Food stamps: Why benefits are being cut

Millions of poor Americans are about to get hungrier, said Brad Plumer in WashingtonPost.com. Funding for food stamp benefits was reduced last week by $5 billion a year, after a temporary benefits increase from the 2009 stimulus bill expired on Nov. 1. All 47 million Americans who receive food stamps will get a 5 percent cut; a family of four will see its $668-a-month benefits slashed by $36—enough to deprive kids of several meals. You try feeding four people on $20 a day. And that’s “not the only cut on the horizon.” Both houses of Congress recently passed food stamp reform bills, with the House GOP hoping to strip $40 billion over a decade and remove 3.9 million people from the program. Why are conservatives so eager to take food out of people’s mouths? asked Paul Krugman in The New York Times. They believe that the poor are lazy. Race is a big factor, too. Consumed with resentment of “Those People,” Republicans are waging “war on the poor.”

You’ve heard the liberal rhetoric, said Rachel Campos-Duffy in NationalReview.com. Now, “here are the facts.” The number of Americans on food stamps has doubled in the past decade, from 21 million to 47 million, and the amount of benefits paid has almost quadrupled from $21 billion to $75 billion. That kind of spending is unsustainable. Republicans actually want to keep the program going, by ensuring that benefits go only to the truly needy and stamping out fraud. The “righteous defenders of the poor” are ignoring the fact that the real problem is the Obama economy. Giving people a few more “crumbs off the government table” is not the answer to poverty. “Jobs, opportunity, and economic liberty are.”

It’s easy to “blame the big bad GOP” for these cuts, said George Zornick in TheNation.com. But Democrats are hardly guilt-free. The temporary increase in food stamp funding expired last week because Democrats agreed to end it early, in exchange for agriculture subsidies and a healthy lunch program pushed by Michelle Obama. In a Washington dominated by money and influence, “the poor have virtually no pull.” When the Democratic alternative to the GOP’s long-term food stamp plan would cut “only” $4 billion, it’s clear that “a basic indifference to the plight of people on food stamps is a bipartisan problem.”

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