Food stamp cuts coming soon, sponsored by Democrats (You read that correctly)
Health
advocate Lisa Carrero assists with healthy food choices at a nutrition
class at Tony's Finer Foods in Chicago. (Phil Velasquez/Chicago
Tribune/MCT) The Ohio Association of Foodbanks says that SNAP already provides only an average $1.50 a meal per person, which will drop to an average of $1.40. By the third week of each month, most SNAP households have already run through their monthly benefits, the association says.
The Democrats made a deal to reduce benefits in a manner that many in the party took pains to avoid discussing at the time. Saying that the nation’s school districts were on the verge of laying off teachers because of the poor economy’s effect on local and state tax revenues, Democrats put together a mini-stimulus bill to send more federal money to schools. Through another bill, they also provided money for a school nutrition program.
They said the money for both of these would come from closing corporate tax loopholes.
But the biggest share was actually from SNAP, more commonly known as food stamps, with cuts this November of $36 for a household of four that receives the maximum allocation, $29 for a household of three, $20 for a household of two and $11 for a single recipient, according to advocates for the program.
The $36, the Ohio Association of Foodbanks says, is the equivalent of a gallon of low-fat milk ($3.69), a box of corn flakes ($2.99), eight bananas ($3.12); a loaf of wheat bread ($2), some deli ham ($2.49); some deli cheese ($3.49), two boxes of spaghetti ($2), spaghetti sauce ($1.79), some ground beef ($4.99), some chicken breasts ($5.69), and four potatoes ($2.36).
One of the only Ohio Democrats in Congress who freely acknowledged these coming cuts at the time was Rep. Marcia Fudge of Warrensville Heights. At the time, she said she hoped to find a way to restore the money. In contrast, Rep. Zack Space, who was subsequently defeated for reelection, earned a "Pants-on-Fire" rating from PolitiFact Ohio when he claimed the teacher money would come entirely from closing corporate tax loopholes.
There was little public outcry at the time because Congress put off the reductions until Nov. 1, 2013. When pressed, some Democrats said they would work to get the money restored by this year. That has not happened, and a turn of political tides has made it practically impossible. Republicans control the House now and want cuts beyond those scheduled already.
“It’ll affect everybody” who gets SNAP benefits, said Jack Frech, director of family services in Athens County. He added, "Remember that food stamps are only designed to meet 70 percent of a family's food needs."
Forty-two percent of those affected will be children, said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks.
It may seem unlikely that the party that embraces Great Society programs would raid one program in order to pay for a different priority. But at the time, the cut was characterized slightly differently. SNAP benefits are based not only on family income and size but also on the price of a bare-bones diet, called the Thrifty Food Plan, as calculated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Social Services advocates say that level is inadequate.
Congress seemed to agree with that assessment when passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in early 2009. The House was then under Democratic control, with Nancy Pelosi of California as speaker. As part of the 2009 stimulus, Congress provided a so-called SNAP bonus to help struggling families cope with high unemployment and rising food prices. Lawmakers said they thought the extra money would tide struggling families over until 2014, at which point the economy would have improved and the need for extra SNAP benefits would have lessened.
Also by then, lawmakers said, they believed the rate of food inflation would catch up with the bonus. The bonus, in other words, could naturally sunset because by then, the regular SNAP rate (thanks to food inflation) would exceed the rate provided by the bonus.
But food inflation turned out to be lower than anticipated. So lawmakers in 2010, with Pelosi still the speaker, changed their minds about how the bonus would end. They estimated that with food inflation low, they had essentially over-funded SNAP with the bonus, and that it would take until 2018 for a natural leveling off to occur.
So they decided in 2010, when looking for ways to provide a teacher stimulus, to take back the food stamp bonus after Oct. 31, 2013. They based that on expectations of economic recovery.
The recovery has been weak, however, and family advocates say they sure have not seen food prices stabilize. Congress had hoped that the extra money "would help create new jobs to lessen the need for SNAP," said Frech, of Athens County, but it has not happened.
"Also there has been a growing number of people on food stamps who have no cash income whatsoever," he said. "So there is still a desperate need for these funds. The real situation on the ground for families on SNAP is quite dire. The economy has not improved enough to fix their problems."
Federal data show that SNAP participation has grown nationally, from 28.2 million people in fiscal 2008 to more than 46 million in 2012.
Ohio had 1.15 million people in the program in 2008. As of May, the last month for which official data is available, it had 1.83 million. That represented a drop of more than 23,000 from the level in March, but it is too soon to know whether it indicates a trend. Statistically, it amounted to a 1.3 percent decline.
Food banks and social service agencies say clients are not yet able to get additional sources of income to supplement their food budgets. That’s why, they say, the cuts -- or the end of the bonus, if viewed that way -- will hurt.
"Eligibility levels have remained the same,” said Anne Campbell Goodman, president and CEO of the Cleveland Foodbank. “It is difficult to hear people cry out in anger about the high numbers of people on food stamps in recent years. It is simply a function of the high number of people whose incomes allow them to be eligible."
She added that "Nothing has changed about the program. The program is doing what it was designed to do many many years ago: expand in times of economic distress and it will contract in times of economic improvement.”
As to staving off these cuts, Democrats now acknowledge the chances are slim. But they say they blame House Republicans, who have shifted the debate -- and now control the House. Once Democrats lost power in the elections of November 2010, they lost their chance to fix what they had done earlier that year.
The GOP has little interest in fixing the Democrats' problem, and it moved on to a new debate: What to do about future food and farm subsidies. Looking ahead, the House this year voted to split off SNAP from a new five-year farm program authorization bill. House leaders say they will deal separately with SNAP. Republicans make no secret of their desire to cut SNAP beyond pre-Recovery Act levels because they say it is inefficient and wasteful.
“The massive fight over the farm bill has superseded” talk of restoring the November cuts, acknowledged Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Toledo. “When you can’t even pass a farm bill, what happens to the whole program?
"I guess the deck has been reshuffled from what our choices are at this point," Kaptur said.
Fudge’s spokeswoman, Belinda Prinz, said her boss's focus on the need to restore the cuts hasn't changed, “but Washington obviously has. We've had sequestration and no jobs bill has been allowed to advance in the House. Wages are stagnant and unemployment and underemployment remain unacceptably high. Against this backdrop, the need for help to put food on the table also remains high for millions of Americans.”
And so Fudge and her colleagues are working on the broader issue of farm bill, post-November cuts.
Social service advocates say they deeply appreciate these efforts. But they’re still unhappy that Democrats let it come to this.
“The 47 million Americans who receive this modest supplemental food benefit live in poverty, often despite working every day,” Hamler-Fugitt said in an email. “They aren’t like members of Congress who earn more than $1,500 a day (for working only 123 days last year) and who receive the best government-funded health care our tax dollars can buy, paid time off vacation/sick time (242 days this year) pensions and all that comes with their public service employment.
“Maybe we as Americans should call on our these members of congress to walk a mile in the shoes of 1 in 6 poor Americans, require that they eat on a SNAP budget for a month and accept poverty wages for their work for a year – I bet we wouldn’t be having the one-side debate if they did.”
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