It’s
almost as if Republicans are actively striving to get a reputation for
being mean to poor, hungry people. On Tuesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer
reported that the administration of Gov. Tom Corbett
plans to start restricting eligibility
to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as the
food stamp program). Specifically, the state is imposing an “asset
test” — anyone under 60 years old with savings of more than $2,000 is no
longer eligible for assistance.
The news isn’t quite as
bad as some outlets are spinning it.
Pennsylvania’s proposed asset test conforms to federal guidelines for
SNAP and doesn’t include the value of a recipient’s home, retirement
savings or car. But what’s troubling is that the nationwide trend has
been headed in exactly the opposite direction. Only 11 states currently
impose asset tests for SNAP eligibility. Just four years ago, in fact,
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, abolished the state’s
asset test.
And with good reason, as we can readily learn from two new
freshly updated informational fact sheets on SNAP coincidentally published on Tuesday by the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities.
SNAP
serves as the bedrock of the federal safety net. Ninety-two percent of
SNAP’s $78 billion budget goes to benefits that can only be used to buy
food. Seventy-five percent of SNAP participants are families with
children. There are already plenty of restrictions in place that ensure
that SNAP benefits primarily go to people who are legitimately poor.
According to CBPP, “93 percent of SNAP benefits go to households with
incomes below the poverty line, and 55 percent goes to households with
incomes below half of the poverty line (about $9,155 for a family of
three).”
SNAP gets
high marks
for low levels of waste and fraud, kicks into action quickly and
efficiently when the economy craters, and is rated by the Congressional
Budget Office as one of the two most effective forms of federal
stimulus. Perhaps best of all, the number of recipients usually declines
just as quickly when the economy rebounds. According to a recent study
by the USDA, in the mid-2000s, “More than half of all new entrants to
SNAP in the mid-2000s participated for less than one year and then left
the program when their immediate need had passed.”
As
the U.S. economy continues to recover, SNAP outlays will surely
decline. So why hurry it along? Could it be because conservatives think
there’s something fundamentally wrong with providing nutritional
support? Or is it the racial angle — the intersection of poverty and
race that encourages people like Newt Gingrich to call Obama “the food
stamp president.”
The most charitable way to interpret Gingrich’s
slur is as a critique of the president’s management of the economy: If
he’d been a better president, fewer people would be eligible for
assistance. But there’s also a deeper, darker level that connects the
classic conservative antipathy to anything vaguely smelling of the nanny
state. And the more one ponders that, the harder it is to fathom. The
richest Americans skated through the Great Recession, while poor people
lost their jobs and their homes and struggled to put food on the table.
SNAP was there to help, to prevent the kind of pain and suffering that
plagued American during the Great Depression, or that still afflicts
citizens of less fortunate countries today. We should be thankful that
Obama is the food stamp president; it’s a tribute to the progress
inherent in becoming a civilized nation. We don’t let our citizens
starve when Wall Street causes an international catastrophe. We should
be proud of that.
is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.
No comments:
Post a Comment