(Photo from MassLive.com)
With poverty at record numbers, 14 million people unemployed, and state-level assistance getting axed thanks to lean budgets, federal assistance for economically struggling Americans is more important than ever before.
But food stamps, a lifeline for poor Americans that literally keep millions out of hunger, could be the next victim in Washington’s expanding appetite for deficit reduction. budget cuts and calls to dramatically tighten qualification standards threaten the availability of aid to Americans dealing with a battered economy.
Lawmakers have already passed legislation that would do away with the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the modern axiom for food stamps, which 1 in 5 Americans currently rely on for assistance. And now the congressional “super committee” charged with finding nearly $2 trillion in spending cuts could come after the program, too.
Such threats to government aid for the poor have galvanized activists into launching the “Food Stamp Challenge,” an even meant to encourage awareness of the importance of government hunger-relief programs among lawmakers on Capitol Hill. A religious group called Fighting Poverty With Faith came up with the idea to recruit members of Congress to live on the average food stamp allowance of $31.50 for one week. It’s a significant task for a body that includes at least 237 millionaires among its ranks.
Sadly, only ten lawmakers, all Democrats, agreed to take part in the challenge. California Rep. Barbara Lee, Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky and eight other House members are finding out what life is like for poor Americans surviving on government aid.
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) ate crackers and peanut butter for breakfast on Friday, while Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) solicited ideas for nutritional meals under $1.50.
They and at least eight other Democratic congressmen are participating in the Food Stamp Challenge, which requires living for a week on the average food stamp allotment, according to the organization hosting the challenge, Fighting Poverty With Faith (FPF).
The Food Stamp Challenge is an event to preserve the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program. Earlier this year, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) proposed a budget plan that would transfer SNAP to the states using block grants.
Lee, who also participated in the challenge three years ago, started the challenge Thursday with a launch at a Washington, D.C., supermarket.
Lee warned that members of Congress should not consider making cuts to the food stamp program as part of ongoing efforts to balance the budget. Lee was one of 64 congressmen earlier this month to call on the deficit-reduction supercommittee to preserve entitlement programs, including food stamps benefits.
“I am again taking part in this challenge because I believe that it is unconscionable to make cuts to programs that feed America’s poor and our nation’s children during the height of an economic crisis,” Lee said in a statement released by her office.
The ongoing struggles of the country’s economic recovery have forced a record number of Americans into poverty and led to a dramatic rise in the number of people relying on food stamps. Fully 15 percent of the US population used food stamps in August.
Beneficiaries of the SNAP program hit an all-time high of nearly 46 million earlier this year, an astonishing increase of 34 percent from just two years ago, when the country was supposedly in the middle of the great recession.
With the country experiencing widespread economic distress, experts say the “stigma” of asking for assistance has vanished. Some of the fastest growth in food stamp use occurring in typically comfortable Midwestern suburbs.
Some 45.8 million people collected food stamps in May, up from 44 million in April, according to the USDA. That’s an all-time high, up 12 percent from a year ago and an astonishing 34 percent from two years ago. Comparing May 2010 to May 2011, more than 20 states have seen double-digit percent growth in individuals seeking food assistance benefits.
“The rise in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program indicates that the economy is still in tough shape and for a lot of people the recession has not ended,” Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist for ConvergEx, told ABC News.
Of Alabama’s more than 4.7 million residents, 1.7 million are receiving assistance for food based on figures from the USDA. The figure has more than doubled from May 2010 to May 2011 for the state’s residents.
The uptick is steep in parts of the Midwest. In Illinois, food stamps have risen by 46 percent in Cook County, 133 percent in DuPage County, 84 percent in Lake County, 96 percent in Kane County, 168 percent in McHenry County and 74 percent in Will County, according to the Daily Herald.
Throughout the years the cost to maintain the program has risen due to inflation, and an increase in demand as the program sheds its stigma.
“It’s clear that the historical stigma of being on food stamps is quickly eroding because there are so many people on it. People don’t feel bad asking for help,” says Colas.
“If people are struggling to make a mortgage payment, there’s less money to spend on other things like food,” says Colas. “If you think of suburban as the philosophical heartland, the fact that food stamps are on the rise in suburbia’s been accepted as a program people do not feel embarrassed about accepting help.”
The sheer number of Americans receiving food stamps means the program has moved beyond simply a source of regular aid for individuals and families that make up the chronically poor. Typical recipients of nutritional aid might now include families dealing with foreclosure, or working Americans laid off at the height of the recession and now unable to find new work, becoming part of the long-term unemployment crisis in the US.
The number and depth of food stamp recipients means any changes to the program could have wide ranging economic effects that could inhibit signs of a recovery. With consumer spending accounting for more than 70 percent of the US economy, any reduction in government aid could generate adverse impacts.
Even so, many lawmakers are actively targeting food stamps as a source for deficit reduction, with the $68 billion SNAP program facing the prospect of deep cuts or a complete dismantling.
The budget put together by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and passed by House Republicans earlier this year would have imposed cuts of $127 billion on food stamps over ten years while fundamentally changing the program, ending it as a federal entity and moving responsibility primarily to the states as a “block grant” program.
The Ryan plan never passed the Senate, but other lawmakers have taken a similar view that food stamps need to be cut and that hunger-relief is no place for the federal government.
GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama has complained that food stamps are “out of control,” and that the number of Americans relying on them is high not because of the bad economy and rising poverty, but because of rampant fraud and abuse.
Sessions told ABC News that the program has “surged out of control” in large part because “multimillion-dollar lottery winners are getting food stamps,” questions whether “there are four times as many people that need food stamps today as they did in 2001,” and is calling for tighter standards on which Americans are eligible for food stamps.
The number of Americans receiving federal aid for food has skyrocketed in recent years, partly from need and partly, according to Sen. Jeff Sessions, because of abuse.
Food stamps, he told ABC News’ “Top Line” today, are a symptom of a government run out of control.
“No program in our government has surged out of control more dramatically than food stamps,” said Sessions, R-Ala. “And now, nothing is being done at it, about it. Nobody is looking under the hood. It had doubled in the last three years. It had quadrupled from 20 billion to 80 billion in the last 10 years.
“When it started,” he said, “it was one in 50 people on the food stamp program. Now, it’s one in 7. Lottery winners, multimillion-dollar lottery winners are getting food stamps because that money is considered to be an asset, not an income.”
But for every lottery winner, there are many more of the 46 million Americans – 1 in 7 – who receive federal food aid who really need it. The numbers have, indeed, skyrocketed in recent years, from 26 million to more than 46 million since the recession began.
We pointed out to Sessions that for every lottery winner abusing the food stamp system are families that likely need the help.
“Well, look, do you think there are four times as many people that need food stamps today as they did in 2001?” he asked. “This year, they are proposing another 14 percent increase in food stamps without any real reform to understand how it is that it surged so dramatically. We cannot do this. We don’t have the money. If Congress doesn’t understand that we can’t continue to double the food stamp program every three years, they don’t understand how deeply we are impacted by the debt. The debt is already pulling down economic growth, costing jobs. We need people working with jobs, not receiving food stamps.
Sessions wants to tighten restrictions on who can get food stamps and has proposed defeating a planned $9 billion increase to the program.
With threats from Washington, Americans dealing with food insecurity face an uncertain future. In Arkansas alone, over 500,000 state residents use food stamps in a tough economy. State officials and charity workers have a “high level of concern” about the debate in Washington and whether food stamps will be a victim of mandated deficit reduction.
But future assistance from the federal government is now up in the air.
“We do have a high level of concern, we’re monitoring it, watching it, and we want the public to know how this benefits those around them,” Rhonda Sanders said.
Rhonda Sanders runs the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance. She says more than 500,000 Arkansans currently use food stamps, mainly to weather tough times.
“It’s used as a safety net: I’ve lost my job, I don’t have the income that I used to have, I need to pay rent, need to pay medical bills,” Sanders said.
Sanders says recipients range from families to seniors. And the word from Washington now is Senate amendment reductions for SNAP and rolling back stimulus expansion for it.
For the “I don’t like paying for anything” crowd, here are your choices -
1. People can go hungry. Including kids, without whom it is very difficult to get food stamps. I’ve had family members on less than $800 a month be rejected.
2. We can pay people a living wage so they can afford food without help, but this would raise prices across the board.
3. We can subsidize it via our taxes.
I’d prefer #3 because it’s actually the cheapest option. Much better than never ending wage inflation to the bottom half afloat or letting kids starve. I don’t want to go back to a world where the rich are a full head taller than the poor because the poor don’t get enough food while growing up.
So instead of fixing this so-called “problem” of fraud, etc., Sessions wants people to go hungry. That will create a lot of jobs, right?
“Surged out of control…” you mean like the budget spending for these wars that we have been fighting for the last 10 years?
“do you think there are four times as many people who need food stamps today as in 2001.” Yea…. have you noticed that we are in an economic down turn? Come on! an 8th grader has more sense than this.