House Republicans have passed legislation that would cut food stamp funding by $40 billion over the next four years. If there’s any upside, it’s this: the Senate won’t agree to such severe cuts.
The Republican legislation passed by a mere seven votes, since even some GOP legislators thought the cuts too draconian. The cuts would boot 3.8 million recipients out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2014, says an editorial in the New York Times. House Representative Louise Slaughter and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, both Democrats, sent out statements yesterday condemning the legislation. Slaughter voted against the bill, but the other House member representing Monroe County, Republican Chris Collins, voted for it. In her statement, Slaughter had this to say about the bill:
“Decades of expanding inequality, misguided trade agreements and the recent financial crisis have decimated the middle class and destroyed good-paying American jobs, forcing many to temporarily rely on food stamps to feed their families. These are not people living lavishly; these are people who are having trouble finding work in a bad economy or are employed in low-wage jobs that don’t pay enough to make ends meet. They need a little help to get by, and the SNAP program provides a modest benefit of $1.40 per meal to keep Americans from going to bed hungry.”
The legislation would also impose new work requirements on SNAP recipients.
The exact effect on local recipients is unclear, but opponents of the cuts point out that the benefits largely go to children, the elderly, veterans, and people who already have jobs. State Office of Temporary Disability Assistance statistics show that in June, 63,120 Monroe County households, totaling 118,928 people, received SNAP benefits. Of the recipients, 40,459 people were receiving temporary assistance.
Democrats have the majority in the Senate, and that chamber has already passed its own SNAP legislation. The House and Senate bills head to conference negotiations and the severe cuts in the House bill are not expected to survive that process.
But that doesn’t mean that SNAP cuts aren’t coming, or that new work requirements won’t be put into place. House Republicans and Senate Democrats could always find some middle ground. Though the two parties seem to be on opposite ends of the issue, the Senate did pass legislation cutting SNAP funding by $4 billion. But House Republicans and Senate Democrats also don’t have to agree on anything — a move that would create complications and uncertainties of its own, particularly in light of a potential government shutdown.
This article appears in Sep 18-24, 2013.
I think that tightening the eligibility restrictions is perhaps not the right move at this time. Despite that some people will game the system or grow too comfortable on it, I think that’s just the cost of having a working safety net. Anybody’s situation can change and I for one know that I would not want to starve.
There is a fair bit of food stamp fraud in my Rochester neighborhood. I’ve seen people trading in their food stamps to corner stores for cash – the stores pay about 50 cents on the dollar. I’ve been approached in Save A Lot by other shoppers asking to cash out my groceries with their food stamps in exchange for my cash, offering me a discount. I’ve seen tenants lend their food stamp cards to landlords as a way to cover whatever remainder of the rent was not paid by social services.
People who need food assistance and get food stamps but for whatever reason don’t manage to convert their food stamps to food end up getting food mainly by working the soup kitchen and food pantry circuit. There are multiple free hot meals served throughout the city daily, enough so that you could go from one to the next all day long.
I would like to see a concerted effort to identify and reduce fraud, especially going after stores and recipients who are colluding to sell the food stamps basically for drugs. As it is, I don’t see that this is happening. I have never heard about any arrests or seen any corner store’s food stamp machine taken away. In the grand scheme of the overall program, the fraud may be a relatively small percentage. But in some of our city neighborhoods the fraud is pronounced. It’s waste to the taxpayer and I think ends up harming the benefit recipient too. If we would aggressively tackle this fraud, I think the general public would feel better about the program and the good that it does.