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)file photo
WASHINGTON,
D.C. -- Food stamp recipients this fall -- 16 percent of all Ohioans --
will have their benefits reduced because of an act of Congress, with a
family of four losing up to $36 a month.And this time,
Democrats are the ones who did it. While Democrats complain that House
of Representatives Republicans want to dramatically cut the federal
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the cuts that will
take effect Nov. 1 were passed by Democrats in 2010.
In Ohio, this will mean a loss of $193 million in direct benefits
between Nov. 1 and the end of the 2014 fiscal year next September,
according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Ohio
Association of Foodbanks, which tries to supplement households with
donated groceries. It will affect 21.6 percent of people in Cuyahoga
County, based on state SNAP participation tables.
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.”
