Last week, in a stroke of utter stupidity, our nation’s House of Representatives voted to drastically cut the funding of the country’s food stamp program. The program, called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), would see 3.8 million Americans kicked out by 2014.
SNAP has been for years connected to a farm subsidy bill when these programs go up for federal funding. This conglomeration was a political compromise that brought a liberal program (SNAP) with a more conservative one (mainly funding for big farms). Many people, then, could see something was wrong when the Republican majority House decided to split the two when they went up for funding.
Then, last week, the House confirmed liberal suspicions and fears by drastically cutting a program that has taken on a truly vital importance since the economic downturn in 2008.
Republican reasoning for the drastic spending cut was that SNAP had grown enormous since the Great Recession began in 2008, increasing from 26 million participants in 2007 to 48 million now. Many Republicans believe that the extreme swelling of this program was due to some people ‘gaming’ the system for free benefits. Senator Paul Ryan (R-WI) stated that the safety net of SNAP was turning into a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”
Furthermore, many people not directly hit by the recession may believe that, by now, the economy has recovered. Unemployment has dropped to 7.8 percent from a high of 9.1 percent in 2011.
Unfortunately, these numbers do not paint the whole picture. The Americans that lost their jobs during the recession have most often not found a job that pays as high. The economy has recovered some since the hit of 2008, but it is the richest Americans that have received the most positive effects of the recovery. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the top one percent rose 31 percent from 2009 to 2012. The real income of the bottom 40 percent of Americans, on the other hand, has actually fallen six percent over the same time period.
As for the hammock that is lulling able-bodied workers to dependency, it’s interesting to note that the benefits of SNAP are $4.45 daily for food. It would also be interesting to note that two thirds of the recipients for SNAP are children, the disabled or the elderly. As for the others, most are adults with children. So it is hardly the able-bodied adults that are receiving the extremely generous benefit of $4.45 (I dearly hope you can see the irony here), but it is instead the people that are most in need.
In America right now, there are 45 million people under the poverty line. This number has drastically increased since the onset of the Great Recession, and many may believe that SNAP must not be doing enough to keep Americans out of poverty. The reality, however, is that SNAP kept more than four million people over the poverty line last year, and kept many more people from sinking further into poverty.
Lastly, the food stamps program has fundamentally helped children recipients of the program over the past 50 years. In the 1960s and 70s, a group of economists studied the impact that the food stamp program had on the children recipients. They found that, in comparison to children that had not received the benefits that the food stamp program provides, they grew up to be physically healthier and productive adults and were also less likely to need the safety net in the future.
Amidst a shrinking government evidenced by sharp drops in public employment, and declining spending, House Republicans needed a scapegoat in order to appeal to their conservative constituents back home. But what they’ve just done is cut one of the most important and successful social security programs in the United States right now.
This egregious act of shortsighted selfishness would not only hurt millions of Americans now, but it may also hamper this nation’s growth in the future.