SNAP Under Attack, Again...

Food Security Aid is one of the most important strands of the safety net our tax dollars provide. The average monthly SNAP benefit is about is about $287, or about $4.30 per person per day. Conservatives view these benefits as so extreme they just encourage people to live off the dole. Recently the Wall Street Journal noted that the SNAP program is not shrinking along with unemployment rates, another sure sign say conservatives that the benefit "takers" will never leave these programs. The Conservatives will tell you that Snap benefits, formerly Food Stamps, are a bribe, designed to ensure a steady stream of Democratic voters.

SNAP benefits are NOT tied to employment. They are tied to poverty, or to be more precise household income. While there has been a liberalization of eligibility requirements, the Journal article notes in the very last paragraph “The Congressional Budget Office said reinstating eligibility limits would save around $4.5 billion over 10 years.” Benefit increases enacted as part of the economic stimulus amounted to $80 per month for a family of four, about sixty five cents a day per person. Unless Congress takes action this largess will be eliminated in November of this year.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/03/28/1789251/ignore-the-spin-why-food-stamp-enrollment-isnt-shrinking-yet/

You may recall Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich in the last election cycle making the outrageous claim that African Americans ought to "demand jobs, not food stamps." Approximately 60% of the beneficiaries of the SNAP program are white, but setting that aside, Mr. Gingrich still missed a critical point in his cracker racial outreach program. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that for families with children receiving SNAP benefits 87% are employed within the year they receive benefits. In those households without children 82% worked within a year of receiving the benefit. CBPP goes onto report that more than 60% of SNAP recipients are working while they receive the benefits.

SNAP recipients are already working. The pay they receive is just not adequate for them to pay for the food their families require. The equation seems to be that poor people need both a job and SNAP to survive. Ironically, it appears that the vast majority of poor people would rather work than go hungry or see their children do so. Go figure.  

The reason that SNAP benefits remain at historic highs is that so many are employed at jobs where the wages they earn are not enough to live on. SNAP expenditures are not coming down with the rate of employment-- Which has been reduced by 0.4% in the last six months—because the vast majority of recipients ARE working! All but a small minority of those that receive the benefit for any period of time in a given year work.

The bigger, more critical challenge is that 58% of the jobs in the Obama recovery have been low-pay, low-benefit jobs in the service sector.  These jobs doom people to providing sustenance for their families by relying on the SNAP program. Republicans truly interested in reducing the cost of SNAP ought to be full-on supporters of the living wage movement sprouting up across the country, but the Republican benefactors do not want to pay more to their workers. The party believes that requiring them to do so would be something like Communism. So what are they left with? Paul Ryan has proposed a 17% reduction, an actual cut of projected spending of $135 billion over the next ten years. Since I believe he knows the scope of the challenge (as did the WSJ writer) I’m led to believe that Ryan’s proposals are based in logic that mingles equal portions of impatience, resignation, and ultimately defeat. Is the former VP candidate just giving up on solving any of America’s problems?

Ryan and the Republicans will insist that they do want to help poor people, even as they slash the programs for which they count literally for their family’s survival. Those that make this claim operate in a Republican hierarchy that denies that people go hungry in America. Ben Carson, the great new hope of Republicans, made that exact claim at the C-Pac conference.  Why invest in the truth when making it up is so much easier?

To stimulate the economy Ryan proposes tax code restructuring which would include both cuts in rates and closing some “loopholes”. The plan, a slightly warmed over rehash of the one he and Romney ran on last fall, again claims to remain revenue neutral even as it slashes rates at the top from 39.6% to 25%. Citizens for Tax Justice reviewed the plan and noted that “Even if the wealthy [defined as average income of $3.15 million] gave up all their tax breaks, they'd still wind up paying $203,670 less in taxes [per year]. And if the tax preferences were maintained, their tax burden could be up to $345,640 lighter.” The Republicans and Ryan argue that such a reorganization of the Tax code would liberate the entrepreneurialism of the American people, creating a “roaring job market”. What they fail to explain is how concentrating even more wealth in the hands of an ever smaller group of oligarchs will break the  economic pattern of the past thirty years where ever greater portions of America’s wealth was concentrated in fewer and fewer and fewer hands.

There has been a precipitous decline of the manufacturing base in this country. Union households, once representing one in three American workers, are now less than 10% of the workforce. The good paying jobs that union based factory workers relied on to lift their families are more vivid in sepia toned pictures than they will ever be in Detroit, Flint, or upstate New York for that matter. The median wage has risen 3% in the last 15 years. While inflation has been low, wages have not kept pace with the erosion in purchasing power. In an extended period of stagnant wages everything costs more. Prices for milk, gas and clothes are on a slight but steady upward trend. This has pushed people on the bubble into poverty. It is both simple and tragic, particular so because the deepest belt of Poverty is the rock-ribbed deep south states of the old Confederacy.  Segregation turned out to be a great tool for keeping pressure on low wages. The sons and daughters of the south are still paying for their history. Mississippi, long identified as the state with the most racist excess, has the lowest median income, $36,000, of any state in the nation.

WPA style infrastructure jobs and training and investments in research and technology could form part of an answer. But with the elections over, unemployment is no longer a national priority. Moreover, doing something to lift the plight of the poor is not a Democratic priority. That kind of concern is relegated solely now to the Progressive Caucus. $1.2 trillion in infrastructure investments? Yeah, that’s going to happen. As an alternative, Obama is asking for $50 billion which is so small as to be practically worthless.  

It seems we’re locked in a spiral. The way to our escape as a society and a country is at the moment murky and unclear. Even as the new Pope implores his people to go to “the outskirts where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight, and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters” our political leaders choose a way of surrender to forces they neither command nor understand. Money over washes our political process in such a way that almost any accommodation to the betterment of the people is met with a walls of bitter resistance, often ironically by those that may have the most to gain by such change.

The cacophony of fear drowns out any sane voice. There is no Dr. King demanding our attention, imploring us to “civilize ourselves by the abolition of poverty.” He has been replaced by the bombastic selfishness of the radio right. Those voices are everywhere and well distributed. Rather than a million strong chorus of voices being raised to solve the country’s problems we have simply settled into our little worlds of self-righteousness. We pick at the scabs of our disagreements, but we expect so much less from our leaders than we ought to.  The left is often knee-jerk in its protection of this president. While I acknowledge the fierce urgency of the moment, I reject the path of rationalizing fear or failure. Maddow, Stewart, and a handful of others aside, too many of us operate merely as blind apologists for an administration that too often fights small fights.   

Bobby Kennedy said, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” I wonder how America may once again get to the place where dreaming is possible.