids
by MARTHA C. WHITE
For one in seven Americans,
the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food
stamps, is all that stands between them and too little food.
But the complicated calculus
of financial survival for the working poor also means any cuts to the roughly
$80 billion SNAP, as it’s known, being considered by Congress would be felt
well beyond the grocery checkout line. Buying new school clothes, family
outings, even getting a toehold in the financial mainstream could be thrown
into limbo.
For many of the working poor,
wages just don’t go far enough. The National Employment Law project says nearly
60 percent of jobs created in the post-recession recovery pay $13.83 or less an
hour, and hourly wages for some low-wage occupations fell by more than 5
percent in just three years.
Food service and temporary
employment make up 43 percent of the post-recession job growth, according to
NELP policy analyst Jack Temple. "They overwhelmingly pay low wages,” Temple said. “For that
lower segment, you’re going to see increased use of safety net programs to make
up the difference."
Sharonton Taylor of Marietta, Ga.,
is a single mom of three, even working full-time and earning $9.50 an hour as a
certified nurse's aide qualifies her for $500 a month in food stamps. (Like
Medicaid, SNAP is federally funded but administered at the state level.) That’s
still about $150 less than the U.S.D.A.'s average monthly estimate of what a
“low-cost food plan” should cost for Taylor’s
family.
If that $500 were cut, Taylor wouldn’t be able
to buy new clothes for her daughter and two sons, or take them on the kind of
outings middle-class kids take for granted. “We’d play Uno or do something
around the house, try to make it fun for them, instead of going to the zoo, to
the aquarium, stuff like that,” she said.
Taylor said it’s hard trying to explain to her kids, who are
eight, five and four, about the family’s dire financial straits. “I have to
tell them, ‘Mom don’t have it right now. Don’t you want a roof over your
head?’... I have to keep telling them that.”
Buying less food
The next step would be simply
buying less food, she said. As it is, Taylor
says she often struggles to make it until the 9th day of each month, when her
SNAP card is refilled. “I’ll try to make the food last… It feels hard to
stretch, especially if you cook everyday. I get low at the end of the month and
I have another week to go.” During that week, cheap, filling staples like
spaghetti fill the gap.
“As finances get worse, the
dietary quality also gets worse,” warned Dr. Deborah Frank, founder and
principal investigator of Children's HealthWatch at the Boston University-affiliated
Boston Medical
Center. “Poor nutrition
isn’t obvious to the lay person,” she said. “This is a health problem. I think
that’s the connection that people miss.”
But there are sharp
disagreements in Washington
about how to fix the system. Proponents of cutting SNAP funding say the program
is bloated, poorly managed and subject to abuse.
"There are 21 programs
that provide food-purchasing assistance at the federal level. Isolating SNAP is
distorting the debate," said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato
Institute. " We spend too much on the social welfare safety net for too
little gain."
Calling SNAP "the
fastest-growing welfare program that we have," Tanner said even cuts of
nearly $21 billion over the next 10 years proposed by the Republican-led House
of Representatives don't go far enough.
Kevin Concannon,
undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services at the U.S. Department
of Agriculture, countered that the program’s growth was a necessary response to
the recession and unemployment it produced. “Most of the increase in SNAP is attributable
to the depth and severity of the economic downturn,” he said.
Anti-hunger advocates say the
program has become a political football. “A lot of the racial and gender and
other cultural politics of the country play out through the food stamp program,”
said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center.
“They shouldn’t, but they do.”
On Thursday, the House voted
to decouple food stamps from a five-year farm bill, setting the stage for a
battle with the Democratic-led Senate and the White House. But whichever party
wins, the real losers will be families who have benefits cut or eliminated,
said Lisa Davis, senior vice president of government relations at nonprofit
Feeding America.
Other proposed changes to
SNAP would have longer-term ramifications for people struggling to lift their
families out of poverty.
Juggling jobs
Krystal Cole juggles two jobs
in pursuit of that goal. A single mother of two in Marietta, Ga.,
Cole works Monday through Friday in an on-the-job training internship that pays
roughly minimum wage for 20 of the 40 hours she works. On weekends, she works
as a waitress for two seven-hour shifts at a waffle restaurant. Nearly all of
that paycheck goes toward her health insurance; virtually her only take-home
pay on weekends is the roughly $100 she pulls down in tips.
"I work hard but I still
don’t make enough money," Cole said. "Food is expensive, and you
don't really realize it until you have all these mouths to feed." Cole
gets $160 a month in SNAP benefits, and estimates that she pays another $100 or
so out of pocket each month (her kids are in programs that give them breakfast
and lunch on weekdays).
In one sense, though, Cole is
lucky. Feeding America
says the average SNAP household has only $333 in assets. The Center for Family
Resources in Marietta
helped Cole set up a savings account about a year and a half ago and taught her
the importance of budgeting and saving. She's been socking away a little bit —
$20 here, $50 there on a good week — ever since.
Currently, the government
lets states lift a $2,000 asset cap on SNAP participation so families aren’t
forced to wipe out their savings before becoming eligible. But changes proposed
under the House’s original farm bill would take away that option. If Cole’s
eligibility for food stamps were at risk because of her small nest egg, she
would face a difficult decision: benefits now, or a more secure financial
future.
Farm bill aside, food stamp
benefits are going to drop by an average of $20 to $25 per family in November
anyway when a stimulus increase expires, Davis
said. The U.S.D.A. estimated that last year's drought will make food prices
rise up to 3.5 percent over the course of the year.
Families are already feeling
the pinch. “I’m barely making it, even with the program,” said Michelle Tyson,
a school bus aide and single mother to three teenaged boys in Buffalo, N.Y.,
who gets nearly $400 a month in food stamps despite working 30 hours a week and
taking every extra shift that comes her way.
If her benefits were cut
back, “There would be no more cookies or chips, I tell you that. I don't buy a
lot of it, but I buy enough that it could be cut back.” Next, Tyson said she
would start rationing. “I would cut out portions… It's no fun not being able to
eat what you want to eat or not having any food in the house,” she said.
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