Snapbak
estb 10 25
new cat 8/14, see obesity/hunger
SEE SOCIAL SAFETY NET and TWO
SEE B3 BIG BEUT BILL BS
primary 1020 covid emergency, scary stats on kid hunger
SEE SCHOOL LUNCH
see strict fr/evang
see cruel?
shd i make a farm bill node?
NOTE WORK REQ BAD BC MOST APPL CAN’T
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===
COM DR 5 26
‘4.3 Million Off SNAP and Counting!’ Trump Official Celebrates Mass Loss of Food Aid
“Kicking 4.3 million Americans off of SNAP is not a flex, it’s a failure,” said Democratic Rep. Shontel Brown.
May 04, 2026
US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins on Saturday openly celebrated millions of people losing their food assistance, which experts say is a direct result of the Republicans’ 2025 budget law that slashed funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by $186 billion over a decade.
In a social media post pointing to preliminary data from her department, Rollins boasted that there were now “4.3 million off SNAP and counting!”
RECOMMENDED...
Trump-GOP Law Spurs Largest Loss of Food Aid in Decades
](https://www.commondreams.org/news/republicans-cut-food-aid)
Outrage Grows Over GOP Plan to Take Food Aid From Millions of Women and Children
“Under President Trump, Americans are getting back to work!” Rollins added. “Healthy employment numbers mean less reliance on government programs. Leaving benefits for those who truly need them. America is back in business!”
In reality, the unemployment rate is currently higher than when President Donald Trump took office in February 2025 and there has been almost no growth in net employment since the president announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs just over a year ago.
The Associated Press on Monday published a fact check of Rollins’ claims about SNAP, finding that Republicans’ cuts to the program were far more likely responsible for the historic drops in enrollment than any purported improvement in the economy.
Caitlin Caspi, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut who studies food insecurity, told the AP that current job creation numbers are nowhere near strong enough to explain the massive number of Americans losing access to SNAP.
“We’re not seeing a linear kind of drop-off,” Caspi said. “We are not seeing, if you look at the unemployment rates, things that might be an indicator that a strong economy was driving this change. We don’t see, for example, a pattern of decline in unemployment that would match the pattern of decline in SNAP participation.”
Caspi’s analysis was echoed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), which last week published an analysis finding that “economic conditions haven’t been improving as the number of people receiving SNAP has plummeted in recent months, representing the sharpest decline in decades.”
Instead, CBPP pointed the finger squarely at the GOP’s budget law as the biggest culprit behind the decline.
“The deep cuts to federal funding for SNAP are shifting significant new costs to states,” wrote CBPP, noting that the GOP law “also dramatically expands SNAP’s already harsh and ineffective provision taking away people’s benefits for not meeting the work requirement.”
Rollins’ claims about SNAP enrollment were also criticized by Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), who expressed disgust that the administration is bragging about kicking people off food assistance during a time when the price of groceries has continued to rise thanks in part to Trump’s own policies.
“Better economy where?” Brown wrote on social media in response to Rollins. “You mean the one where Americans paid $300 more on their groceries to compensate for Trump’s tariffs? Kicking 4.3 million Americans off of SNAP is not a flex, it’s a failure. That’s why I’ve authored legislation to reverse the Trump SNAP cuts.”
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mma
April 16, 2026, edition ofThe Benny Show, streamed on YouTube
BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): You know that our take on Iran has been pragmatic. Not light ourselves on fire. Don't burn your MAGA hats. But I don't like the distraction. It's too far away, and the distraction is, like, burning up political capital that should be spent on lowering prices for America.
The economic numbers are underwater for our side, and they need to be flipped. And you can flip them quick. How do you flip them? Cheap gas. Plow gas directly back down to $2 a gallon, which is where it was. Home prices. You must fix affordable housing in this country. How do you do that? Well, first thing is you deport 20 million criminal aliens. Free up 20 million houses, right? Especially the starter homes, the homes that they occupy. The starter homes get people started with the American dream. Free up those houses, more supply that will reduce the prices.
And then you got to get grocery prices down. How do you fix that? Well, 40% of the groceries are free to the parasitic class. Many of them criminal aliens. Many of them people who need to have their benefits cut, to be quite honest. People who are engaging in welfare and SNAP fraud.
And that was ubiquitous on the old block — I used to live in the ghetto in Washington DC. Everybody would trade their SNAP cards for cash. Ubiquitous — is like literally probably the largest scale fraud in the country is SNAP fraud. And so crack down on that. Make it so that all — like, we're not subsidizing with our groceries, so every time you buy a steak for $22 a pound, you're subsidizing some jackrabbit on SNAP who's buying the same steak for free off the government that you're paying for. Anyway, that's how you reduce — so that you get rid of fraud, I think, and you get rid of dependency on those systems, prices lower.
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MMA
Myths and facts about SNAP
As the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program runs out of funds, right-wing figures have suggested food insecurity is an “illusion” and called program recipients “entitled”
Written by Noah Dowe
Research contributions from Helena Hind & Jane Lee
Published 10/31/25
With SNAP benefits set to expire on November 1 due to the ongoing government shutdown and the Trump administration’s refusal to shift emergency funds, many right-wing media figures have seized the opportunity to spread false claims about the program and its users.
These figures have claimed, contrary to government data, that food insecurity is overblown, and suggested the program leaves taxpayers being “ripped off by the poor.”
They have also wrongly suggested that “a lot” or even “most” of SNAP recipients are “not even Americans,” arguing the program is “redistributing the wealth away from productive Americans to foreigners.”
As SNAP funding runs dry, the Trump administration has decided not to use emergency reserves to maintain it
- SNAP is set to “exhaust its remaining funds” by November 1, and the administration is refusing to save the program by using “billions of dollars left over across multiple federal accounts, including money in an emergency reserve specifically for SNAP.”In a hearing for a lawsuit filed against the administration by 25 states, a federal judge commented that it was “hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency, when there’s no money, and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits.” The judge later gave the administration until Monday to come up with a plan for expiring benefits, and said “the Agriculture Department must use emergency funds to keep SNAP going.” The New York Times, [10/30/25; NPR, 10/31/25]
- Axios: The U.S. Department of Agriculture “told states it would not provide November's SNAP payments” in “an apparent departure from its Sept. 30 shutdown plan (which has since been taken down) that stated, ‘Congressional intent is evident that SNAP's operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds.’” The USDA’s initial shutdown plan also stated: “These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.” Axios, [10/27/25; U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Lapse of Funding Plan (as of September 30, 2025),” accessed 10/31/25]
- The USDA website later posted a notice blaming Democrats for its refusal to pay out the benefits, declaring that “the well has run dry.” United States Department of Agriculture, accessed [10/31/25; Axios, 10/27/25]
- The Project 2025 play book,Mandate for Leadership, which has heavily influenced the Trump administration, called for sweeping changes to SNAP and other food assistance programs that would cut many Americans off from aid. These include implementing work requirements, ending automatic eligibility for those receiving other forms of welfare, reducing the purchasing power of SNAP over time, and closing the “heat-and-eat loophole” which allows those in the Low-Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program to receive more benefits. Axios, [10/2/25; Media Matters, 10/29/24]
- ## MYTH: Food insecurity is overblown, and people will not go hungry without food stamps
- Newsmax host Rob Schmitt: “This whole idea that there's food insecurity in this country, what an illusion that is.” Schmitt declared, “I don't think there's a food security problem at all -- or food insecurity problem.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [10/28/25]
- MAGA influencer TheQuartering: “I refuse to believe there are 43 million Americans in need of me to pay for their Mountain Dew.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25, 3/26/25]
- Conservative Political Action Conference Chair Matt Schlapp said it was “sad to watch Republicans saying that SNAP funding delays will lead to widespread starvation.” He explained, “There are truly needy poor people in America. But these programs are riddled with waste and people here illegally seem to be first in line.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25]
- Right-wing host Steven Crowder claimed SNAP recipients “spend TWICE what the average worker does on groceries,” arguing the program is “rewarding people who abuse the system.”Twitter/X, [10/28/25]
- Right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson said, “This is not the Great Depression. There are not food shortages in this nation.” He then attacked SNAP recipients, calling them “able-bodied Americans and illegals who refuse to work” and “ want to just leech off the productive class.” YouTube, The Benny Show, [10/31/25]
- Daily Wire host Matt Walsh questioned whether anyone has “ever starved to death” in modern America, adding, “There are so many other lines of defense that should mean that you're not going to starve” and listing family, friends, soup kitchens, charities, churches, food drives, and other welfare programs. He then attacked SNAP recipients, saying when you consider their pleas they come off as “entitled, lazy,” and “barely literate,” arguing that “some of them are just frankly bad people.” The Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [10/28/25]
- ## FACT: SNAP is an essential program protecting against food insecurity and severe hunger, and food banks “will not be able to fill the gap”
- USDA data shows that “47.4 million people lived in food-insecure households” in 2023. The agency noted that food insecurity was worst in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Food Security in the U.S. - Key Statistics & Graphics,” [1/8/25]
- A 2019 study published in the Health Affairs journal found “groups whose SNAP benefits were reduced or cut off had significantly increased odds of household and child food insecurity.” Health Affairs, [5/19]
- According to CNBC, 73% of SNAP recipients “live below the poverty line, which is currently $32,150 or less for a family of four.” The article notes that “Google search interest for ‘food banks’ and ‘food stamps’” have surged “as SNAP beneficiaries look for alternatives.” CNBC, [10/29/25]
- The New York Times interviewed “several food bank directors” who warned that “they will not be able to fill the gap if funding for SNAP does not come through.” As reported by the Times, “For every nine meals that were supplied by federal food assistance, food pantries can provide only one on their own. No matter how thin they stretch their resources, they will not be able to fill the gap if funding for SNAP does not come through.” The New York Times, [10/26/25]
- ## MYTH: SNAP is rife with “fraud”
- Rob Schmitt: “12% of Americans are on food stamps. I think just purely about how much fraud there must be in that, because we do not have 12% of Americans that aren't able to work.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [10/22/25]
- :{:{Matt Walsh claimed the shutdown’s impact on SNAP “has finally drawn attention to the scale of this fraud” and “exposed a vast network of criminal activity that needs to be shut down.” Walsh continued, “And beyond that point, if the food stamp program is going to continue to exist at all, which I'm not convinced it should, it needs to have standards, strict standards. It needs to have a reason to exist.” The Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [10/29/25]}:
- Walsh later said taxpayers are “getting ripped off by the poor and the rich at the same time.” Twitter/X, [10/30/25]
- Right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich: “SNAP is fraud, it's for people to buy sugar soda and junk food.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25]
- Right-wing influencer Phillip Buchanan, who posts on social media under the moniker “Catturd”: “The Government shutdown has exposed how many millions of people are scamming the SNAP program.” Daily Dot, [7/25/23; Twitter/X, 10/29/25]
- ## FACT: SNAP fraud is rare, and nearly 40% of recipients are children
- Citing the Congressional Research Service, PBS reported in 2023 that “for every 10,000 households participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), about 14 contained a recipient who was investigated and determined to have committed fraud.” The article continued, “Within SNAP, for every $10,000 paid in benefits, about $11 is determined by state agencies to have been overpaid due to recipient fraud.” PBS, [5/15/23]
- The Urban Institute found that “the maximum SNAP benefit did not cover the cost of a modestly priced meal in 99 percent of US counties.” Urban Institute, [7/16/25]
- MSNBC: Nearly “half of SNAP households contain elderly or disabled people. Of the others, about half are currently employed while most of the rest are relying on SNAP during relatively short periods of unemployment.” MSNBC, [10/30/25]
- According to USDA data from 2023, about 39% of SNAP recipients were children, and about 11% of recipients were under 5 years old. USDA, [7/24/25]
- ## MYTH: SNAP is used primarily by “noncitizens or foreigners”
- Newsmax host Rob Finnerty: “Most of the people getting food stamps from the U.S. government and the U.S. taxpayer are not even Americans.” Finnerty continued, “We can confirm tonight that millions of Joe Biden illegal aliens, people who crossed the border when Joe was president, are now collecting food stamps from a program funded by hard-working American taxpayers.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [10/27/25]
- Turning Point USA’s Alex Clark: “While we are here-let’s look into the amount of illegals using SNAP benefits over Americans.” Twitter/X, [10/27/25]
- Fox host Laura Ingraham claimed “a lot” of SNAP recipients “are noncitizens or foreigners.”Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [10/28/25]
- Townhall senior columnist Kurt Schlichter said SNAP users are “bums” who should “go back to the garbage homelands.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25]
- Newsmax guest James Fishback: “We are essentially redistributing the wealth away from productive Americans to foreigners and subsidizing their way of life.” Newsmax, *Carl Higbie Frontline*, [10/29/25]
- :{Matt Walsh: “We import the third world and force working class Americans to feed and house them at gunpoint. Civilizational suicide.” Twitter/X, [10/26/25]
- ## FACT: The overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients are citizens
- Wired: “USDA data shows that almost 90 percent of SNAP recipients are American-born citizens. 1.1 percent of recipients are refugees, and 3.3 percent are other noncitizens.”Wired, [10/30/25]
- ABC News: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act “cuts off [SNAP] access completely for refugees and other immigrant groups in the country lawfully,” although “states are still awaiting federal guidance on when to stop or phase it out.” As reported by ABC, “One of the first provisions to take effect under the law removes SNAP eligibility for most refugees, asylum seekers, trafficking and domestic violence victims, and other legal immigrants.” ABC News, [10/30/25]
- ## MYTH: SNAP recipients are using the program to live unhealthy lifestyles
- Far-right commentator Stefan Molyneux: “You should not be fat on government food.” Twitter/X, [10/27/25]
- Right-wing social media account End Wokeness: “Every single fat person on food stamps is an indictment of the entire program.” Twitter/X, [10/28/25]
- :{:{Matt Walsh: “75% of these people are obese.” Walsh used this to claim that “the massive number of people who receive these subsidies … clearly don’t need them, for the most part.” Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [10/29/25]}:
- Podcaster Adam Carolla: “The average female who gets no free food from the government is 146 pounds. The average SNAP recipient is 211 pounds. … Nobody could benefit from a nice fast more than the SNAP recipients.”Twitter/X, [10/29/25]
- Rob Schmitt: “Why are people who weigh 300 pounds on SNAP? Is there no weight limit for a free food program in this country? Are you kidding me?” Schmitt added, “A perfect diet plan would be no more EBT cards.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [10/29/25]
- ## FACT: SNAP recipients sometimes see improved health outcomes as compared to nonrecipients
- Usage of SNAP is associated with “better self-reported health, lower risk of heart disease and obesity among adults who had access to SNAP as children, and greater medication adherence among older participants.” According to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Early access to SNAP among pregnant mothers and in early childhood improved birth outcomes and long-term health as adults. Elderly SNAP participants are less likely than similar non-participants to forgo their full prescribed dosage of medicine due to cost. … Infants and children in families participating in SNAP are more likely to see a doctor for periodic check-ups. Low-income adults participating in SNAP incur an average of about $1,400, or nearly 25 percent, less in medical care costs in a year than low-income non-participants. The difference is even greater for those with hypertension (nearly $2,700 less) and coronary heart disease (over $4,100 less).” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, [12/14/22]
- PBS: “Anti-hunger advocates point to research that shows SNAP recipients are no more likely than other low-income Americans to buy sugary drinks or snack foods. And they say that limiting food choices undermines the autonomy and dignity of people who receive, on average, about $187 per month — or about $6.16 per day, according to latest figures.” PBS, [2/19/25]
//
:{10/30/25
:{10/29/25
11/04/25
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mma
10/30/25 4:47 PM EDT
10/30/25 3:15 PM EDT
omg an 10 25
CNN Capitol Hill reporter Sarah Ferris reported on Xthat U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins will not commit to releasing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds if ordered to do so by a Boston judge overseeing a case against them
Boston's U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani is currently overseeing a legal case involving the government shutdown and SNAP, with the Trump administration arguing that it lacks the authority to use an emergency fund to pay for November SNAP benefits, potentially affecting 42 million Americans.
Talwani expressed skepticism toward the administration's argument during a hearing on Thursday, emphasizing her interpretation of congressional intent to protect people during emergencies. According to the*Washington Post, Talwani indicated she is likely to intervene to ensure food aid continues by ordering the U.S. Department of Agriculture to utilize the available $5.5 billion contingency fund.
Talwani stated that if the government can't cover the full cost, it must find an "equitable way of reducing benefits" rather than suspending them entirely.
Ferris said that CNN senior Capitol Hill producer Ellis Kim asked Rollins "if she will agree to release funds if ordered to do so by Talwani, to which Rollins replied, “We're looking at all the options.”
Aaron Blake, CNN's senior political reporter shared the news on X, saying, "I have a really hard time believing they would resist such an order. Feels like a great way to lose the political battle here."
Daily Kos reporter Emily Singer noted the move would mean the Trump administration is "[fighting] to make sure people aren't fed."
Bulwark MSNBC managing editor Sam Stein explained his understanding of the "administration's position" on the potential ruling.
The Trump administration is arguing "they legally can't release the funds[,] but if a judge tells them that they legally can release the funds they won't necessarily release the funds," Stein wrote on X.
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an 10 25
ngo
Jeff Bridges: 'Feds getting in the way' of deal while leaders 'use feeding kids as a weapon
Actor Jeff Bridges slammed lawmakers for using the feeding of children as a weapon during thegovernment shutdown Thursday on Jake Tapper's CNN show "The Lead."
"The Big Lebowski" star is an activist primarily known for his work to end childhood hunger and combat plastic pollution. He is a notable member of the Plastic Pollution Coalition and the national spokesperson for Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign since 2010.
"It's so bizarre here in the wealthiest country in the world. We have enough food, we have enough money, we have enough programs to end childhood hunger. To use feeding kids as a weapon going back and forth doesn't make any sense," he said.
An estimated 7.3 million households with children will lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on Saturday. Other federal nutrition programs that serve children are also being affected, such as the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program and Head Start, which provides early education and development for children.
Bridges is outraged and speaking out No Kid Hungry's national spokesman.
"Billy (Shore, the founder of Share Our Strength) and I have been traveling all over the country talking to governors and mayors in the states themselves, Republicans, Democrats and independents all agree, we should feed our kids," he told Tapper.
"There's no reason not to do that. And to have the feds getting in the way of this thing, talk about bizarre," he added.
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an 10 25
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) ignited a firestorm of outrage after a recent tweet in which he blamed the 42 million Americans set to lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits this weekend for their own plight.
On Thursday, Higgins posted to his official X account: "There are 22 million American households receiving SNAP benefits for groceries, at $4200 per year on average. Try to get your head wrapped around how many pantries you can stock with $4200 dollars in properly shopped groceries. Any American who has been receiving $4200 dollars per year of free groceries and does NOT have at least 1 month of groceries stocked should never again receive SNAP, because wow, stop smoking crack."
Higgins' post was met almost immediately with anger and ridicule. Children's author Kristine Rudolph wrote on Bluesky: "Tell us you don’t do the grocery shopping in your house without telling us you don’t do the grocery shopping in your house." Pennsylvania Capital-Star editor-in-chief Tam Lambert posted that $4,200 per year in SNAP benefits amount to "about $80 a week."
Retired air traffic controller Vivian M. Lumbard argued that Higgins' post reveals how "none of these Republicans seem to understand how much groceries actually cost, especially if you have kids."
"$4200 equates to $350/month," she wrote. "I doubt I could cover all my groceries just for myself for that amount of money, even if I gave up meat."
Political consultant Jamison Foster quoted Lucille Bluth from the sitcom "Arrested Development" (who
: "It's one banana Michael. What could it cost? $10?) by writing: "It's one month of groceries, Michael. How much room can it take up? Ten closets?"
Political scientist Miranda Yaver broke down Higgins' post by pointing out that Republicans simultaneously expect Americans to "Stop eating processed foods. Make healthy choices: eat more fresh food" while claiming SNAP recipients are "irresponsible" if they "don't have a month's food supply on hand to live on when we can't keep the government open."
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an 10 25
'Said it out loud': Johnson ripped for admitting he's holding food stamp funding hostage
===
an 10 25
Washington Monthly Editor Bill Scher recently deconstructed Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-S.D.) explosion on the Senate floor last weekend as he labored to pin the shutdown of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food benefits on Democrats.
“SNAP recipients shouldn’t go without food. People should be getting paid in this country. And we’ve tried to do that thirteen times! You voted ‘no’ thirteen times!” Thune said. “This isn’t a political game. These are real people’s lives that we’re talking about!”
But it was all performance, according to Scher.
“Look, it’s fair to tag Democrats for being the instigators of the government shutdown, but not for President Donald Trump’s decisions that maximize the shutdown’s pain and hurt people who do not need to be hurt,” Scher wrote. “Before the shutdown began almost a month ago, the Department of Agriculture, led by Secretary Brooke Rollins, made clear that the delivery of SNAP … need not be impacted.”
The details of that reality were "available here at this URL until at least October 10, according to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine," said Scher. Additionally, Thune blocked legislation by Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) that would have funded SNAP benefits.
“But Trump’s USDA has memory-holed it,” Scher said, adding that when visitors now visit that URL, they get a Republican attack ad against Democrats that Scher said “almost surely” violates the Hatch Act: “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”
But the truth is that SNAP has never been disrupted during past shutdowns, either during Republican or Democratic administrations, said Scher. They’ve always been provided by officials using available funding sources to prevent a break in benefits.
“Democrats shoulder no responsibility for Trump and Rollins cutting off SNAP benefits from those who need them to survive,” said Scher. “You can’t even argue Democrats should have expected SNAP to be affected because USDA declared ahead of the shutdown that it wouldn’t.”
Furthermore, the number of SNAP beneficiaries tops 40 million, “more than a tenth of the U.S. population,” said Scher. So, at least until very recently, the program enjoyed bipartisan support.
“Thune can save his performative rage for the people playing political games with people’s lives: Donald Trump and Agriculture Secretary Rollins,” Scher said.
Read the Washington Monthly report at this link.
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MMA
10/28/25
October 28, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
BASIL SMIKLE (GUEST): And the the point I would make in addition to that is if you are looking to punish people, right, they're mostly punishing their supporters. There are more people in this country from red states -- there are more white Americans, particularly Republicans, that are on these programs. So if you want to even use the sort of, you know, that sort of welfare queen trope that a lot of Republicans have historically used, it doesn't even touch that or come close to touching that. So the suggestion -- the point I would think is that they're only just trying to punish Americans using this tactic.
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Well, Angelo, to build on the point that Basil just made, I'm sure you've seen the highly partisan framing of the USDA's -- a government agency's communication in a message saying that Democrats are to blame and, quote, "The well is about to run dry." I wonder the extent to which on conservative media that message is being echoed or how they are justifying to Basil's point about the fact that this is a lot of Trump's own supporters who are being impacted by this, how they are explaining that away.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. I mean, you know, I think the way they look at it is in a few dimensions. One, they never acknowledge the reality, right, that it's going to be a lot of their own supporters. Even though they all kind of know it, they never actually acknowledge that. The predominant right-leaning narrative is what's been that way for 20-plus years going all the way back to Rush Limbaugh, you know, sort of really reinforcing the false notion of a welfare queen or, you know, one of the things he used to say about the WIC program in particular was that it was all just a gigantic fiction because why would you need a program like this if they were able to have babies in the first place? Surely, they weren't that desperate if they were able to have babies. So clearly, it was just sort of a Democratic fiction, and that's been percolating forever.
So it's basically the notion that it's liberals and Black people that are getting this program predominantly. So to some extent, they're happy. There's a lot of schadenfreude and they're leaning into the cruelty that there's a whole bunch of people that don't get it, that they don't like, that are going to be punished.
And on the flip side, some of this soft undercurrent, and you sort of got to that in your messaging, is that, yeah, there are going to be some of their people that are going to suffer from this. And to an extent, they're perfectly fine with that as long as they know that they can convince their people that it's Democrats at fault. Because recognize that a big part of what they want to do here is not only to punish liberals and Democrats, any of their perceived political opponents, but to keep the anger flowing on their side so that they can continue to justify and rationalize the cruelty that they're inflicting on the country and our slide toward authoritarianism. And you sort of need that as the fuel to then justify all the other extreme measures that you're taking. So that's the large framework that's playing out in the right-wing media right now. More bloodthirstY and more cruelty.
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10/28/25
October 28, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH (HOST): Has anyone ever starved to death in the modern history of this country because they haven't had access to food? I mean, has that actually happened in this country? Has a single sane adult, OK — now, we're not talking about kids who are victims of horrific abuse and those kinds of awful cases, in which case, like, food stamps are not solving that. Has any sane adult, through no fault of his own, shriveled and died because he couldn't afford to buy anything to eat? Has there been a single example of someone in modern America, in modern America, someone who has no family, no friends, no other forms of state or federal welfare he can tap into, no food banks, no churches he can visit, no job, no soup kitchens nearby, no charity food drives in his area, nothing at all?
:{So the point is that there's a — there are a bunch of lines of defense. Like, when we deal with the question of, well, who should be feeding you? Right? There's — there are a lot of answers that come up. And the first person, ideally, who feeds you should be you. You should be feeding yourself if you're an adult. Who should feed your children? It should be you. Like, that's the first. That's where we should go.
That should be number one, you. And if you really can't, I mean, there are things that happen where someone really, really can't. So through no fault of their own, they can — they're not able to feed themselves. That can happen. I'm not denying that. But then there are so many other — in modern America, there are so many other lines of defense — even if you take EBT out of it, there are so many other lines of defense that should mean that you're not going starve. You should have your family. You should have friends. Even if you don't have them, you have a local community, you have soup kitchens, you have charities, you have churches, you have all of these things. You have food drives, all of these things. You have other forms of welfare programs that also exist.}:
So for how many people — I guess this is the question, how many people are in a situation where all of those lines of defense have failed, every single one. And the only possible thing left that can feed them is EBT? You know? Now, if something like that — if there were someone in that situation, if something like that were ever happening in United States, then I'd be the first in line to say, yes. Get that person a taxpayer funded hot dog. I don't want to see anyone starve. Nobody does. But I don't think that's that's actually happening in modern America, and nobody has demonstrated otherwise. Like, no one has presented us with a person and said, OK. Here's someone who — there's an actual human who's alive today in America, and for this person, legitimately, if they don't have food stamps, they will starve. It's the only thing. It's the only way they could get their hands on food. I — no one has shown that example.
And in fact, if you look at what food stamp recipients are saying in their own words, you come away with the distinct impression that, like, almost none of these people actually need the food stamps. Instead, you come away with the impression that many of these people are simply entitled, lazy, barely literate, and, like, some of them are just frankly bad people. And, of course, that doesn't describe every adult on food stamps. No one is saying that. But it does seem to describe a large portion of them. And that is a moral outrage that we as tax paying Americans who are funding this, we have every right to be upset about that. When people are stealing our money who don't even need it and just wasting it in this profligate way, don't let anyone morally blackmail you into thinking that you're not allowed to be upset about that. Of course you could be upset about that. And, of course, you could demand answers. You're taking my money. I want to know who exactly needs it, and for what, and how are you spending it? That is a legitimate question. Of course, it is. And what you end up with is there are a lot of people who, rather than get a job, would prefer to rob grocery stores and the people shopping inside them.
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The split in the right over SNAP and food stamps: Some attack the program and its recipients, while others try to use cuts as a cudgel against Democrats
Written by Jason Campbell
Research contributions from Helena Hind & Jane Lee
Published 10/29/25
The 42 million Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will not receive assistance in November, and some right-wing media are using the opportunity to attack the program and its recipients while others are using SNAP recipients as a cudgel against Democrats.
The $8 billion in congressional appropriations for the benefits, known as food stamps, lapsed with the October 1 government shutdown, and there is no indication that Congress will appropriate funds for the program. The Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, has further said it will not shift funds around to keep the program operational despite SNAP having having some contingency funds available and the department's own "shutdown-funding plan," which was struck from its own website, that indicated emergency funds could be used.
About 1 in 8 Americans rely on SNAP benefits, receiving an average of $187 a month in food aid. The vast majority of households which receive SNAP benefits include children, an elderly person, or someone with a disability.
Right-wing pundits are calling the program too generous, with some attacking recipients — who now are also being attacked online with fake racist AI-generated videos.
- The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh: “If you look at what food stamp recipients are saying in their own words ... you come away with the impression that many of these people are simply entitled, lazy, barely literate, and, like, some of them are just frankly bad people."
- While discussing SNAP benefits, Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt denied that there is food insecurity in the U.S. and asked, “Why is it that we are subsidizing food for people that weigh 300 pounds?” He also said, “The entitlement of the people on these programs is through the roof."
- Podcaster Steven Crowder insulted SNAP recipients in some pretty ugly ways typical of his program.
- While discussing SNAP, Newsmax host Carl Higbie said that “our welfare programs are out of hand” and “these programs should definitely sunset."
- The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro: “It is insane that there are 42 million Americans on food stamps. That is a wild statistic. And the amount of government dependency in this country is just way too high, period. But they are, in fact, dependent on food stamps."
While some right-wing pundits are claiming that too many people are receiving SNAP benefits, others are arguing that SNAP is an essential benefit and blaming Democrats for taking it away.
- Fox & Friends host Ainsley Eardhardt said if Democrats “really care about families, and people in need, and people who can’t afford to go to the grocery store, then open up the government."
- Turning Point USA’s Alex Clark posted, “So when people claim they’re starving and have no food remember it was the democrats, not Trump, who did this to you."
- And Fox anchor Harris Faulkner said that “we have food insecurity in this country” and blamed Democrats for keeping the government shut down.
During the Obama administration, many right-wing media pundits attacked the SNAP program, often calling for it to be discontinued, while others attacked food assistance recipients.
The gleeful enthusiasm with which some right-wing media personalities suggest food should be taken away from their fellow countrymen is truly disturbing — and ultimately in line with the cruelty which defines so much of the MAGA movement.
//
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Matt Walsh: “We need drug testing and weight testing for anyone receiving SNAP”
:{10/29/25
10/29/25 4:26 PM EDT
- ### Ben Shapiro says it would be “borderline impeachable at best” for DOJ to give Trump $230 million
10/29/25
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Fox guests have spent months advocating cuts to SNAP, which are now reportedly included in the Big Beautiful Bill
Written by Isabella Corrao, Helena Hind, Jane Lee & Alicia Sadowski
:{:{Published 06/27/25 }:
Senate Republicans are planning to include big cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka food stamps) to pay for tax cuts in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” per new reporting in The New York Times and Politico.
Fox News has consistently argued against and criticized the nation’s food stamps program, which helps over 42 million people purchase groceries. Similarly, Project 2025 called for sweeping cuts to the program.
Politico reports that the current plan “would cut around $186 billion from federal spending on agriculture, with the majority from coming from SNAP.” In response to a previous House plan to cut SNAP food assistance, one expert said that “a lot of people are going to lose their benefits as a consequence” of the plan, which would effectively push some costs of SNAP onto states.
Fox guests advocated for cuts to SNAP to reduce the deficit
- Conservative podcast host Matt Whitlock on cuts to Medicaid and SNAP: “The fraud, waste, and abuse in those programs is making it more difficult for those programs to serve the people that need it.” Fox News, *Fox News @ Night*, [5/30/25]
- Fox News Sunday guest Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) argued that those who opposed cuts to SNAP and other welfare programs were “just not frankly serious.” Paul said: “There is no free lunch. You can offer people free stuff, but if you're borrowing money to do it, you end up punishing them with inflation. The same people that are getting the free stuff are also being punished by inflation and never seem to creep out of poverty or climb up out of poverty. So, it's a bait and switch.” Fox News, *Fox News Sunday*, [5/25/25]
- ## Fox guests advocated for work requirements to be added to SNAP in the spending bill
- By expanding work requirements for households with school-aged children and raising the maximum age for required employment, researchers estimate that the bill’s expanded SNAP work requirements alone would cause 1.8 million people to “lose benefits entirely.”
- Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY) declared: “There are five million people in this country, working-age men who ought to be working, but they're not, and they're getting food stamps, they’re getting Medicaid. We need to have strict work requirements. That's why we have to get this bill passed soon, so the hardworking taxpayers in this country get the benefits almost immediately.” Host Maria Bartiromo agreed: “These are such important points that you have just made, senator.” Fox News, *Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo*, [6/15/24]
- Former Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore: “If you're going to get food stamps, or if you're going to get Medicaid, if you're going to get free public housing, any of these programs, you should have to work for these. … You either should be in a job training program or you should be in work if you're an employable adult.” Fox News, *Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy*, [6/9/25]
- Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) touted “some really good things” in Trump’s big, beautiful bill, noting that the House “made Medicaid work requirements move up to 2026 to make sure they would actually apply” and “applied work requirements to food stamps.” Roy continued: “If we were to actually make sure that the able-bodied were no longer scamming, along with the blue states, the vulnerable population on Medicaid — and it is actually waste, fraud, and abuse what’s going on, I support the president on that — we could save another $4, 500 billion.” Fox News,*The Will Cain Show*, [6/5/25]
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz: “There is a work requirement for SNAP, right, the food stamps program. There's a lot we can do to — I think there's a moral hazard if we don't, because you’ve got people who are not working who could work, who should work. And it's better for them and better for the country if they do. And it's worth about $400 billion to the reconciliation bill.” Fox News, *Sunday Morning Futures*, [5/25/25]
- ## Fox guests praised efforts by Republican governors to limit sugary items from SNAP
- On May 19, Nebraska became the first state to receive a USDA waiver banning the purchase of soda and energy drinks with SNAP. Data does not show that banning soda from SNAP reduces their consumption or improves public health, and advocates maintain that such exemptions further marginalize low-income people.
- Former TV personality Jillian Michaels praised the effort by states to ban soda and junk food, claiming, “This is a supplemental nutrition program. There is no nutrition in a soda.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [6/12/25]
- Senior advisor to the White House on “Make America Healthy Again” Calley Means claimed that through SNAP, “we subsidize and recommend sugar for children.” Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [6/4/25]
- Fox News senior medical analyst Mark Siegel said that he supported the changes to SNAP because sugar consumption was “almost like opioid addiction in that the receptors in the brain are used to seeing a ton of sugar or seeing fats or high-fructose corn syrup.” Fox News, *Fox News Live*, [4/19/25]
- On Fox & Friends, Maricopa County Superintendent Shelli Boggs said if Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs does not sign a bill banning SNAP recipients from using benefits to buy soda that it “would just say that she supports, you know, poisoning these kids.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [4/9/25]
- ## Fox guests claimed “illegal aliens” are benefitting from access to SNAP
- Under federal law, undocumented immigrants are not eligible to receive SNAP benefits.
- Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich remarked that the Boulder attacker, an asylum seeker, “may well be on Medicaid and may well be on food stamps.” Fox News, *The Faulkner Focus*, [6/4/25; NBC News, 6/5/25]
- OnFox News Sunday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared: “We're ensuring that programs like Medicaid and SNAP are strengthened for the U.S. citizens who need and deserve them and not being squandered away by illegal aliens and persons who are ineligible to receive them and are cheating the system.” Fox News, *Fox News Sunday*, [5/18/25]
- ## Fox News has a long history of arguing against SNAP benefits and criticizing the program
- In 2013, Fox News aired a special profiling Jason Greenslate, “a blissfully jobless California surfer,” in an attempt to make him the face of SNAP recipients. Media Matters, [8/9/13]
- In 2014, when a report showed that the SNAP benefits program hit a historic low for waste in 2012, Fox’s Brian Kilmeade accused the program of being wasteful. He stated, “The government is overpaying on food stamps by about $2 billion.” Media Matters, [7/24/14]
- In 2018, Mollie Hemingway blamed SNAP for helping perpetuate obesity in America. Hemingway: “People on these programs tend to eat a lot of cookies, candies, sugary snacks.” Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [2/13/18]
- In 2018, Fox's Jesse Watters praised the Trump administration's food stamp cuts and claimed that SNAP fraud was a major issue, even though it had fallen over the past several decades.Watters also said, “Food stamps skyrocketed under President Obama and under President Trump they’re coming down. That’s a good thing. You don’t want to be dependent on government, but you want to do it with heart.” Media Matters, [2/13/18; Time, 3/30/17]
- In 2019,Fox & Friendsguest Star Parker celebrated Trump’s move kicking hundreds of thousands of people off SNAP: “This is fantastic news.” She added, “They are now acknowledging those that are sitting on their couch, they've gotten very comfortable on the couch, to say our national food stamp program is for those that are in need, desperate need.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [12/5/19]
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AN 5 25 COMM DR
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez castigated House Republicans for pursuing massive cuts to Medicaid "in the dead of night" as a committee markup hearing on the GOP's legislation dragged on into the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said it is shameful that Republicans are rushing ahead with their proposal "at 2:38 in the morning, when everyone is asleep, when we've asked for the opportunity to do this in the light of day so that people can call their representatives' offices in order to stop this disaster."
As the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing kicked off Tuesday afternoon, demonstrators gathered in the Rayburn House Office Building and more than two dozen people were arrested for protesting the GOP's Medicaid proposal, which would cut the program by around $800 billion over the next decade and leave around 8 million more people uninsured.
But attention on the hearing naturally dwindled as it continued into the night and early Wednesday morning. As of this writing, the critical.
During her remarks at the hearing, Ocasio-Cortez said Republicans have looked to the state of Georgia as a model for their Medicaid proposals—particularly their push for work requirements that advocates say would endanger coverage for millions of people who are eligible for benefits.
Ocasio-Cortez noted that Georgia is among the states with the highest uninsured rates in the nation.
"The Republican majority has looked at the state with the third-highest number of uninsured Americans and said, 'That's what we want to model our Medicaid system after—this catastrophic failure,'" said the New York Democrat.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted Tuesday that beginning in 2029, the GOP bill would "require states to deny coverage to people applying for Medicaid if they are not already working (or participating in another qualifying activity) at least 80 hours per month, as well as terminate Medicaid for people already enrolled if they cannot document that they are meeting work requirements."
"Evidence shows that much of the coverage loss due to work requirements would occur among people who work or should qualify for an exemption but nevertheless would lose coverage due to red tape (states should be able to exempt most people with children automatically, but many others who should be exempt, such as people with disabilities, would not be automatically exempted)," the group observed.
CBPP estimated that the Republican plan would put between 9.7 million and 14.4 million people at risk of losing Medicaid coverage by 2034.
"Let me be clear—this is not a moderate bill, and it is not focused on cutting 'waste, fraud, and abuse,'" said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "Instead, Republicans are intentionally taking healthcare away from millions of Americans so they can give giant tax breaks to the ultra-rich who don’t need them."
Politicoreported early Wednesday that "after hours of debate, Republicans in unison voted down a Democratic amendment that would have required the Health and Human Services Secretary to certify that the GOP bill would not reduce any Medicaid benefits offered by states, pointing to President Donald Trump's repeated pledges to protect the program."
Republicans started several markup sessions for key pieces of their reconciliation package at around the same time on Tuesday, reportedly a deliberate effort to disperse and weaken the opposition.
"Down the hallway, they are trying to finance tax cuts for people who are inheriting $22 million houses," Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday, referring to the House Ways and Means Committee's marathon hearing on the tax section of the reconciliation bill.
Republicans also held a hearing Tuesday for their proposal to slash the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by hundreds of billions of dollars. The lasted more than three hours and is expected to resume Wednesday morning.
"Tonight, you're taking food away from single moms with 7-year-olds at home—as if being a single parent raising a young child wasn't hard enough already. And farmers, too, will suffer from your direct attacks on SNAP," Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said at the hearing. "Benefits will get cut—and for what? To fund tax breaks for everyone but the middle class."
NOW READ:How MAGA got brainwashed: The science behind the right-wing’s 50-year propaganda campaign
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PHOENIX — As an Arizona bill to block people from using government aid to buy soda headed to the governor’s desk in April, the nation’s top health official joined Arizona lawmakers in the state Capitol to celebrate its passage.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said to applause that the legislation was just the start and that he wanted to prevent federal funding from paying for other unhealthy foods.
“We’re not going to do that overnight,” Kennedy said. “We’re going to do that in the next four years.”
Those words of caution proved prescient when Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed the bill a week later. Nevertheless, state legislation to restrict what low-income people can buy using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits is gaining momentum, boosted by Kennedy’s touting it as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” platform. At least 14 states have considered bills this year with similar SNAP restrictions on specific unhealthy foods such as candy, with Idaho and Utah passing such legislation as of mid-April.
Healthy food itself isn’t largely a partisan issue, and those who study nutrition tend to agree that reducing the amount of sugary food people eat is a good idea to avoid health consequences such as heart disease. But the question over the government’s role in deciding who can buy what has become political.
The organization largely behind SNAP restriction legislation is the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative policy think tank out of Florida, and its affiliated lobbying arm, which has used the name Opportunity Solutions Project.
FGA has worked for more than a decade to reshape the nation’s public assistance programs. That includes SNAP, which federal data shows helps an average of 42 million people afford food each month. It also advocates for ways to cut Medicaid, the federal-state program that connects 71 million people to subsidized health care, including efforts in Idaho and Montana this year.
FGA’s proposals often seek to limit who taps into that aid and the help they receive. Those backing the group’s mission say the goal is to save tax dollars and help people lift themselves out of poverty. Critics argue that FGA’s proposals are a backdoor way to cut off aid to people who need it and that making healthy food and health care more affordable is a better fix.
Now, FGA sees more room for change under the Trump administration and the Kennedy-led health department, calling 2025 a “window of opportunity for major reform,” according to its latest annual report.
A Vision for Limiting Government Benefits
Tarren Bragdon, a former Maine legislator, founded FGA in 2011 to promote policies to “free millions from government dependency and open the doors for them to chase their own American Dream,” he said in a statement on FGA’s website. The main foundation started out as a staff of three with about $60,000 in the bank. As of 2023, it had a budget of more than $15 million and a team of roughly 64, according to the latest available tax documents, and that’s not counting the lobbying arm.
The foundation got early funding from a grant from the State Policy Network, which has long backed right-leaning think tanks with ties to conservative activists including brothers Charles and David Koch.
FGA declined several interview requests for this article.
In recent years, the nonprofit helped draft a 2017 Mississippi law, the Jackson Free Press found, which intensified eligibility checks for public aid that made it more difficult for some applicants to qualify. It successfully pushed a 2023 effort in Idaho to impose work requirements for food benefits that health care advocates said led some recipients to lose access.
The same year, the group helped pass SNAP restrictions affecting eligibility in Iowa. Since those restrictions have taken effect, the Food Bank of Iowa has seen a record number of people show up at its pantries amid rising grocery prices and a scaling back of covid pandemic-era federal support, said Annette Hacker, a vice president at the nonprofit.
Part of the group’s strategy is to pass legislation state by state, with the idea that the crush of new laws will increase pressure on the federal government. For example, states can’t limit what food is purchased through SNAP without federal approval through a waiver process. And in the past, some of FGA’s efforts have stalled because states never got that approval.
Kennedy’s agenda now echoes some of FGA’s key messages, and he has said states can expect approval of their waivers. Meanwhile, congressional leaders are eyeing nationwide Medicaid cuts and work requirements, which FGA considers among its major issues. The foundation also has a connection working inside the administration: Its former policy director, Sam Adolphsen, was tapped to advise President Donald Trump on domestic matters.
“We’re excited to fight from Topeka to Washington, D.C., as opposed to Washington, D.C., to Topeka,” Roy Lenardson, FGA’s state government affairs director, told Kansas lawmakers in February when testifying in support of SNAP legislation there.
Shaping State Policies
In the states, FGA has become known as a conservative “thought leader,” said Brian Colby, vice president of public policy for Missouri Budget Project, a progressive nonprofit that provides analysis of state policy issues.
“Conservatives used to try to chop away at the federal budget,” Colby said. “These guys are doing it at the state level.”
In its 14 years, FGA has created a playbook to shape state policy discussions around public benefits behind the scenes. In Montana, retired Republican legislator Cary Smith, who worked with FGA, said not all of the think tank’s ideas split along party lines.
“They offer a buffet of options,” he said. “Their agenda is making government accountable; it’s in the name.”
He said besides drafting legislation, FGA provides talking points and data to help policymakers support their arguments. “They would go in and would say, ‘This is what Medicaid fraud is costing us,’” Smith said. “That would be the number you’d want to use in your bill.”In January, FGA released a memo for states to “stop taxpayer-funded junk food.” In February, Stateline reported that Wyoming Republican state Rep. Jacob Wasserburger said the group asked him to sponsor a SNAP restriction bill. The state sponsor of similar legislation in Missouri has repeated at least one of FGA’s talking points, as reported by the Missouri Independent. In Arizona, Republican Rep. Leo Biasiucci, who sponsored the SNAP legislation there, told KFF Health News FGA was behind that bill as well.
Opponents of such bills argue the proposals are not as simple as they sound. Amid debate on a SNAP bill in Montana, Kiera Condon, with the Montana Food Bank Network, testified the legislation would force grocery store workers to sort through what counts as soda or candy, “which could result in retailers not participating in SNAP at all.”
State lawmakers tabled the Montana bill in April.
Montana legislators also easily passed a bill to extend the state’s Medicaid expansion program even after FGA began publishing a series of papers that asserted the program was “breaking” Montana’s budget. FGA had presented data saying most Montanans on the program don’t work, which state data refutes.
Ed Bolen, who leads food aid strategies at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think tank, said FGA has a pattern of proposing technical changes to existing laws and “unworkable work requirements” that cause people to lose benefits.
After working with policymakers in Kansas for a decade, FGA helped pass legislation that limited how long people can access cash assistance, added work requirements to SNAP, and banned the state from spending federal or state funds to promote public aid. Many of those changes came through 2015 legislation known as the “HOPE Act” drafted by FGA, The Washington Post reported.
Analysis from Kansas Appleseed, an advocacy organization for low-income Kansans, found the SNAP caseload sharply declined after the bill was enacted because of the new hurdles, dropping from 140,000 households in January 2014 to 90,000 as of January 2020.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” said Karen Siebert, an adviser for Harvesters, a community food bank network in Kansas and Missouri. “Some of these FGA proposals are such complex policies, it’s hard to argue against and to explain the ripple effects.”
In 2024, the foundation produced more than two dozen videos featuring state politicians from across the nation touting the organization’s goals and dozens of research papers arguing public benefits are wrecking state budgets. FGA also has its own polling team to produce data out of the states it’s working to influence.
The organization released a list of 14 states it labeled as “redder and better” places to exert more influence. That included Idaho, where the group has four registered lobbyists in the state Capitol.
In 2023, FGA helped present and successfully lobby for legislation there to require people receiving food aid to work at least 80 hours a month. The organization called the resulting law “landmark welfare reform” years in the making.
And this year, Idaho lawmakers passed more requirements for people enrolled in Medicaid who can work. FGA staffers worked with one of the co-sponsors of the legislation on a similar bill last year that failed, then again this year. A compromise bill passed with FGA’s backing, marking another victory for the foundation.
David Lehman, a lobbyist for the Idaho Association of Community Providers, which represents health organizations that have opposed FGA bills, said Idaho illustrates how FGA works with sympathetic lawmakers in conservative states to gain more ground.
“They’re pushing an already rolling rock downhill,” he said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom
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SOC SAFE NET STEALTH ATTACK? RFK2
AN 4 25
While Republicans throughout the United States are intensifying efforts to regulate soda, lawmakers in Texas, Arkansas, West Virginia, Idaho, Nebraska, Michigan, Arizona, and South Carolina have reportedly declined to support a ban on the drink. However, they are aligned with businessman Michael Bloomberg's other initiatives: banning the purchase of soda with food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
An article in the Atlantic by Nicholas Florko published on Tuesday noted that these states are taking cues from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has expressed strong opposition to allowing low-income Americans on SNAP to use government funds to buy soda.
"The soda wars have long broken along partisan lines. New York City’s ban was struck down in court before it could go into effect, but even more modest attempts to regulate soda have been concentrated in deeply blue cities such as Berkeley and San Francisco. Liberals drink soda too, of course, though the drink’s biggest defenders are on the right. President Donald Trump loves Diet Coke so much that in both of his terms, he’s had a button installed in the Oval Office to summon a refill; on the campaign trail, now–Vice President J. D. Vance claimed that Democrats see Diet Mountain Dew, his drink of choice, as 'racist,'" the article reads.
ALSO READ: 'You own this': Top GOP senator who backed RFK Jr. now under attack after HHS mass firings
"The federal government’s own research has shown that Americans who receive food stamps have worse diets than nonparticipants with similar incomes, and soda is surely part of that problem. These proposed bans should be even more palatable because they wouldn’t be permanent; they are pilot programs to try out the idea."
Overall, Democrats largely continue to stand against soda bans, the article notes. In both Idaho and Arizona, no Democratic legislators in the state Senates supported the proposed measures in their states. To effectively address soda consumption in the U.S., initiatives like these will need to be included in the solution, the author said.
He further pointed out that the Republican Party’s "about-face on soda" is more stark in West Virginia.
"In July, the state removed its soda tax. And now, less than a year later, it is pushing forward with a SNAP soda ban as part of an effort to decrease consumption of 'ultra-processed crap that barely qualifies as food,' Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey said late last month," the article notes.
ALSO READ:A deadly mosquito-borne illness is rising in the US as Trump cuts health funding
Many seasoned advocates against soda express skepticism about Republicans' motives. Marion Nestle, a professor emeritus at NYU and the author of Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning), has supported bans on soda within the SNAP program. She told the Atlantic that she views the current Republican initiatives as a disguise for their true aim, which is to reduce SNAP funding. Nestle added that while soda is detrimental to health, restricting food stamps also poses risks and that research indicates that the program greatly alleviates food insecurity and lowers healthcare expenses.
Supporters of the soda ban emphasize that the official name of the food-stamp program is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, highlighting that a two-liter bottle of Pepsi does not contribute to nutritional assistance. However, public health and anti-hunger advocates contend that any food is better than having no food at all.
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MMA
Steve Bannon endorses cutting food stamp benefits
12/18/24
Weakened 'ruthless' Mitch McConnell wields minimal influence in 2025
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Democrats are voicing strong opposition to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget framework, which narrowly passed Tuesday night by a razor-thin margin of 217-215.
The framework is widely expected to cut $880 billion from Medicaid, a program that helps one in four Americans, and another $230 billion from SNAP, which helps feed about one in eight Americans — while raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion to provide a massive $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, largely for the wealthiest of Americans. People making less than $200,000 a year could effectively see their taxes rise, because Johnson’s legislation does not renew tax cuts from 2017. Johnson’s budget, supported by President Donald Trump, requires a minimum of $2 trillion in cuts to the federal budget.
Every Republican except one voted for Johnson’s budget legislation. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was the only holdout, refusing to give in to pressure from GOP leadership.
Every Democrat present voted against the bill. Only one was not present due to his battle against cancer.
READ MORE: House GOP: Federal Employees Are ‘Bloated Bureaucrats’ Who ‘Do Not Deserve Their Jobs’
But every other Democrat showed up and stood firm.
“After 3 surgeries, a blood clot, an infection, & being hospitalized for over a week – the moment I was discharged from the hospital, I immediately rushed to the airport so I could fly to D.C. and vote NO on Republicans’ disastrous budget plan. I’m proud to stand with @HouseDemocrats to fight Republican’s extreme agenda,” wrote U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin, (D-CA).
Republicans refused to allow U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO), out on maternity leave, to vote by proxy, so she traveled across the country with her four-week old newborn, Sam, to vote against the GOP budget.
I have a message for Donald Trump: nobody fights harder than a mom.
Republican leadership may have denied my ability to vote by proxy but that didn’t stop us from voting against this disastrous budget that strips away health care and food for seniors, veterans, kids and… pic.twitter.com/rfoKNoyeVJ
— U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen (@RepPettersen) February 26, 2025
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), largely seen as the loudest and most consistent voice on the left opposing President Donald Trump’s agenda, tore into Republicans.
“Good morning. The House voted yesterday to kick millions of off their health care, close rural hospitals, and shut down addiction clinics. All in order to afford a giant tax cut for Elon Musk, Donald Trump and their billionaire and corporate friends,” he charged Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Senator Murphy denounced the GOP’s “greed” at an outdoor press conference.
Calling the Republicans’ budget framework “the most massive transfer of wealth and resources from poor people in the middle class to the billionaires and corporations in the history of this country,” Murphy (video below) said, “You’re talking about 880 billion dollars of cuts to Medicaid.”
“Now I get it, like, $880 billion. Like, what does that mean? Right? That’s a huge number, nobody understands. Let me tell you what that means. That that means that sick kids die in this country. That means that hospitals in depressed communities and rural communities close their doors. Right? That means that drug and addiction treatment centers disappear. All across this country.”
:{READ MORE: Refusing to Publicly Reveal DOGE Head, White House Says It’s Been ‘Incredibly Transparent’
“That means that millions of working families who have insurance today, because by the way, 24% of Americans get their health care from Medicaid, they all of a sudden don’t have their health care tomorrow,” he continued, adding, “the scope of this greed is something that we have never ever seen before in this country, and we should not accept it as normal in the United States of America.”
24% of Americans get their health insurance from Medicaid.
Seniors. Working families. Millions of kids.
Republicans voted tonight to burn Medicaid to the ground.
And for what? To fund a giant tax cut for their billionaire friends.
A moral abomination. pic.twitter.com/Xez9GmzJlC
— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) February 26, 2025
U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) explained how Johnson’s budget legislation came together, and all the things Republicans voted against.
He said Democrats asked Republicans to “vote against tax breaks for people earning over $100 million per year.”
“Every Republican vote no,” he said, regarding that proposal, as well as on protections for large numbers of Americans who need support.
Republicans voted against assuring “the American people that they’re not gonna steal school meals from kids in order to give tax breaks for millionaires,” and on protecting Medicaid, which McGovern noted, “covers 41% of all births in the United States.”
“Nearly half of children with special healthcare needs and five in eight nursing home residents,” he said, are also covered by Medicaid.
“Democrats offered an amendment preventing tax giveaways for people earning over $1 million a year. Every Republican voted no,” the Massachusetts Democrat said. “We even offered an amendment preventing tax cuts for people with a net worth of over, get this, $1 billion. Every Republican voted no.”
McGovern: Democrats offered an amendment to protect Medicaid. Every Republican voted no.
Democrats offered an amendment to extend tax cuts for people making under $400,000 while ensuring that corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. Every Republican voted no.… pic.twitter.com/IiuC8skXc2
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 25, 2025
Watch the videos above or at this link.
===
mma
Project 2025 seeks to fulfill the right-wing media dream of cutting vital food assistance
The extreme right-wing initiative proposes cuts to programs benefiting millions of Americans
Written by Casey Wexler & Reed McMaster
Published 10/29/24 mma
Right-wing media have spent over a decade attacking and calling for cuts to vital food assistance programs, with particular focus on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as “food stamps”) as well as free school lunch programs.
Now, Project 2025 — an extreme right-wing initiative organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration — proposes fulfilling their wish of cutting off hundreds of thousands of Americans from vital food assistance.
Project 2025 calls for sweeping cuts to the food stamp program, which would eliminate food assistance for some Americans and slash the purchasing power of families
- Project 2025’s play book, Mandate for Leadership, calls for reimplementing work requirements for food stamps, which it estimates could put 688,000 adults at risk of losing food assistance. Project 2025 claims that these work requirements would be “fairly limited” but admits that the policy will deny some Americans food assistance. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ analysis of Project 2025, “These requirements are premised on the false assumption that people who receive SNAP do not work and must be compelled to do so — an assumption rooted in a host of unfounded prejudices based on race, gender, disability status, and class. Rigorous studies have shown that the current work requirement policy is ineffective at increasing employment. Instead, it takes food assistance away from people with very low incomes and increases food insecurity and hardship.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 9/3/24]
- Project 2025 seeks to remove automatic qualification for SNAP if an individual receives benefits from another government program or broad-based categorical eligibility.The authors of Mandate for Leadership are trying to end automatic eligibility for SNAP for those who receive other benefits because, they claim, “‘benefit’ is defined so broadly that it includes simply receiving distributed pamphlets and 1–800 numbers. This definition, with its low threshold to trigger a ‘benefit,’ allows individuals to bypass eligibility limits—particularly the asset requirement.”
- But a major benefit of broad-based categorical eligibility, according to CBPP, is helping families through the “benefit cliff,” when a family’s income rises just above the SNAP limit. Broad-based categorical eligibility allows states to ignore the threshold and phase out SNAP benefits gradually as income increases. It also lets families keep higher levels of allowed assets, which allows them to “avoid debt, weather unexpected financial disruptions, and better prepare to support themselves in retirement.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 7/30/19]
- Project 2025 attacks recent increases to the Thrifty Food Plan, which estimates the cost of a healthy diet, saying the Biden administration “may have skirted regulations and congressional authority to increase the overall cost of the program.” The Biden administration raised the budget of SNAP when it found higher costs in maintaining a healthy diet, which Project 2025 called “a dramatic overreach.” Mandate says the Thrifty Food Plan has previously been based on just inflation, which was proposed in the latest federal farm bill. According to the Urban Institute, “In effect, the proposed changes would reduce SNAP benefits’ purchasing power over time, exacerbating the current SNAP benefits gap.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; Newsweek, 4/23/24; Urban Institute, 3/18/24;]
- Project 2025 seeks to close the “heat-and-eat loophole” that allows states to issue larger amounts of food stamp benefits. Food stamps are issued based on income minus certain deductions, and beneficiaries of the Low-Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program receive a large deduction even if, according to Project 2025, their LIHEAP benefits are as low as $1 (in reality, as of 2014, LIHEAP benefits have to be $20 or more).
- LIHEAP helps households pay utility costs, and beneficiaries of the program can maximize their SNAP benefits on top of receiving utility assistance. The program was created because low-income households have a tendency to go without food due to high energy costs. Therefore eliminating this “loophole” entirely will create the food insecurity it was implemented to prevent. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; Food Research and Action Center, 3/16/21; LIHEAP Clearinghouse, 2/21/24]
- ## Right-wing media have attacked SNAP and downplayed its importance for years
- In 2012, Fox host Megyn Kelly claimed that food stamps created a culture of dependency. Kelly claimed there is an “emerging culture of dependency on taxpayer-funded money.”She and other Fox figures ignored the fact that most SNAP recipients stay on the program short term. Media Matters, [10/4/12]
- Fox News' Andrea Tantaros claimed she would look “fabulous” if she were forced to live on a SNAP diet. In November 2012, on the eve of Thanksgiving, Fox News host Andrea Tantaros dismissed the plight of hungry Americans, claiming that she would look “fabulous” if she were forced to try to subsist for an extended period of time on $133 for food per month, the amount that SNAP participants in New Jersey received. Media Matters, [11/21/12]
- In 2013, Fox's Charles Payne complained that there wasn’t enough “stigma” surrounding people on SNAP. According to Payne, “The good part about the stigma is it actually does serve as an impetus to get people off” food stamps. Media Matters, [3/28/13]
- In 2013, right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh used his radio show to smear SNAP as “the buy-beer ... with-a-government-credit card program” even though people cannot buy alcohol with food stamps.Media Matters, [3/29/13]
- Fox’s Brian Kilmeade repeated a baseless attack against SNAP in 2013, when the New York Post claimed with little evidence that low-income New Yorkers were using SNAP funds to purchase food to send overseas.Kilmeade said, “You're paying for food stamps for foreigners? The New York Post reports that welfare recipients in New York City are buying groceries and sending them in giant barrels to relatives in Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.” Media Matters, [7/12/13]
- In 2013, Fox aired a special attacking SNAP titled, “The Great Food Stamp Binge,” which centered on one person abusing the program, even though less than 2% of SNAP benefits at the time were issued to people who did not meet all of the program's eligibility requirements.Host Bret Baier asked in reference to people who use food stamps to feed themselves and their families, “Shouldn't there be at least some stigma?” Media Matters, [8/13/13]
- In 2013, Kilmeade claimed that SNAP was rife with fraud when it had one of the lowest fraud rates of all federal programs. According to Kilmeade, “30 percent: That's how many more Americans, according to a new study, are selling food stamps for cash illegally. No, Steve, that's not legal. Nearly 48 million people receive food stamps.” Media Matters, [8/19/13]
- Fox's Brad Blakeman claimed that the Obama administration was “like a drug dealer,” because it was making people dependent on food stamps and it should instead “get ‘em a job.” Blakeman also claimed of entitlement plans broadly: “Fraud, mismanagement, and abuse is rife in America.” Media Matters, [10/31/13]
- Limbaugh falsely claimed that SNAP increases childhood obesity, referring to a misleading op-ed in The Washington Times. Limbaugh also said, “We got nearly 48-49 million Americans on food stamps and they can buy whatever they want with it. The Democrat party has made everybody they can think that they’re victims, which makes them entitled.” Media Matters, [12/3/13]
- In 2014, Kilmeade falsely claimed SNAP benefits could be used to withdraw cash and purchase marijuana. He stated, “Can people collecting food stamps in Colorado add marijuana to their shopping list? Right now the answer is yes. Because there's nothing blocking government benefit cards from working in pot shop ATMs.” Media Matters, [1/21/14]
- In 2014, then-Fox host Eric Bolling cited an interview with food stamp user and surfer Jason Greenslate to argue food stamps will later be used on “strip clubs” and “liquor stores.” He stated, “What's next? Strip clubs, liquor stores, pot dispensaries? Oh, that's already going on, folks. Welcome to Obama's America.” Media Matters, [2/25/14]
- Fox's Stuart Varney accused the government of helping poor people in order to buy votes by expanding food stamps. He stated, “What's really going on here is the government is buying votes. They’re keeping churning out food stamps in return for votes. That's what's happening.” Media Matters, [3/11/14]
- In 2014, when a report showed that the SNAP benefits program hit a historic low for waste in 2012, Kilmeade accused the program of being wasteful. He stated, “The government is overpaying on food stamps by about $2 billion.” Media Matters, [7/24/14]
- In 2015, Varney continued to push his dubious theory that food stamps are designed to “buy votes” for Democrats.He told Fox anchor Martha MacCallum, “I said to you, this is a couple years ago, I think — I remember saying it to you — this is an attempt to buy votes right before an election.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [5/13/15]
- In 2017, Fox guest and billionaire Ken Langone falsely claimed people were using food stamps to buy drugs. According to Langone, “Hell, people use food stamps to buy marijuana, that's illegal, or cocaine, or whatever the hell else people use to get high.” Fox News, *Your World with Neil Cavuto,* [5/24/17]
- In 2017, Fox host Jesse Watters said that the “able-bodied” on food stamps could get work by building Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall. Watters said, “Maybe the able-bodied that are getting the food stamps could work for the food stamps by building the wall.” Fox News, *The Five*, [7/12/17]
- In 2018, Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway blamed SNAP for helping perpetuate obesity in America. Hemingway: “People on these programs tend to eat a lot of cookies, candies, sugary snacks.” Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [2/13/18]
- In 2018, Fox's Jesse Watters praised the Trump administration's food stamp cuts and claimed that SNAP fraud was a major issue even though it had fallen consistently since 1993.Watters also said, “Food stamps skyrocketed under President Obama and under President Trump they’re coming down. That’s a good thing. You don’t want to be dependent on government, but you want to do it with heart.” Media Matters, [2/13/18; Time, 3/30/17]
- In 2018, Fox’s Tucker Carlson attacked refugees for using food assistance and complained about having to pay taxes if migrants get assistance. He said, “If we're rewarding foreign nationals who break our laws, why should I have to pay my taxes? Why should I, as an American citizen, obey the laws? I mean, I guess that's a rhetorical question, but what's the message that we are sending? I have to obey every law or else I go to jail, but a foreign national can show up and give the finger to our justice system and get rewarded for it? How does that work exactly?” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight,* [8/14/18]
- In 2019, Fox & Friends guest Star Parker celebrated Trump’s move kicking hundreds of thousands of people off SNAP: “This is fantastic news.” She added, “They are now acknowledging those that are sitting on their couch, they've gotten very comfortable on the couch, to say our national food stamp program is for those that are in need, desperate need.” Fox News,*Fox & Friends*, [12/5/19]
- In 2021, Fox’s Sean Duffy claimed Black people who spend SNAP benefits on junk food are the cause of racial disparity in COVID statistics.He said, “We have to take personal responsibility for the choices that we make in our lives, and to say that it's all racism is a farce.” Fox News, *The Five*, [4/9/21]
Project 2025 also aims to cut free school lunch programs, cutting children off from vital nutrition
- Some school districts are part of the USDA’s Community Eligibility Provision, which allows all students within a low-average-income school district to access free breakfast and lunch.U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, accessed[7/22/24]
- Project 2025 wants CEP gone, ending universal free school lunch for low-income schools and districts.Mandate also criticizes efforts to allow schools to provide meals in the summer. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]
- Not providing meals over the summer creates a three-month food insecurity gap. Nebraska Public Media, [7/18/24]
- Project 2025 also wants to reduce school lunch programs to their “original intent” by feeding only “students who otherwise would not have food to eat while at school.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]
- Studies have shown that before CEP, students who were eligible for free school lunch while other students paid were stigmatized.CEP eliminates that stigma by providing free lunch schoolwide, which potentially helps students do better academically and receive fewer disciplinary infractions. American Educational Research Journal, [1/9/24; Economics of Education Review, August 2020]
- Free school meal programs like CEP have also been shown to decrease obesity and lower school administrative burdens. Health Day, [3/18/24; No Kid Hungry Center for Best Practices, accessed on 7/22/24]
- ## Right-wing media have also been crusading against free school lunch for more than a decade
In 2010, Rush Limbaugh attacked school lunches and suggested hungry children should “dumpster dive.” Limbaugh provided a list of places kids could supposedly go to get meals such as their own kitchens, McDonald’s, and a dumpster, stating, “There are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Rush Limbaugh Show*, [6/16/10]|}:
- Limbaugh complained on his show that the Memphis school district provided dinner, arguing that it would lead to children living at school. He stated, “You know where this is heading? To hell with home — the kids live at school. You and your spouse, the sperm meets the egg, the kid’s born and, off to school he goes and you might see him on weekends.” He continued, “Going home is going to be the exception. Going home is going to be the odd thing about school.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Rush Limbaugh Show*, [11/9/11]
- In 2013, Limbaugh compared students who receive free school lunches to family pets.He claimed, “When you get a new pet what’s the first thing you do to try to bond with it? You want to be the one to feed it, right? You don’t want anybody else feeding that new puppy or kitten. You are going to, because you know that that puppy or kitten will bond with you first and when that happens, everybody else is getting second or third dibs. That pet is always going to be yours if you’re the only one that feeds it. Well, same thing here.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Rush Limbaugh Show*, [9/6/13]
- Fox guest Joy Pullman called school lunches a “collusion” between big business and government that deprives families of the joy of providing for their children. She stated, “So the federal school lunch program, the reason that it exists is actually a collusion between big agribusiness and big government, and what it ends up doing is raising food prices for the poor and middle class, it makes kids more fat, and it also has the effect of making families -- depriving them of their ability and the privilege and joy of providing for their own children.” Media Matters, [10/23/13]
- Fox's Martha MacCallum attacked New Jersey’s free school lunch programs, arguing that it’ll cause kids to grow up thinking “school lunch is free.” She stated, “One of the things that kills me is that now that, you know, there’s a free lunch program in New Jersey, and it’s for everyone, even if you don't need help to send your child's lunch to school. So, now those kids are all going to grow up thinking, well, school lunch is free. Right? And then God help the person who comes along and tries to take that away.” Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [9/30/21]
- As recently as 2021, Fox host Sean Hannity complained about free school lunches that were offered in summertime. He said, “They want free school lunches, even when school is out for the summer, they want lunches for welfare recipients, anybody and everything for illegal immigrants as well.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [10/1/21]
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an 11 23
insisting they have to make tough cuts to government spending, some House Republicans are pushing to gut a decades-old federal program that helps feed 53% of all infants born in the United States, along with women through and up to six weeks after their pregnancies, breastfeeding women, and children up until the age of 5.
WIC, officially the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, is a program under the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. The USDA notes that it is “not an entitlement program as Congress does not set aside funds to allow every eligible individual to participate in the program. WIC is a federal grant program for which Congress authorizes a specific amount of funds each year for the program.”
Despite the growth in both population and food prices, some House Republicans, like U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), oppose increasing funding for WIC, according to Politico.
“At stake: whether the government will have to begin turning away large numbers of mothers and their children from the program,” Politico reports, noting House Republicans are “pushing to pare back WIC spending this year, arguing tough cuts are needed across the government amid the nation’s mounting debt.”
Aderholt suggested putting the onus on the USDA to ask the White House for more funds, rather than appropriate funds to meet the expenses WIC knows are coming. The Alabama GOP Congressman “who chairs the House Appropriations panel on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, recently argued there’s nothing stopping USDA from requesting more funding from the Office of Management and Budget for WIC if the program runs short during the stop-gap period,” Politico reported.
READ MORE: ‘DC Gulag’: Possible Trump AG Wants to ‘Denaturalize’ and ‘Deport’ MSNBC Host
“If this becomes a problem, that’s because the administration is purposefully making it a problem for not allocating these necessary funds,” Aderholt, the chair of the House Values Action Team (VAT), said. But Congress, not the White House, is responsible for funding WIC, which up until now has always been bipartisan.
“Without congressional action,” Politico adds, “Minnesota WIC director Kate Franken said states will be forced to add families to wait lists for the first time in nearly 30 years.”
“If WIC funding is not adequate, and funds are cut, our families and our communities would suffer the consequences,” Franken said.
Last year, Aderholt was among many Republicans and Democrats furious over the baby formula shortage, but was also one of the 192 House Republicans who voted against legislation to help the FDA address the problem, which was “triggered by a safety recall.”
Last week, Aderholt introduced a 2024 funding bill he said cuts “almost 30% and will bring funding back to roughly 2018 Trump-era levels.”
READ MORE: Trump Lawyer Trips Over His Own Argument as Judges Appear Skeptical of Gag Order Appeal
The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities last week noted House bills would take “away food assistance from hundreds of thousands of new parents and young children by underfunding WIC.”
“The House Agriculture bill’s WIC funding is well below the level needed to serve all eligible families who wish to participate, and would result in an estimated 600,000 new parents, toddlers, and preschoolers being turned away,” the nonprofit think tank reported. “The House bill would also cut WIC’s science-based fruit and vegetable benefit by between 58 and 71 percent (depending on the recipient’s age) for 4.7 million of the remaining participants.”
Earlier this month the President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities criticized House Speaker Mike Johnson, noting his continuing resolution to keep the federal government open “doesn’t provide additional funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) so that postpartum participants and young children aren’t turned away from vital food assistance.”
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11 23
ahead of President Joe Biden's goal to "win back rural voters" in 2024, according to a Thursday Politico report, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), "is a proponent of more hardline GOP efforts to overhaul the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the country's largest anti-hunger program that serves 41 million low-income Americans," farmers and rural Americans.
Per Politico, Johnson has referred to SNAP, formerly called "food stamps," as "our nation's most broken and bloated welfare program."
As a result, "Many Democrats are alarmed that Johnson's rise to speaker will embolden GOP hardliners who are eager to target nutrition spending in the farm bill," the report notes.
"I can't imagine the Mike Johnson that we know would pass up the opportunity to secure as many conservative wins as possible in this farm bill," a Republican aide told Politico. "And that means serious SNAP reforms."
The news outlet notes the new speaker "is still assembling his team," and "has yet to dive into detailed planning for the next farm bill."
Politico reports, "House Republicans are essentially guaranteed to need Democratic votes to pass the next farm bill, given the GOP's narrow majority and opposition within the House GOP over the topline spending. Even some House Republicans, like Dusty Johnson, say the task ahead is significant, given there are 'a number of hardliners who struggle to get to 'yes' on anything."
Johnson told the news outlet, "At the same time, you've got some pragmatic farm-state members who get frustrated with the political gamesmanship."
Still, "as a senior member of the conservative-leaning Republican Study Committee," Politico emphasizes, Johnson's history includes supporting "proposals to roll back food aid expansions under Biden and block states from exempting some work requirements for SNAP."
READ MORE:House GOP unveils budget with trillions in cuts to medicaid, food benefits and more
According to the report, far-right "Republicans are pressing to include similar measures in the next farm bill. Such a move would upend the fragile bipartisan coalition needed to pass the legislation — a blow to House Republicans who represent the majority of rural and farm districts, including Johnson, as well as more centrist GOP members who will be fighting for their political lives in 2024.
U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) told the news outlet the speaker is "100 percent wrong on SNAP," which he believes is "one of the most impactful tools we have to fight poverty."
The Democratic lawmaker added, "Anyone who thinks the solution is more cuts is living in an alternate reality."
Politico's full report is available at this link.
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work requirements i assume snap 4 23 debt hostage
https://www.alternet.org/youre-unemployable-matt-gaetz-welfare/
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an 4 23
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is poised to propose cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which supports millions of Americans — but many of his Republican colleagues doubt he'll be successful,Politico reports.
According to The Washington Post, over the last few weeks, the "GOP has focused its attention on two anti-poverty programs: Medicaid, which enrolls the poorest families in health insurance, and food stamps" — or SNAP — "which provide grocery benefits to those in need."
The Post reports:
[The GOP's] demands largely come in the context of a brewing fight over the federal budget. Many Republicans have said that federal aid programs offer a way for policymakers toboost U.S. workforce participation [3.5%?!] while saving Washington money — a stance that infuriates Democrats, aid workers and others, who say such changes could harm vulnerable families still reeling since the coronavirus pandemic.
READ MORE: 'Cowards': GOP pushes bill targeting food aid for the poor
However, Politico reports Senate Democrats are not going for it, having "said such measures are dead on arrival in the upper chamber, and with the help of key Senate Republicans, they have killed off a series of similar House GOP efforts over the years — including a 2018 push involving McCarthy and his current top debt limit lieutenant Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA)."
Politico notes "the early response from Senate Republicans this time around does not bode well for a different outcome in 2023.
An anonymous Republican lawmaker's aide said regarding the proposal, "I mean, Godspeed. Get what you can. We're going to live in reality over here."
Similarly, Politico adds Sen. John Boozman (R-AK), who is a lead on the Agriculture Committee the controls SNAP, said days "after the 2022 midterms that the effort 'would be difficult to pass in the Senate with 60 votes.'"
READ MORE: 'If it were Matt Gaetz': Florida Congressman floats cutting SNAP
Likewise, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said of McCarthy's measure, "I'm sure it won't be easy" to achieve.
Politico reports:
Already, the talk of shrinking SNAP, which currently serves 41 million low-income Americans,is raising pressure on many Republicans that represent districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. Several of those members have raised internal concerns, especially about proposals from their colleagues that would add work requirements for some low-income parents who have children under 18 living at home, according to two other people involved in those conversations, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal caucus matters.
"The President has been clear that he will oppose policies that push Americans into poverty or cause them to lose health care," White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa said according to The Post. "That's why he opposes Republican proposals that would take food assistance and Medicaid away from millions of people by adding burdensome, bureaucratic requirements."
READ MORE: GOP ramps up cruel push for work requirements
Politico's full report is available at this link. The Washington Post's report is here (subscription required).
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an 2 23 MOFO where are these # coming from?
United States Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) told right-wing commentator Steve Bannon on Saturday that he would back efforts to slash spending toward the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as a substitute for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Nearly half of those Americans who benefit from SNAP are children.
"I just don't understand why we're a country that pays people who could go to work, not to. And when I go..." Gaetz began.
:{:{"How big a deal is that? Does that come away with the emergency measures coming off or is it deeper?" Bannon interrupted to ask.}:
}:
"Oh, considerably deeper. And by the way, it pays you on both sides of the ledger, right? If you impose work requirements on all means-tested entitlement programs for working-age people, not for the disabled, not for seniors, but for working-age people, it's a trillion dollars in savings during the ten-year budget window," Gaetz said on War Room.
"This is in Medicaid and other..." Bannon interjected.
"This is in Medicaid and in food stamps," Gaetz stated.
"...in food stamps. Discretionary spending," Bannon added.
READ MORE: Letter from 30 of Matt Gaetz’s classmates 'denounced' him as 'the antithesis of a citizen lawyer'
"Yeah. The biggest chunks are from the Obamacare Medicaid expansion to able-bodied adults and to the SNAP program. It's over 400 billion to SNAP," the congressman continued.
"So Social Security and Medicare are off the table. But you're saying taking Medicaid and other aspects of discretion?" Bannon wondered.
"Well look, if it was Matt Gaetz, I think that we do need reforms to Social Security and Medicare. I understand politically enough people have said that's off the table," Gaetz mused.
"But that can come later," Bannon added.
"By the way, Medicaid should not be a sacred cow.And so it hasn't been," said Gaetz. "You notice people and talk about Medicaid the same way they're talking about Social Security, right? So with Medicaid, I think there's a lot of meat on the bone for savings. In SNAP, you can get over 400 billion in savings."
Watch below or at this link.
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an 5 22
Republicans just voted against two bills to ease the baby formula shortage they have spent weeks falsely trying to pin on President Joe Biden.
In tweets and in floor speeches, Republicans have been attacking President Biden for the nationwide baby formula shortage caused by one manufacturer’s recall and closure of its plant for bacterial infection after two infants died.The shortage has been exacerbated by a trade agreement signed by then-President Donald Trump that makes it extremely difficult and expensive to import formula from other countries, and the fact that 90 percent of baby formula in the U.S. is manufactured by just four companies. Also, hoarding, and price-gouging.
Last week President Biden sat down with manufacturers and retailers to map out a plan to get more formula onto store shelves immediately and directed the Food and Drug Administration to help get the plant reopened. This week he went two steps further: he invoked the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce more formula and produce it ahead of other products and created a program to use federal planes to import baby formula from other countries.
House Democrats last week also opened an investigation into the baby formula shortage.
On Wednesday the House voted on two emergency bills to further ease the shortage.
One example of Republicans falsely attacking President Biden and the left is House GOP Caucus chair Elise Stefanik‘s now-infamous tweet accusing Democrats of having “no plan” as she labeled them “pedo grifters.”...
one bill would give FDA $28 million to add staff, work to help get more formula to consumers, and create a long-term strategy, including increased safety inspections so this cannot happen again. The second would dramatically increase supply from foreign sources to consumers using the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program.
192 House Republicans voted against giving FDA $28 million to help fix the crisis and ensure it does not happen again.
Nine House Republicans voted against making it easier for WIC customers to get access to baby formula.
Many Americans are becoming outraged as the news from last night’s votes is spreading online.
[Here’s the list of 9 members of Congress (all Republicans)who voted NO:
Marjorie Taylor Greene Matt Gaetz Louie Gohmert Lauren Boebert Paul Gosar Thomas Massie Andy Biggs Clay Higgins Chip Roy.]
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aha this is a kind of extraction, pvtize profits, socialize costs; corps are tax dodgers thus leeches
https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/bernie-sanders/
'The Walton family is the real welfare queen': GAO report details how taxpayers subsidize corporate giants' low wages
pinpointing a reality denounced as "morally obscene" by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a new government study shows how some of the nation's largest and most profitable corporations—including Walmart, McDonald's, Dollar General, and Amazon—feast upon taxpayer money by paying their employees such low wages that huge numbers of those workers throughout the year are forced to rely on public assistance programs such as Medicaid and food assistance just to keep themselves and their families afloat.
According to a statement from Sanders' office, the study he commissioned the Government Accountability Office to carry out—titled "Millions of Full-time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs"—found that an estimated 5.7 million Medicaid enrollees and 4.7 million SNAP(Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients who worked full-time for 50 or more weeks in 2018earned wages so low that they qualified for these federal benefits. In addition, an estimated 12 million wage-earning adults enrolled in Medicaid and 9 million wage-earning adults living in households receiving SNAP benefits worked at some point in 2018.
Upon the study's release Wednesday, Warren Gunnels, staff director and policy adviser for Sen. Sanders, tweeted: "The real looting in America is theWalton family becoming $63 billion richer during a pandemic, while paying wages so low that 14,541 of their workers in 9 states need food stamps—all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Yes. The Walton family is the real welfare queen in America."
According to the Washington Post:, based on the GAO report:
Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries in every state. McDonald's was in the top five of employers with employees receiving federal benefits in at least nine states.
In the nine states that responded about SNAP benefits—Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington—Walmart was found to have employed about 14,500 workers receiving the benefit, followed by McDonald's with 8,780, according to Sanders's team. In six states that reported Medicaid enrollees, Walmart again topped the list, with 10,350 employees, followed by McDonald's with 4,600.
In Georgia, for example, Walmart employed an estimated 3,959 workers on Medicaid—an estimated 2.1 percent of the total of non-elderly, non-disabled people in the state receiving the benefit. McDonald's was next on the list, employing 1,480 who received Medicaid, or 0.8 percent of the total of non-elderly, non-disabled people on the program.
"At a time when huge corporations like Walmart and McDonald's are making billions in profits and giving their CEOs tens of millions of dollars a year, they're relying on corporate welfare from the federal government by paying their workers starvation wages," said Sanders in a statement. "That is morally obscene."
With the individual wealth of high-ranking executives and members of billionaire families like the Walton's, who own Walmart, soaring even as front-line, minimum wage employees and their families struggling to stay afloat amid the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, Sanders argues that the stark contrast should be a wakeup call for those who have refused to see how unjust and economically backward it is for the federal government, meaning taxpayers, to subsidize the cruel wages that massive profitable companies force their workers to accept.
"U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America," said Sanders. "It is time for the owners of Walmart, McDonald's and other large corporations to get off of welfare and pay their workers a living wage."
The Walton family is worth $238 billion. Yet they pay wages so low, 14,541 of their workers in 9 states are forced… https://t.co/NHcullycqz
— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders)1605742875.0
"No one in this country should live in poverty," Sanders added. "No one should go hungry. No one should be unable to get the medical care they need. It is long past time to increase the federal minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to $15, and guarantee health care to all Americans as a human right."
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an 1020 in middle of covid crisis, when mcconn/trump cut off $; this makes no sense right before election, so mebbe lag effect?
judge strikes down Trump effort to slash food stamps for 700,000 Americans: Victory for 'basic human decency'
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220 theconv
Scaling back SNAP for self-reliance clashes with the original goals of food stamps
Tracy Roof, University of Richmond
This pillar of the American safety net originated as a solution to the paradox of hunger in the midst of plenty.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-shame-of-child-poverty-in-the-trump-era-poor-kids-lose-as-billionaires-cash-in/
no lnx
Rajan Menon / Tom Dispatch February 3, 2020
The plight of impoverished children anywhere should evoke sympathy, exemplifying as it does the suffering of the innocent and defenseless. Poverty among children in a wealthy country like the United States, however, should summon shame and outrage as well. Unlike poor countries (sometimes run by leaders more interested in lining their pockets than anything else), what excuse does the United States have for its striking levels of child poverty? After all, it has the world’s 10th highest per capita income at $62,795 and an unrivaled gross domestic product (GDP) of $21.3 trillion. Despite that, in 2020, an estimated 11.9 million American kids — 16.2% of the total — live below the official poverty line, which is a paltry $25,701 for a family of four with two kids. Put another way, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, kids now constitute one-third of the 38.1 million Americans classified as poor and 70% of them have at least one working parent — so poverty can’t be chalked up to parental indolence.
Yes, the proportion of kids living below the poverty line has zigzagged down from 22% when the country was being ravaged by the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and was even higher in prior decades, but no one should crack open the champagne bottles just yet. The relevant standard ought to be how the United States compares to other wealthy countries. The answer: badly. It has the 11th highest child poverty rate of the 42 industrialized countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Winnow that list down to European Union states and Canada, omitting low and middle-income countries, and our child poverty rate ranks above only Spain’s. Use the poverty threshold of the OECD — 50% of a country’s median income ($63,178 for the United States) — and the American child poverty rate leaps to 20%.
The United States certainly doesn’t lack the means to drive child poverty down or perhaps even eliminate it. Many countries on that shorter OECD list have lower per-capita incomes and substantially smaller GDPs yet (as a UNICEF report makes clear) have done far better by their kids. Our high child-poverty rate stems from politics, not economics — government policies that, since the 1980s, have reduced public investment as a proportion of GDP in infrastructure, public education, and poverty reduction. These were, of course, the same years when a belief that “big government” was an obstacle to advancement took ever-deeper hold, especially in the Republican Party. Today, Washington allocates only 9% of its federal budget to children, poor or not. That compares to a third for Americans over 65, up from 22% in 1971. If you want a single fact that sums up where we are now, inflation-adjusted per-capita spending on kids living in the poorest families has barely budged compared to 30 years ago whereas the corresponding figure for the elderly has doubled.
The conservative response to all this remains predictable: you can’t solve complex social problems like child poverty by throwing money at them. Besides, government antipoverty programs only foster dependence and create bloated bureaucracies without solving the problem. It matters little that the actual successes of American social programs prove this claim to be flat-out false. Before getting to that, however, let’s take a snapshot of child poverty in America.
Sizing Up the Problem....
Defining poverty may sound straightforward, but it’s not. The government’s annual Official Poverty Measure (OPM), developed in the 1960s, establishes poverty lines by taking into account family size, multiplying the 1963 cost for a minimum food budget by three while factoring in changes in the Consumer Price Index, and comparing the result to family income. In 2018, a family with a single adult and one child was considered poor with an income below $17,308 ($20,2012 for two adults and one child, $25,465 for two adults and two children, and so on). According to the OPM, 11.8% of all Americans were poor that year.
By contrast, the Supplementary Poverty Measure (SPM), published yearly since 2011, builds on the OPM but provides a more nuanced calculus. It counts the post-tax income of families, but also cash flows from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC), both of which help low-income households. It adds in government-provided assistance through, say, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), Medicaid, subsidies for housing and utilities, and unemployment and disability insurance. However, it deducts costs like child care, child-support payments, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. According to the SPM, the 2018 national poverty rate was 12.8%.
Of course, neither of these poverty calculations can tell us how children are actually faring. Put simply, they’re faring worse. In 2018, 16.2% of Americans under 18 lived in families with incomes below the SPM line. And that’s not the worst of it. A 2019 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study commissioned by Congress found that 9% of poor children belong to families in “deep poverty” (incomes that are less than 50% of the SPM). But 36% of all American children live in poor or “near poor” families, those with incomes within 150% of the poverty line.
Child poverty also varies by race — a lot. The rate for black children is 17.8%; for Hispanic kids, 21.7%; for their white counterparts, 7.9%. Worse, more than half of all black and Hispanic kids live in “near poor” families compared to less than a quarter of white children. Combine age and race and you’ll see another difference, especially for children under five, a population with an overall 2017 poverty rate of 19.2%. Break those under-fives down by race, however, and here’s what you find: white kids at 15.9%, Hispanic kids at an eye-opening 25.8%, and their black peers at a staggering 32.9%.
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congress to Vote on $22 Billion Defense Increase One Week After Trump Slashed Food Stamps
Alex Emmons
Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna called the defense bill an example of “astonishing moral cowardice.”
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mma 1219
fox News’ crusade against food stamps gains a victory with new rule change approved by the Trump administration
12/05/19 4:01 PM EST
Fox & Friends guest Star Parker celebrates Trump move kicking hundreds of thousands of people off SNAP: “This is fantastic news”
12/05/19 8:59 AM EST
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no lnx
Punishing the poor for being hungry
Written by David K. Shipler / Washington Monthly October 11, 2019
The United States might be the only country in the world where poverty is considered a moral failing—on the part of the victims, not the society. When conservatives are in charge of government, this judgment infiltrates policy. Republicans move repeatedly to twist regulations around an assumption that the poor don’t want to work and don’t make sound decisions. And when this bias affects children’s nutrition, it can cause lifelong impairment.
In the last year alone, the Trump administration has taken multiple shots at food stamps, now called SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which helped feed about 40 million people last year. The latest change, one week ago, would cut benefits by $4.5 billion over five years. Even in a booming economy, one in seven households with children were considered “food insecure” last year, according to the Department of Agriculture’s 2018 survey, meaning that they weren’t sure of having enough food for everyone.
Research in the rapidly advancing field of neuroscience has documented the severe biological assaults caused by inadequate nutrition during sensitive phases of brain development. Numerous studies, compiled in a lengthy National Academy of Sciences report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, portray a devastating landscape of cognitive deficiency resulting from nutritional deprivation. The insufficiency of healthy food during a pregnant woman’s second trimester can reduce the creation of neurons, the brain’s impulse-conducting cells. Malnutrition in the third trimester restricts their maturation and retards the production of branched cells called glia.
Iron is essential to promote the growth of the brain in size and the creation of the nerve-transmitting myelin sheath around the brain’s nerve fibers. The impact of iron deficiency in a baby, therefore, never disappears, even once the deficiency is eliminated. One longitudinal studythat followed children from infancy through adolescence found that they scored lower “in arithmetic achievement and written expression, motor functioning, and some specific cognitive processes such as spatial memory and selective recall.”
Teachers reported that such children displayed “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems.” It is no great leap of logic to see learning disabilities as one result of malnutrition. And a child who can’t do decently in school, who can’t follow half of what a teacher is saying, is more inclined to drop out.
For those Republicans who are moved more by self-interest than empathy, it’s worth noting that high school dropouts earn less that those with degrees, pay less in taxes, have more serious medical problems, and are at higher risk of ending up in jail.
Yet Trump’s people have sought to saddle the $68 billion-a-year SNAP program with restrictions and cuts to the monthly benefits, which now come on debit cards with declining balances, and typically last a family only two or three weeks. Certain regulations that the Trump administration has either enacted or has openly considered would treat needy Americans with suspicion and distrust. For instance:
Officials have considered imposing a drug-testing regime on SNAP recipients (although not on farmers who receive huge federal subsidies as part of the same legislation).
The Agriculture Department, which administers the program, published a rule in July to eliminate states’ option to raise eligibility limits above the federal ceiling, which is 130 percent of the poverty line.
Previously, states could get waivers to enroll families earning more if their housing and child-care expenses soaked up a big percentage of their income. More generous housing subsidies would help, because in many parts of the country, where rent can consume 50 percent or more of a family’s budget, the money for food gets squeezed. The comment period on the rule change ended in September; once adopted, it will cut off about 3 million recipients.
In last week’s action, the administration effectively took away $75 in benefits from one out of every five families by recalculating how housing and utilities costs are figured.
The Trump administration tried to tighten work requirements in this year’s budget, Congress refused, and officials have gone ahead anyway to partially evade the legislative intent. Since 1996, single able-bodied adults with no dependents, up to age 49, could get SNAP benefits for only three months in a three-year period unless they worked or were in job training at least 80 hours a month. States could waive the rule in areas with acute joblessness. Trump wanted to expand the requirement to age 59 and, more harmfully, apply it to those with children over six years old. That was rejected by Republicans and Democrats in Congress. So last December the Agriculture Department did what it could administratively by making it much harder for states to get waivers.
In his 2019 budget, Trump proposed replacing half of a family’s cash grants with a food package of cereal, pasta, peanut butter, canned fruit and vegetables, meat, poultry, and other items deemed good for them. Sending such packages to 40 million people would have been so costly and impractical that the idea collapsed of its own weight. But the notion seemed borne of a patronizing attitude toward the poor, who suffer from a disparaging stereotype that they do not act responsibly.
Clinics treating childhood malnutrition see a broad array of causes. Lack of money is the centerpiece, but lack of knowledge about healthy eating can also contribute to some cases. Health providers find that some parents don’t know how to cook with relatively inexpensive ingredients. New immigrants unfamiliar with American food can be fooled by ads into thinking that Coke and Cheetos are healthy. So can Americans themselves. Lots of junk food is cheap and filling, hence the nation’s epidemic of obesity, which can be a sign of malnutrition.
Supermarkets with fresh, healthy food are scarce in many low-income neighborhoods. A child’s food allergies can be baffling without the funds and information required to have a large assortment of choices on hand. Single parents doing shift work can’t keep track of what their kids are being fed by multiple caregivers. Nor do they usually have the orderly life that allows them to sit children down calmly to feed them, or have a regular family meal.
In other words, childhood malnutrition is created at the confluence of problems and disabilities that magnify and reinforce one another. They must all be addressed. The cognitive impairment that results cannot be attacked by a country that keeps electing officials who entangle the safety net in a set of punitive impulses.
David K. Shipler is a Washington Monthly contributing writer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven books, and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He blogs at The Shipler Report.
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no lnx
Trump’s big farmer grift: He’s giving millions to the rich while starving the poor
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-big-farmer-grift-hes-giving-millions-to-the-rich-while-starving-the-poor
Written by Jim Hightower / Creators Syndicate August 15, 2019
Donald Trump loooooves farmers. We know this because he says so. “Farmers, I LOVE YOU!” he declared in December. And we’ve learned that whenever The Donald says something, it’s true — even when it’s not.
These days, he’s loving farmers to death. Trump has ignored the obvious need to get monopolistic price-fixing bankers, suppliers and commodity buyers off their backs. And he’s ineptly playing tariff games with China and other buyers of U.S. farm products, causing exports and farm prices to tumble. The result is that our ag economy is tumbling into a deep ditch, slamming farm families and rural America with a rising tsunami of bankruptcies.
Adding crude insult to economic injury, Trump’s doofus of an ag secretary, Sonny Perdue, laughed at farmers, branding them “whiners” for opposing his majesty’s disastrous policies.
So, needing a political “I love you” gesture, Trump has been sending big bouquets of money to some of his beloved farmers. Our money. Lots of it — $28 billion so far, in what he cynically (and comically) calls the Market Facilitation Program, otherwise known as a taxpayer bailout.
But TrumpLove turns out to be highly selective, with more than half of the government payments going to the biggest farm owners. The Department of Agriculture initially announced a $125,000 limit on the amount any one farm could get, but every Trump deal seems to have a gimmick in it to give a special break to the slickest operators. The slickum in this deal is that assorted members of a family can claim to be owners of the same farm and be eligible for bailout money, even if they do no actual farming and live in New York City! Thus, one Missouri farm family got $2.8 million worth of subsidy love from Trump, and more than 80 families topped half a million in payments.
Meanwhile, the great majority of farmers — 80% of eligible grain farmers — got zilch from Donald the Dealmaker. The smaller producers who are most endangered by his export collapse got less than $5,000. So Trump’s “Market Facilitation” is squeezing the many who are most in need while helping a few of the largest get even bigger.
While the Trumpistas are presently trying to plow a multibillion-dollar subsidy into big grain farms, they’re shockingly stingy when it comes to our society’s moral responsibility to make sure the least-wealthy among us get an adequate level of food. Their latest effort in the practice of mass minginess is to try literally taking food off poor children’s plates. Using a tangle of federal red tape, Trump ideologues and bureaucratic minions are intervening to prevent states from providing food stamp assistance to millions of their people.
According to federal rules, to qualify for food aid, a family of three should have an income under $27,000 a year. But with rents, utilities, health care and even food prices constantly rising, millions of Americans can’t make ends meet on such a low income. Thus, 40 states have stepped in to loosen that income restriction so families at least get the minimum nutrition humans need. Far from being welfare moochers (as far-right-wing extremists screech), these recipients overwhelmingly are working families, children, the elderly and Americans with disabilities. The benefit is hardly lavish; it averages only $127 a month, but even this modest outlay has proven enormously successful in mitigating poverty.
Congress actually authorized states to make such pragmatic income adjustments in a 1996 revamp of the law. But look out! Here comesSonny Perdue again, rising up on his hind legs to proclaim that naughty state officials are using that authority as a “loophole” to circumvent Trump’s federal authority. So Sonny and Donnie are demanding that a whole new bureaucracy of food stamp “eligibility police” be set up to monitor the assets of hard-hit people who’re just trying to get adequate food on their tables. This nonsense will cost tens of millions of our dollars to harass the poor in an autocratic hope of nabbing a couple of hungry families who have a dime more in assets than miserly Trumpistas claim they should have.
What we have here is government by plutocratic authoritarians who’ll gleefully dole out millions to a wealthy family and then just as gleefully go out of their way to deny food to millions of poor families.
Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org. COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM
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the conv 819
Restricting SNAP benefits could hurt millions of Americans – and local communities
no lnx many
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying to restrict access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.
SNAP is the primary way the government helps low-income Americans put food on the table. According to the government’s own calculations, an estimated 3.1 million people could lose SNAP benefits, commonly referred to as food stamps, through a new proposal that would change some application procedures and eligibility requirements.
We are nutrition and food policy researchers who have studied the effects of SNAP on the health and well-being of low-income Americans. Should this change go into effect, we believe millions of Americans, especially children, and local communities would suffer.
Americans access their SNAP benefits through cards issued by the states. United States Department of Agriculture
Helping families and the economy
SNAP helped 39.7 million Americans buy food in 2018.
Federal research has found that the program reduces hunger, particularly in children – who make up 44% of its beneficiaries.
Hunger and poor nutrition harm children’s health and hinder their development. Kids who don’t get enough to eat have more trouble at school and are more likely to experience mental health problems. One research team found that people who had access to SNAP as children earned higher incomes and were less likely to develop chronic diseases like diabetes once they grew up.
“My eating habits have improved where I can eat more healthy than before,” a Massachusetts woman who had recently been approved for SNAP told us. “It is like night and day – the difference between surviving and not surviving.”
SNAP benefits also ripple through the economy. They lead to money being spent at local stores, freeing up cash to pay rent and other bills. Every US$1 invested in SNAP generates $1.79 in economic activity, according to the USDA.
Trying again and again
The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to slash SNAP and make it harder for people who qualify for benefits to get them.
Its 2018, 2019 and 2020 budget proposals all called for cutting spending on food stamps by about 25%.
The Trump administration also worked with Republicans in Congress to try to tighten eligibility requirements. Had this policy been implemented, all beneficiaries between the ages of 18 and 59 deemed “able-bodied” would have had to prove they were working at least 20 hours per week or were enrolled in school. According to government projections, some 1.2 million Americans would have eventually lost their benefits as a result.
Congress, which would have needed to approve the change for it to take effect, rejected it in December 2018. The White House then sought to change work requirements through a new rule that has not yet taken effect.
In July 2019, the Trump administration again sought to restrict access to food stamps without any input from Congress, this time by going through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families – a program that gives low-income families with children cash to cover childcare and other expenses.
Currently, most states automatically enroll families in SNAP once they obtain TANF benefits. The new rule would prevent states from doing this. Even though 85% of TANF families also get SNAP benefits, the vast majority of them still live in poverty.
The government is seeking comments from the public about this proposed change through September 23, 2019.
Replacing food stamps with ‘harvest boxes’
Other changes to SNAP could also take a toll.
The Trump administration’s proposed budgets have also called for changing how the government helps low-income families get food they have trouble affording. Its 2019 budget proposal called for replacing half of SNAP benefits with what it called “harvest boxes” of nonperishable items like cereals, beans and canned goods.
According to research we conducted with low-income Americans, 79% of SNAP participants opposed this proposal, with one of the primary reasons being not being able to choose their own foods.
“People who are struggling are already demoralized,” a New Mexico woman who uses SNAP benefits told us. “Being able to make our own food decisions is something that keeps us feeling like human beings.”
Congress rejected the concept but the White House included it again in its 2020 budget draft.
Advocates for food aid fear that recent proposals to change how SNAP works would reduce the share of Americans who get these benefits by making it harder to qualify and enroll in the program. Should this major transformation ever occur, children and families won’t have access to critical benefits that help them avoid going hungry.
Tracking the demand for food stamps
Although the Trump administration has until now largely failed in its effort to cut SNAP spending, the number of people getting food stamps is already declining. This trend began during the Obama administration, in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
Since the economy is doing well overall, the number of people on food assistance programs has fallen. The reason for the decline is that the number of people who are eligible for these benefits rises when the economy falters and falls when conditions improve. As a result, the government is spending less on food stamps without cutting the SNAP budget.
Case in point, 7 million people have already left SNAP due to better economic stability. In parallel, federal spending on SNAP budget has dropped from $78 billion in 2013 to $64 billion in 2019.
If the Trump administration wants to shrink SNAP, reduce costs and have fewer low-income Americans receive benefits, we believe that the best thing it can do is to keep working to improve the economy – particularly for low-income Americans, who have been reaping fewer benefits from the improving economy than others in recent years.
Children
Nutrition
safety net
spending cuts
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
Trump administration
SNAP
food stamps
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Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue proposed a rule that would gut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), making it harder for people to put food on their tables.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/watch-fox-news-guest-claims-food-stamp-recipients-are-too-busy-watching-porn-to-work/
Fox News guest Star Parker is applauding Trump administration requirements that make it harder for some Americans to use food stamps. On “Fox & Friends” Parker accused people on food stamps of being too busy “watching porn” to go out and get a job.
“These guys are not working, they’re watching,” Parker said. “They’re watching porn, they’re watching women, they’re watching TV, they’re watching everything, but they’re not working,” she claimed. That’s mostly false, according to US News & World Report.
Parker, a far right wing pundit who espouses anti-LGBTQ and pro-white racist positions on Wednesday lamented that under President Barack Obama the stigma of public assistance programs was eliminated. She claims embarrassing people who need to use welfare programs is helpful.
She also claimed that the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program use of a debit-type card instead of “food stamps,” as the program is still often called, turns welfare programs from short-term assistance into a “generational” tool.
Parker touted the strong economy, which includes a low unemployment rate, which makes it harder for those without a job to find one.
The Trump administration is working to allow states to reduce access to food stamps by increasing work requirements, despite the fact that a large portion of food stamp users are single parents with children and no access to affordable day care, along with the elderly, and those who are unable to work.
But low-income workers also rely on food stamps.
SNAP “helps millions of low-wage workers put food on the table. That’s right – workers,” Stone writes at US News.
“Close to 70 percent of SNAP participants are in families with children; more than one-quarter are in households with seniors or people with disabilities,” Stone says. “SNAP provides only a modest benefit (on average, less than $1.40 per person per meal), but research shows that SNAP reduces poverty and food insecurity and, over the long-term, that means better health and economic outcomes for SNAP recipients, especially those who receive it as children.”
Here’s Parker on national television advancing the idea that’s it’s good to embarrass low-income workers and others who need federal government assistance Parker has written books with titles including, “Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats: From Welfare Cheat to Conservative Messenger,” and “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It. === In a lesser-publicized note, the administration just imposed new tougher work requirements on food-stamp recipients, just a day or two after Congress voted on a farm-support bill that left out these requirements as unnecessary and a masked attempt to punish poor people. It is not leadership to stomp on those in need. This policy arrived along with the long series of attempts to take away healthcare from millions, a tax cut policy that has helped corporate interests over households, and education loan policies that have been tilted toward banks over students.
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mitch daniels billion? $ contract to automate snap b/c public sector workers make decison, thus collusions: church indianapolis fake acc'ts anecdote, ibm
sever connection to person, aplly online (1/2 have PC) call ctr
https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-july-18-2018/
Most of us have a growing sense that something’s deeply wrong with the way that digital data is used to track and monitor us. But most of us don’t realize that the poorest among us are particularly vulnerable. Virginia Eubanks argues that such data is used to criminalize and turn the poor away from public resources to which they are entitled.
Resources:
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor St. Martin’s Press, 2018
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https://www.alternet.org/house-republicans-pass-bill-requiring-millions-work-food-stamps
House Republicans just passed major legislation that would
require millions of people who are disabled or possibly otherwise unable to work, to work to be eligible for food stamps. The farm bill passed by a very narrow margin: 213-211. 20 Republicans joined with Democrats to oppose the archaic legislation.
The work requirement, which President Trump specifically praised in a statement via Twitter, would require "millions of low-income Americans who receive nutritional assistance to work at least 20 hours a week or enroll in a job training program," USA Today reports. but Democrats oppose the legislation, especially the work rule, saying "the new requirements would slash benefits to needy families and the elderly, jeopardizing their ability to put food on the table."
The food stamp program is officially known as SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
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RR welfare queen recycled
BO food stamp pres newt G
gop/banks crashed economy but blame BO for feeding kids (cf newsroom sorkin)
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farm bill stalled?
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-has-plan-even-further-demonize-food-stamps
In an attempt to find new ways to make life worse for people receiving any government benefits, the Trump administration is seeking to lump together all government benefit programs into a renamed and reorganized Department of Health and Human Services. And you can be sure that the word “welfare” will be emphasized in any new organization.
According to a story that ran first in Politico, the White House Office of Management and Budget soon will release a new report outlining a plan to move all safety-net programs into HHS and to give the federal department a new name, emphasizing the “welfare” moniker that used to be part of the department’s name. A big reason for this recommendation is to lump the $70 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, more commonly known as food stamps, in with Medicare and Medicaid. SNAP would move out of the Department of Agriculture, where it is now housed.
The reasoning is likely that once these benefits are combined under one departmental roof, it will be easier to cut them all.
The mission of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is to enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.
“Health and well-being”? “Sound, sustained advances in sciences”? No doubt people in Trumpworld overlooked this wording. Otherwise, they would have taken out the humanity and intelligence implicit in the definition.
Any change in federal departments would have to be passed by Congress, but Republicans seem all too willing to push through changes that trim benefits and add more conditions for recipients.
In March 2017, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing OMB to overhaul the federal government, and the budget office’s report is predicted to recommend retooling many departments and agencies. The reorganization proposal on safety-net programs originally came from recommendations by the conservative group the Heritage Foundation. According to the Politico story:
In other words, once you remove the food stamps, they can concentrate more on farm subsidies, because that’s what their voters like. Because in that way of thinking, agriculture—growing food—has nothing to do with nutrition, right?Heritage recommended that all nutrition functions at USDA — including food stamps, nutrition education, and school meal programs that serve some 30 million children each day — be transferred to HHS.
“[T]he USDA has veered off of its mission by working extensively on issues unrelated to agriculture. This is mostly due to the nutrition programs,” Heritage wrote in last year’s report about reorganizing the government. “By moving this welfare function to HHS, the USDA will be better able to work on agricultural issues impacting all Americans.”
House Republicans might have failed in their latest attempt at a farm bill, but only because of internal fights within the GOP over immigration. Even that failed bill included draconian work requirements for food stamp recipients and was opposed by Democrats. The bill would have required adults to spend 20 hours per week either working or participating in a state-run training program as a condition of receiving benefits, according to a story in The Washington Post:
Democrats argue that a million or more people would end up losing benefits, because most states do not have the capacity to set up the training programs required.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) described the legislation as “cruel” and argued that with the proposed changes to food stamps, “Republicans are taking food out of the mouths of families struggling to make ends meet.
”
But cutting aid and adding work requirements is part of the plan. Those work requirements that likely would have taken about 1 million people off food stamps also would save about $20 billion over 10 years. That’s a drop in the bucket compared with the massive hole that the GOP tax cuts are digging in the federal budget, but House Speaker Paul Ryan has no qualms about taking away benefits from the poor.
The rationale behind those cuts is based on the usual misconception about exactly which Americans are on food stamps. Here are factsabout food stamp recipients from a USDA website, using the most recent data available from fiscal year 2016 and published in January 2018. In that year, the program served some 44.2 million people, a slight decrease from previous years.
- Nearly two-thirds of SNAP participants were children, elderly, or had disabilities.
- One-third of all SNAP participants already have jobs, and over half of families with children on food stamps have jobs.
- Eight out of 10 SNAP beneficiaries live in or near major cities, while 10 percent live in or near smaller cities and seven percent live in rural areas.
- When food stamps are added to a family’s gross income, 10 percent of SNAP families move above the poverty line.
- The average monthly benefit for SNAP households was $249.
That amount of money doesn’t go too far in paying for groceries. Instead, cuts would take food money away from the working poor or those unable to work.
Despite the stereotype of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen,” the biggest beneficiaries of government safety-net programs are working-class whites. A 2017 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that whites without a college degree were the largest group of people lifted out of poverty because of government programs. Here’s how The Washington Post described some of the study’s data:
Government assistance and tax credits lifted 6.2 million working-class whites out of poverty in 2014, more than any other racial or ethnic demographic. Half of all working-age adults without college degrees lifted out of poverty by safety-net programs are white; nearly a quarter are black and a fifth are Hispanic.
The result does not simply reflect the fact that there are more white people in the country. The percentage of otherwise poor whites lifted from poverty by government safety-net programs is higher, at 44 percent, compared to 35 percent of otherwise poor minorities, the study concluded.
The saving grace might be that such a massive overhaul of the federal government would have a hard time getting through Congress. If you think congressional Republicans can’t get anything done now, just imagine how ineffective they would be trying to restructure such large programs. The danger is that, just as they’re doing to the Affordable Care Act, they will take a simplistic approach and slash funding without developing the needed plans and details of making a new program work.
Too bad son-in-law Jared Kushner is too busy trying to create peace in the Middle East to handle this task, right? Actually, overhauling government bureaucracy was on Kushner’s original to-do list—just another job he didn’t get done.
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voodoo tax cut --> austerity:
https://www.alternet.org/holy-grail-republican-tax-cuts-about-paul-ryans-parting-gift-rich
yet another Tax Day in America. Eager to deliver another so-called win ahead of the midterm elections, Republicans are using the occasion to roll out even more tax cuts for the rich.
With fewer than half of Americanscomplaining that their personal tax obligation is too high — the smallest percentage in more than five years — and the recently passed GOP tax bill still significantly underwater, Republican lawmakers somehow think the best way to fend off building Democratic momentum is to reward wealthy GOP donors all over again.
:{Standing next to anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist (he of "drown government in the bathtub" fame), Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently announced his plan to ease the tax burden paid by America’s wealthiest citizens. Mind you, those people have already been helped out tremendously by the GOP’s tax law, which made a 40 percent reduction in the top corporate tax rate permanent while setting a 2025 expiration date on cuts to individual taxes and rates.:{}:
}:
“When you’re investing more capital in businesses it means you’re hiring more people, it means you’re buying more equipment, it means you’re raising wages and that you’re driving economic growth,” Cruz said of his new proposal to index capital gains for inflation. The Texas Republican's push for a second part of the GOP tax cuts is certain to exacerbate already growing concerns about budget deficits.
Just last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the Republican tax cuts will fuel historic deficits. In March the federal deficit was $208 billion, an increase of $32 billion from last year. The Treasury Department had already said that the deficit increased 18.4 percent in February compared to 2017. GOP tax cuts are estimated to add $1 trillion or more to federal budget deficits over a decade, even after economic growth is taken into account.
Nevertheless, Republicans have stayed calm and carried on with tax cuts.
On Monday, President Donald Trump traveled to Florida where he praised the GOP tax law for driving one of the "greatest booms" to the U.S. economy. But job growth has actually slowed since Trump took office. Introducing his bill to discount capital gains taxes, in effect, to account for inflation, Ted Cruz claimed, “We’re seeing the economic benefits of this tax cut, even just a few months into it. Over four million Americans have already gotten pay raises or bonuses directly as a result of the tax cut.” But most Americans have not noticed a larger paycheck since the law was enacted, according to a CNBC poll released in March. A recent analysis from the pro-reform group Americans for Tax Fairness found that 433 corporations out of the Fortune 500 have not offered any bonuses or wage increase to employees since the passage of corporate tax cuts. Instead, the analysis found, companies spent 37 times as much on stock buybacks.
Even as GOP groups pour money into efforts to sell their tax cuts for the donor class to the voting base, the law remains massively unpopular. (A group linked to the Koch brothers has spent about $30 million in ads focusing on the tax law since August, and plans to run $400 million worth of ads in vulnerable GOP districts leading up to this year’s midterms.) Just 27 percent of Americans think the GOP tax cuts were a good idea, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Monday. In other words, the Republican tax plan has actually gotten less popular with voters over time.
ut popularity was never really the goal, was it? The point was to starve the federal government of tax revenue in order to justify slashing the social safety net — something Republicans in Congress and the White House began to address in earnest last week.
Just one day after the CBO released its forecast of a ballooning federal deficit, Trump ordered federal agenciesto conduct a broad review of so-called welfare programs to identify new work requirements to place on recipients. Right on time, House Republicans then introduced the 2018 Farm bill, featuring a stringent new proposal to mandate that adults between the ages of 18 and 59 work part-time jobs or be enrolled in at least 20 hours per week of job training in order to receive food stamps under the SNAP program.
Aside from the fact that SNAP spending is already down — from $79.8 billion in 2013 to about $70 billion in 2017 — the CBO estimates that as many as one million people could be kicked off the program as a result of Republicans’ proposed new rule. Most working-age SNAP recipients who don't receive disability benefits already work, especially those able-bodied, childless adults who House Republicans claim abuse the system.
Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Congress followed up their corporate tax cuts with a massive omnibus budget that boosts spending past previous budget caps by $300 billion over two years....
==
recent study that snap ppl who can work already are?!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/18/the-republican-plan-to-tighten-food-stamp-work-requirements-is-advancing-without-a-single-democrats-vote/?utm_term=.99fcf53900a2
House Republicans pushed forward Wednesday with a plan to strengthen work requirements for food stamps, even as Democrats excoriated the proposal as an “ideological crusade” that would hurt the poor, burden state governments and endanger the passage of major food and farming legislation.
The plan, introduced last week as part of the 2018 Farm Bill, would dramatically expand mandatory state workfare programs in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, and require that most adults between 18 and 59 enroll or work at least part time to receive benefits.
[GOP proposes stricter work requirements for food stamp recipients, a step toward a major overhaul of the social safety net]
In a 26-to-2o vote on party lines, the House Agriculture Committee moved to advance the Farm Bill, with the SNAP proposals, to the House floor. Republicans have pitched it as a common-sense revision that would refocus services on the neediest families while providing opportunities for adults who are work-capable.
But over the course of more than five hours, Democrats on the usually placid committee denounced the Republican plan as “heartless” and “deceitful” and accused Committee Chairman K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.) of shutting them out of negotiations.
Farm groups have begun to fear the divisions could delay or prevent passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, the $867 billion package that covers the bulk of the country’s agricultural and nutrition programs, including crop insurance, farm credit, trade, conservation, agricultural research and rural development.
“What are we doing here? Is this half-baked effort what passes for bipartisanship in our chamber?” asked Rep. Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.), the ranking Democrat. “We used to be able to get stuff done, but the way the chairman has gone about this is turning friends into enemies.”
The current law expires Oct. 1, and a number of rural development and agricultural research programs will lose funding if a farm bill is not passed before then. The House likely will not vote until next month.
Both sides have indicated they are unwilling to negotiate on the Republican plan.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates more than 1 million people would leave the SNAP rolls over the next 10 years because of the new work requirements, mandating 20 hours a week of training or work, and stricter eligibility guidelines for low-income families who qualify for SNAP through other welfare programs, a practice known as Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility.
Republicans on Wednesday said their proposals would focus benefits on people who truly need them, eliminating payments to families with incomes significantly above the poverty threshold and helping work-capable adults find work and afford food for themselves.
“Today’s vote was about America’s farmers and ranchers. It was about a better future and greater opportunities for SNAP recipients,” Conaway said in a statement.
“I’m disappointed,” he continued, “that my Democrat colleagues have turned their backs on America’s heartland.”
But Democrats accuse Conaway of preparing the SNAP proposal in secret instead of allowing staff from both parties to hash out the issue together, as they did for the rest of the bill. The minority did not offer any amendments during the hearing because, Peterson told one farming talk show Monday, “you can't put lipstick on a pig.”
“This is the most partisan Farm Bill in 20 years,” said Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), who later tweeted that the proposal should be called the “#HarmBill.”
Democrats maintain that the SNAP program already contains sufficient work rules and that tightening them further may cut off adults who have legitimate reasons for not working.
They also argue that the $1 billion per year budgeted for the new mandatory employment and training programs would fall short. The mandatory program will also overburden poor families and state welfare offices, Democrats said.
In one tense exchange, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) peppered Conaway and Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), the chairman of the nutrition subcommittee, with questions about how many government employees would be needed to manage the workfare programs and how Republicans plan to track the employment status of all 42 million people on SNAP.
“If we had a hearing on this stuff we could go into this in more detail,” he said, as Thompson began to answer one of the questions. “But I only get five minutes.”
The Farm Bill now moves to the House floor, where the acrimony is likely to continue. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has championed the Republican food-stamp plan, which dovetails with his agenda to reform welfare programs.
Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), meanwhile, said on Wednesday that her party could not support what she called a “radical, harmful bill.”
Read more:
GOP proposes stricter work requirements for food stamp recipients, a step toward a major overhaul of the social safety net
The Trump administration takes its first big step toward stricter work requirements for food stamps
'Blue Apron for food stamps' already exists. And some recipients hate the powdered milk.
no linx
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https://www.ecowatch.com/usda-nutrition-program-2559010874.html
USDA Focus on Nutrition Program 'Integrity' Is a Smokescreen
:{:{:{}:
By Sarah Reinhardt
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced it will hire a new "chief integrity officer" to oversee federal nutrition programs such as the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps).
The integrity of SNAP in particular has been a popular topic among those in the Trump administration, including USDA Sec. Sonny Perdue, who argue that SNAP enables a "lifestyle of dependency" and seek major program reforms in the upcoming Farm Bill. But these arguments have been conjured from very little science and a whole lot of smoke—and have the effect of distracting the public from more pressing issues at hand.
SNAP is among the nation's most effective and efficient programs
Monitoring any government program is necessary to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being spent effectively, and the USDA does so through its quality control process and periodic reports on fraud and abuse. In fiscal year 2011, as part of the Obama administration's Campaign to Cut Waste, the USDA Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted an extensive review of more than 15,000 stores for compliance with SNAP program rules. The results of these assessments, combined with USDA participation data, tell us the program is working as intended, and with remarkably few problems.
SNAP fraud1—broadly defined as exchanging benefits for cash or falsifying participant or retailer applications to illegally obtain or accept benefits—happens relatively infrequently, though it's difficult to measure. The USDA's most recent report on the topic estimated that it affected about 1.5 percent of all SNAP benefits received between 2012 and 2014. This represents a slight increase since the early 2000s (1.0 to 1.3 percent between 2002 and 2011), but remains substantially lower than in the 1990s, when reported rates were as high as 3.8 percent.
Compare this to some of the other federal programs contained in the Farm Bill—like crop insurance. Back in 2013, former USDA secretary Tom Vilsack voiced concerns about the integrity of crop insurance programs due to error and fraud rates that exceeded those of SNAP. As with SNAP, illegal activity is largely uncovered by way of criminal investigations. According to the Department of Justice, recent convictions and sentences connected with the federal crop insurance program have included the indictment of a Kentucky agricultural producer for insurance fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering; an Iowa farmer who received more than $450,000 in crop insurance proceeds illegally; a Louisiana farmerwho created shell farms to receive more than $5.4 million in subsidy payments; and a Kentucky crop insurance agent whose clients received nearly $170,000 in indemnity payments for false claims. And those are just the cases from the last six months. Unlike SNAP, no chief integrity officer has been assigned to monitor fraud and abuse in the program.
So yes, we should be striving for continuous improvement in the operation of all federal programs. But explaining why SNAP in particular has come under such intense scrutiny requires some historical and political context—and a good understanding of who might benefit from maintaining old narratives
The rise, fall and flatline of SNAP fraud
Though President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act into law in 1964, the program began to gain popularity in the 1970s, when participation doubled from 5 million to 10 million over the course of the decade. As participation increased, the USDA began to discover incidents of abuse, eventually revealing a widespread pattern of illegal activity that would plague the program for the next twenty years. Reported rates of fraud at this time were between 10 and 20 percent.
The widespread abuse lent itself to growing public disapproval of the food stamps program and, accompanied by racist and classist rhetoric around so-called "welfare queens," fueled substantial program reform by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s.
But what likely ushered in drastic improvements in rates of fraud and abuse was the introduction of new electronic benefit transfer (EBT) systems, which fully replaced paper food stamps in 2004. In addition to requiring a 4-digit PIN number, EBT cards create a record of each purchase, increasing the ease with which agencies can identify and document illegal use.
That brings us, more or less, to the efficient and effective program that we've seen for the last decade.
Despite how well SNAP works, politicians have continued to frame it as a program that suffers from rampant misuse and illegal activity. For those seeking drastic budget cuts and reforms, that negative narrative grants permission to discredit both the program and those who use it—and one needs to look no further than President Trump's welfare reform proposals or Speaker Paul Ryan's comment about the tailspin of "inner-city culture" to know that the legacy of the welfare queen is alive and well.
Speaking of integrity…
To get a sense of where this is all headed, keep your eyes on USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue—if you can. He's been making some quick pivots lately.
At a May 2017 House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture hearing, Perdue stated that "SNAP has been a very important, effective program," and that the agency was considering no changes. "You don't try to fix something that isn't broken."
Less than a year later, the secretary has voiced his support for a number of proposed program changes, including stricter work requirements for adults without dependents. Not unlike the recent announcement aimed at nutrition program integrity, these proposals are often grounded more in political ideology than fact. USDA's own data shows that most SNAP participants who can work do work—albeit in unstable jobs—and counters the notion that participants stay on the program for long periods of time.
When the House releases its draft of the Farm Bill, which may happen as early as this week, Perdue's response (or lack thereof) could provide insight on the policy proposals he's prepared to support. More than likely, he'll continue to endorse the positions of his party—but then again, we've been surprised before.
- Fraud and abuse should be distinguished from error rates, or improper payment rates, which capture how often SNAP participants receive underpayment or overpayment of benefits. (The overwhelming majority of SNAP errors are attributed to unintentional error by recipients or administrative staff.) Program error rates have also experienced substantial declines in recent years: they reached an all-time low of 2 percent in 2013, down from 6.6 percent in 2003. And though a 2015 USDA OIG review of the quality control process found understated error rates in some states, the resulting corrective actions target state agencies—not individual SNAP participants.
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https://www.motherjones.com/food/2018/03/republicans-in-congress-are-so-eager-to-slash-food-stamps-theyre-about-to-make-a-big-mistake/
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https://www.alternet.org/food/trump-wants-deny-struggling-americans-access-healthy-farmers-market-food
last week’s presidential budget, the administration proposed replacing most Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits with a pre-selected box of mostly dry goods like peanut butter, pasta and cereal. They wanted to stop benefit recipients from choosing their own food, including redeeming their federal assistance at farmers’ markets such as those our organization manages across Los Angeles. That’s right, fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts or whole grains—any semblance of a product that looks like it came from a farm—were excluded. Meanwhile, the plan was introduced with Orwellian descriptors like "access to a nutritious diet" and "100% U.S. grown and produced food."
SNAP, formerly food stamps, provides very limited aid to more than 40 million Americans, primarily children, seniors and the disabled. SNAP recipients receive on average $1.40 in benefits per meal, wholly inadequate to address food insecurity among a wide swath of Americans. Nevertheless, the White House budget office seeks to slash SNAP by 30 percent over the next decade. The so-called Harvest Box was reportedly Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue's contribution to that effort, touted as a poor people's Blue Apron that would buy American-produced canned goods and save taxpayers billions.
The bipartisan rejection of this scheme was swift, but the strategy behind it painfully transparent. The food box concept hadn't even been floated among congressional Republicans before it materialized fully formed in the president’s budget. Administration officials conceded it had merely been a ploy, a Trumpian distraction to lay the groundwork for massive cuts to federal food aid.
While this cynical grub box proposal is unlikely to advance, it’s worth unpacking the insidious implications that waft from it.
You'll get what we give you and like it, or else, the Harvest Box declares, in utter contempt for poor people. Agency, actually getting to choose what you eat, a fundamental precept of human dignity, seemingly doesn’t apply to people who need food assistance. Instead, they face the shame of being denied the opportunity to make decisions appropriate for their own nutrition and the stigma for daring to access food in a time of need.
The peanut butter in a box was also another bald attempt to privatize a public benefit regardless of impact. If there's money to be saved cutting corners on services to some of the most marginalized Americans, the race is on. Moreover, stuffed with prepackaged foods and absent fresh produce, the Harvest Box would undoubtedly have assisted large food corporations rather than small-scale farmers. And forget MyPlate, the Trump-prescribed food box is the antithesis of a healthy diet, laden with saturated fat, refined carbs and sodium, giving recipients a complimentary one-way ticket to a shorter lifespan.
Finally, this woeful proposal was a direct assault on the mushrooming local food movement across the United States. Farmers' markets are vital in this movement, facilitating a direct connection between communities, farmers and local businesses. Low-income people have been accessing fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets for the better part of 20 years, the result of lobbying by our forebears in food justice. More recently, organizations like ours helped pilot the use of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards in Southern California and fought for the adoption in 2016 of a Los Angeles city ordinance that requires farmers’ markets to accept CalFresh/SNAP dollars. Certified farmers’ markets throughout the city participate in the Market Match program, which can double the purchasing power of those and other benefits. This translates into increased nutritious foods for our most vulnerable and earnings for our farmers and local businesses.
A defining principle of farmers' markets is community. There's no self-serve check-out; transactions occur with real humans. The market can feel like a small town, and it's common to see friendships form, business relationships bud and families grow over years of visits. Market operators provide information on what to do with produce and where it comes from, but also offer broader links to community resources. Our markets have hosted healthy cooking classes, garden advice, mobile immunization clinics, local water and power resources, voter registration, back-to-school giveaways, local library branches and countless other services.
Policies that incentivize farmers' markets promote the healthiest eating choices. What's more, they expand the safety net, support small farmers, forge community and build vibrant public spaces. What can a box of pasta and canned vegetables do?
Stephen Gutwillig is executive director and Jaclyn Rivera-Krouse is director of benefits and incentives programs at Sustainable Economic Enterprises of Los Angeles (SEE-LA), which manages farmers' markets in Hollywood, Echo Park, Atwater Village and across South Los Angeles.
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Blue Apron but for the poor. On the heels of a $1.5 trillion tax cut for multinational corporations and the richest tenth of the 1 percent, it's a proposal so transparent in its contempt for lower-income earners that few public officials would consider it, much less pitch it to the public. Then again, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney is not most public officials.
According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration aims to roll back the federal food stamps program, embracing what Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, calls a "Depression-era approach" to fighting hunger. Rather than receive paper coupons or credit toward an EBT card, as many as 81 percent of SNAP recipients would be issued "America's Harvest Boxes" approved by the USDA, each containing nonperishable food items like shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter and beans, as well as canned meat, fruits and vegetables.
“What we do is propose that for folks who are on food stamps, part—not all, part—of their benefits come in the actual sort of—and I don't want to steal somebody's copyright—but a Blue Apron-type program where you actually receive the food instead of receive the cash,” Mulvaney told the White House press corps during a Monday briefing. “It lowers the cost to us because we can buy [at wholesale prices] whereas they have to buy it at retail. It also makes sure they're getting nutritious food. So we're pretty excited about that."
Where to begin? While a meal on food stamps costs $1.37, the average order from Blue Apron's meal-kit delivery service runs upwards of $10 per person. Blue Apron also allows its customers to purchase from a menu of eight meals, including fresh fish, meat and produce—a privilege neither the president nor his budget director believes the poor are entitled to.
Adding potential injury to insult, Mulvaney makes no mention of how the Harvest Box plan will address the individual dietary restrictions of millions of Americans. Nor does he explain how canned meats and produce, which are typically loaded with preservatives, will meet the nutritional needs of their recipients.
The proposal would likely upend the supermarket industry, with chains like Walmart, Target and Aldi losing billions in food stamp payments. Unsurprisingly, the Food Marketing Institute, a lobbying group for grocery stores, has called the boxed meals "expensive, inefficient and unlikely to generate any long-term government savings."
Blue Apron itself has not been without its detractors. As the Post notes, the company "saw its customer base contract in 2017. A recent report by the market research firm Datassential found that four in 10 lapsed meal-kit subscribers dropped their service because they were too costly."
The Trump administration's latest budget proposal is almost certainly dead on arrival. But as long as the GOP controls all three branches of government, no social welfare program is safe and no prospective cut is too shameless.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-administration-wants-make-decades-old-right-wing-fantasy-reality
mma
Trump White House’s newly proposed budget is (like all White House budget proposals) more of a political document than anything else. It has no actual bearing on how the government will spend its money, and Congress will almost certainly ignore it. But that’s not to say it is entirely devoid of value -- the White House uses the annual budget proposal to act out its fantasies and give us a little glimpse at the ideologies motivating the administration’s policy preferences.
One of those ideologies, as conveyed by the White House’s vision for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, expresses insane and horrifying contempt for low-income Americans. And while the policy the administration has proposed is extreme, it fits in squarely with longstanding conservative efforts to stigmatize and shame recipients of government assistance.
One of the administration’s supposed cost-saving measures is “a bold new approach to administering SNAP.” The way the program currently works, SNAP-eligible households are provided a monthly benefit based on income level in the form of a debit card, which can be used to purchase grocery items. Some restrictions apply (no alcohol, tobacco, or pet food, for example), but SNAP recipients have wide latitude in what foods they can purchase and where they can shop.
The Trump administration wants to change all of this by forcing most SNAP recipients to receive half their monthly benefit in the form of “a USDA Foods package, which would include items such as shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit, vegetables, and meat, poultry or fish.” The Republican White House wants to choose which foods SNAP recipients eat, and it wants to control how they receive their food each month -- so much for “small government” conservatism abolishing the “nanny state.” Through means left utterly unexplained, the Trump administration argues that this new system (which will require massive bureaucratic build-up alongside the establishment of food-delivery infrastructure) will somehow be cheaper and more efficient than simply transferring money to a debit card. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney laughably spun this proposal to send low-income Americans a monthly box of canned goods and peanut butter as "a Blue Apron-type program where you actually receive the food instead of receive the cash."
This idea is so absurd, impractical, and wildly paternalistic that people can’t really believe that the White House is actually proposing it. Politico reports this morning that “the idea that USDA would provide millions of low-income people packages of food on a national scale has not been floated by conservative think tanks, promoted by industry, or sought by previous administrations.” It was “so out of left field,” Politico notes, “that some anti-hunger advocates initially thought it was a joke.”
The proposal didn’t come out of nowhere, though. It’s an escalation of existing right-wing efforts to use SNAP as a means to control the behavior of its recipients. These efforts are rooted in a mythology -- eagerly promoted and disseminated by conservative media -- that SNAP is rife with fraud and that SNAP beneficiaries, by virtue of their status as welfare recipients, lack the moral character to make good decisions on their own.
Right-wing demonization of welfare recipients stretches back decades, from Newt Gingrich’s high-profile efforts in the 1990s to shame low-income teen mothers to Ronald Reagan popularizing the “welfare queen” slur back in 1976. The running theme of these attacks on the poor is that there exists an epidemic of undeserving welfare recipients who abuse their benefits. That’s a myth, but it carries a potent political message that blends racial and economic resentment with small-government agitation.
When it comes to SNAP, the most common complaint made by conservatives is that recipients are using their benefit to purchase inappropriate foods: “luxury” comestibles like seafood and steak, or junk food like candy bars and energy drinks. This line of attack got a huge boost in 2013 when Fox News put together a special news report called “The Great Food Stamp Binge.” The program -- hosted by Special Report anchor Bret Baier -- spotlighted an unemployed surfer in California who proudly used his SNAP benefit to buy sushi and lobster. Baier dubbed him “the new face of food stamps,” and the program pointedly asked why there isn’t “at least some stigma” attached to SNAP recipients, who used to be called “losers.”
It was a farcical piece of propaganda that actively shunned any sort of data or reporting in order to create a caricature of SNAP recipients as lazy, undeserving parasites on the public. SNAP actually has extremely low rates of fraud and abuse, and “the overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do so,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The news program was wildly popular with Republicans. Fox News distributed tapes of the “The Great Food Stamp Binge” on Capitol Hill, and the SNAP-abusing unemployed surfer became the mascot for the congressional GOP’s efforts to gut funding for nutritional assistance programs. Since then, various state governments have taken up measures intended to restrict which foods SNAP recipients can purchase.
In 2015, Wisconsin Republicans passed a bill banning SNAP recipients from purchasing crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish, citing “anecdotal and perceived abuses.” A Republican state senator from New York proposed legislation to cut off SNAP users from “luxury food items” like lobster and steak, while the Missouri GOP sought to ban “cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak.” The reality that all of these proposals ignore is that SNAP recipients are not blowing their benefits on “luxury” foods.
The Trump administration’s proposal derives from the same idea that SNAP recipients can’t be trusted and will necessarily misuse their benefit. Rather than banning certain foods, the White House is proposing to force SNAP beneficiaries to eat an approved list of low-cost foods while simultaneously limiting the amount of benefit they have to spend. It’s gross paternalism lightly disguised with absurd promises about efficiency and cost-savings. And it fits right in with the broader right-wing argument that receipt of government assistance is morally suspect and recipients should be penalized through stigma and controlled through loss of choice.
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voodoo --> omg
AH 12/17
djt dick-ensian:
That same attitude is driving social policy in the United States today. Only now that the tax overhaul is all but a done deal have we begun to read about why our Republican House and Senate and President seem so little worried about tax cuts that, simple arithmetic tells us, we cannot afford. All month we have been reading about the size of the tax cuts and the plutocrats who will benefit, but there has been very little honest reckoning about what will be the most serious human consequences.
Now, however, are we learning the reason. The real goal is eliminating dependency by punishing the poor for being poor.
In a short update, Chye-Ching Huang of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us: “The congressional budget resolution that Congress approved in October, which created the process and set the parameters for the tax bill, also calls for $5.8 trillion in budget cuts over the coming decade, including deep cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and other health care programs; basic assistance including food assistance through SNAP (formerly known as food stamps); and non-defense discretionary funding, the part of the budget that funds education and training, transportation and other infrastructure, medical research, child and elder care, and other important priorities.”
From the *Washington Post*‘s Caitlin Dewey we learn that Trump-appointed officials in the Department of Agriculture are considering major limitations within the food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): “SNAP is America’s largest anti-hunger program, providing an average benefit of $125 per person each month to 42 million Americans. The majority of SNAP recipients are children or seniors, though participation rose sharply across all demographic groups during and after the recession, peaking in 2013 at 47.6 million.” Officials are considering “new restrictions on purchases of soda and candy,” but also considering more significant cuts: “The agency is also considering a proposal to allow states to reduce payments to some groups of people, including undocumented immigrants’ citizen children… The secretaries’ proposals would allow states to significantly change how they offer nutrition assistance. Through the use of the waivers, the USDA could unilaterally enact the proposals on a state-by-state basis without further congressional action….”
Why are these proposed changes so utterly devastating? Here is Harvard University ethnographer Kathryn Edin—from her (2015) book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America—reporting on the collapse of welfare programs after passage in 1996 of the welfare reform law and the subsequent shift of responsibility for welfare programs from the federal government to the states, which have provided very unevenly for poor families: “Starting in 2001, more and more families with children who were receiving SNAP began to report that they had no other source of cash income to live on—not from work, not from public assistance. By 2006, the number of such families had grown 143 percent from a decade before. By 2012, 1.2 million families on SNAP told eligibility workers they had no other income.” (pp. 30-31)
Earlier this week *POLITICO* published a scathing indictment of planning that has been going on in federal departments to reduce federal servicesonce tax reform has been enacted: “The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are hoping to make the most sweeping changes to federal safety net programs in a generation, using legislation and executive actions to target recipients of food stamps Medicaid and housing benefits. The White House is quietly preparing a sweeping executive order that would mandate a top-to-bottom review of the federal programs on which millions of poor Americans rely. And GOP lawmakers are in the early stages of crafting legislation that could make it more difficult to qualify for these programs… Federal health officials are encouraging states to impose work requirements on able-bodied adults on Medicaid—a major philosophical shift that would treat the program as welfare, rather than health insurance. The Agriculture Department said last week that it would soon give states greater control over the food stamp program, potentially opening the door to drug testing or stricter work requirements on recipients of the $70 billion program long targeted by fiscal conservatives… The president is expected to sign the welfare executive order as soon as January, according to multiple administration officials, with an eye toward making changes to health care, food stamps, housing and veterans programs, not just traditional welfare payments… Although the effort to reshape the country’s welfare system is all but guaranteed to produce powerful political backlash, it appears to have broad backing from conservative congressional Republicans, who are already coordinating with the White House on a legislative agenda to complement expected executive actions.”
Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who, for years, has proposed his own miserly federal budget plans, is quoted by POLITICO: “We have a welfare system that’s basically trapping people in poverty and effectively paying people not to work, and we’ve got to work on that.” Not considered in all this planning is whether jobs are available and whether people using programs like SNAP are able to work.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and regular columnist for the *NY Times,* is one writer who has highlighted what all this will mean for our society and our children. As an economist, Krugman believes cuts in programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and welfare programs like SNAP—programs that, incidentally, help children be able to thrive at school—are economically foolish. He also deplores what such cuts to social programs say about the decline in our society’s ethic of social responsibility: “Children who get adequate care are more likely to be healthier and more productive when they become adults, which means that they’ll earn more and pay more in taxes. They’re also less likely to become disabled and need government support… By the way, broadly similar results have been found for the food stamp program: Ensuring adequate nutrition for the young means healthier, more productive adults, so that in the long run this aid costs taxpayers little or nothing. But such results, while interesting and important, aren’t the main reason we should be providing children with health care and enough to eat. Simple decency should be reason enough. And despite everything we’ve seen in U.S. politics, it’s still hard to believe that a whole political party would balk at doing the decent thing for millions of kids while rushing to further enrich a few thousand wealthy heirs. That is, however, exactly what’s happening.”
If you wonder what all this commentary about planned cuts to social service and health and nutrition programs is doing in a public education blog, consider these previous posts—about sociologist Sean Reardon, writing about the impact of poverty on education—about Harvard’s Daniel Koretz examining how poverty affects test scores—about author Jack Schneider reflecting on poverty and public education.
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https://www.alternet.org/economy/3-noxious-myths-about-poor-republicans-are-using-slash-social-safety-net
Republicans continue to use long-debunked myths about the poor as they defend lower taxes for the richand deep cuts to the social safety netto pay for them. In so doing, they are essentially expressing scorn for working class and low-income Americans.
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Sen. Chuck Grassley,for example, recently justified reducing the number of wealthy families exposed to the estate tax as a way to recognize “the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
Similarly, Sen. Orrin Hatchraised concerns about funding certain entitlement programs. “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything,” he said.
These statements, the likes of which I expect we’ll all hear more of in coming months, reinforce three harmful narratives about low-income Americans: People who receive benefits don’t work, they don’t deserve help and the money spent on the social safety net is a waste of money.
Based on my research and 20 years of experience as a clinical law professor representing low-income clients, I know that these statements are false and only serve to reinforce misconceptions about working class and poor Americans.
Food participants get an average of $125 a month, hardly enough to feed a family without earning money as well.
Most welfare recipients are makers not takers
The first myth, that people who receive public benefits are “takers” rather than “makers,” is flatly untrue for the vast majority of working-age recipients.
Consider Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, formerly known as food stamps, which currently serve about 42 million Americans. At least one adult in more than half of SNAP-recipient households are working. And the average SNAP subsidy is $125 per month, or $1.40 per meal – hardly enough to justify quitting a job.
As for Medicaid, nearly 80 percent of adults receiving Medicaid live in families where someone works, and more than half are working themselves.
In early December, House Speaker Paul Ryan said, “We have a welfare system that’s trapping people in poverty and effectively paying people not to work.”
Not true. Welfare – officially called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families – has required work as a condition of eligibility since then-President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law in 1996. And the earned income tax credit, a tax credit for low- and moderate-income workers, by definition, supports only people who work.
Workers apply for public benefits because they need assistance to make ends meet. American workers are among the most productive in the world, but over the last 40 years the bottom half of income earners have seen no income growth. As a result, since 1973, worker productivity has grown almost six times faster than wages.
In addition to wage stagnation, most Americans are spending more than one-third of their income on housing, which is increasingly unaffordable. There are 11 million renter households paying more than half their income on housing. And there is no county in America where a minimum wage worker can afford a two-bedroom home. Still, only 1 in 4 eligible households receive any form of government housing assistance.
To be sure, there are recipients of public benefits who do not work. They are primarily children, the disabled and the elderly – in other words, people who cannot or should not work. These groups constitute the majority of public benefits recipients.
Society should support these people out of basic decency, but there are self-interested reasons as well. To begin with, all working adults have been children, will someday be old and, at any time, might face calamities that take them out of the workforce. The safety net exists to rescue people during these vulnerable periods. Indeed, most people who receive public benefits leave the programs within three years.
Moreover, many public benefits pay for themselves over time, as healthier and financially secure people are more productive and contribute to the overall economy. For example, every dollar in SNAP spending is estimated to generate more than $1.70 in economic activity.
Similarly, Medicaid benefits are associated with enhancing work opportunities. The earned income tax credit contributes to work rates, improves the health of recipient families and has long-term educational and earnings benefits for children.
The current federal minimum wage is hardly enough to feed a family. AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato
What the needy deserve...
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trms
Steve Benen 01/02/17 12:00PM
Claims about 'food-stamp fraud' completely fall apart
By Steve Benen
01/02/17 11:20AM
As Ari Melber noted on the show last week, Fox News aired a strange report, telling its viewers that "food-stamp fraud" has reached "an all-time high." Citing evidence from the Department of Agriculture, Fox said fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cost taxpayers $70 million in 2016.
"Is it time to end the program?" Fox asked, rhetorically.
It didn't take long before literally every detail of the report was discredited. Food-stamp fraud is not at an all-time high; the Department of Agriculture has not released any new data on this; there's no evidence that puts the price tag of fraud in the system at $70 million; and ending a social-insurance program over this is absurd.
The Department of Agriculture demanded a retraction. As The Hill noted, Fox obliged.
Fox News has retracted a Tuesday story that claimed "an all-time high" for food stamp fraud. "We reported that back in 2016 $70 [billion] were wasted on food stamp fraud," Fox News contributor Abby Huntsman said on Friday's "Fox and Friends."
"That was actually incorrect. The latest information from 2009 to 2011 shows the fraud at 1.3 percent, which is approximately $853 million for each of those three years. Nationally food stamp trafficking is on the decline. So sorry about that mistake."
That's the appropriate resolution, of course. We all make mistakes -- I've had to publish some corrections of my own over the years -- and it's encouraging this was straightened out fairly quickly.
I'm still curious, though, about how and why this bogus report aired in the first place.
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Pathologizing poverty has been a long-term, ongoing—and sadly, highly successful—project of the right in this country. From Scott Walker’s recent appeal to PEOTUS Donald Trump to allow the state of Wisconsin to drug-test food-stamp recipients, to House GOP plans to make it harder to qualify for aid, the goal is to punish and stigmatize the poor while eliminating programs that help lift them out of poverty.
Fox News essentially functions as the media arm of the Republican Party, and on Wednesday it did its part to undermine a program that helps 44 million poor Americans. To that transparent end, an episode of “Fox & Friends” featured a segment titled, “Food Stamp Fraud at All-Time High: Is It Time to End the Program?” The piece goes on to claim that USDA figures reveal “$70 million of taxpayer money was wasted in 2016 due to food stamp fraud.”
There are a number of problems with this episode, from the false fact buried in the query to the absurd answer it proposes. Obviously, no, we shouldn’t scrap a program that serves 44 million needy people, because that would be disastrous for families, children and communities around the country. Especially since it’s an argument based on lies and obfuscation, as Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum points out:
First, I have no idea where Fox's $70 million figure comes from—and I looked pretty hard for it. The Fox graphic attributes it to "2016 USDA," but as near as I can tell the USDA has no numbers for SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] fraud more recent than 2011.
Drum goes on to note that even if the imaginary figure were real, it would account for a tiny fraction of cases.
That's not all: $70 million is a startlingly low figure. In the most recent fiscal year, SNAP cost $71 billion, which means that fraud accounted for a minuscule 0.098 percent of the program budget.
So, less than 1 percent of program costs went to fraudulent cases. As Drum notes, that’s not to suggest that having $70 million go to people who weren’t eligible to receive the money isn’t problematic. But as the Washington Post points out, if we really wanted to make sure federal funds aren’t being wasted in unnecessary places, there are a few other sites we might want to look first.
Earlier this month, The Washington Post revealed that the Defense Department had deep-sixed recommendations that might save the agency up to $125 billion over the course of five years. “Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power,” our Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward wrote. “But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.” That's a potential savings of $25 billion a year — 357 times the amount of waste in the SNAP program.
Another example. On Wednesday, we reported about a long-running scam operated by Leonard Francis, a Navy contractor who, over the course of several years, defrauded the government to the tune of $35 million.
“As of writing, Fox News has not questioned whether we should disband the Navy,” the Post wryly notes.
In fact, we can be 100 percent certain that the network would attack any messenger who suggests American military spending should be cut, though the U.S. spends more on its armed forces than the next eight nations combined. Yet Fox has no problem suggesting, based on flimsy evidence and illogical reasoning, that we should let millions of American adults and children go hungry. If the election of Trump wasn’t enough proof of the right’s complete and utter lack of morals, there’s new evidence emerging all the time.
Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/fox-news-caught-using-out-and-out-lie-push-end-food-stamps
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