Food stamps: Why the GOP wants cuts

For Republicans, “freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat,” said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. That’s the message sent out by the House GOP’s vote last week to ax $40 billion from the federal food stamp program over the next decade, leaving about 3.8 million people to go hungry. Food stamp enrollment has grown since the Great Recession gutted our economy, but conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan claim the safety-net program has become “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” Some hammock: Average food stamp benefits are just $4.45 a day. And two thirds of the program’s supposedly lazy beneficiaries are children, seniors, or disabled people. Most of these same Republicans have refused to cut the $20 billion in farm subsidies handed out primarily to giant agribusinesses and wealthy farmers, said Jonathan Chait at NYMag.com. Clearly, Republicans are offended only by welfare programs that aid the “poor, sick, or otherwise unfortunate.” That’s real “class warfare.’’

The House GOP isn’t trying to starve the poor, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, just to rein in an out-of-control program. Washington will spend $83 billion on food stamps this year, more than double the amount in 2008. One in seven Americans “now let taxpayers pay for some or all of their grocery bills.” Food stamp rolls have kept expanding even during the economic recovery. The House’s cuts would be made through commonsense reforms, said NationalReview.com. Able-bodied people who’ve been on food stamps for three months would have to work or perform community service for 20 hours a week. “If that sounds paternalistic, it is.” If there’s one group of Americans who need a shove in the right direction, it’s “able-bodied adults who are unable to feed themselves.”

But these proposed cuts show “a total tin ear to American politics,” said Henry Olsen, also in NationalReview.com. Mitt Romney lost the race for president “largely because he was perceived as not caring about average Americans.” Yet here the GOP is once playing to its “Scrooge McDuck” stereotype, defending farm subsidies while making a top priority of “taking food away from needy people at a time of a tepid job market.” When Democrats kill this dumb bill in the Senate, they’ll once again claim to be the party that cares about ordinary families. “Why, conservatives? Why?”

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