Don’t Starve the Food Stamp Budget
By: San Francisco Food Bank
So it’s come to this. On Wednesday, Congress passed a bill that was hailed all over Washington for preventing teacher layoffs and cuts to Medicaid. The money to pay for this came at the expense of a $12 billion cut to the Food Stamp program. And so the grim reality behind the election-year cheerleading is this: The burden of funding is being put on the backs of those who can least afford it - the tens of millions of struggling Americans who rely on Food Stamps to keep food on their tables. The cost will be borne by people like Ginny*, a disabled San Franciscan scraping by on less than a poverty-level income, supporting herself and her son on $9,960 a year.
Has this country really come to the point where we have to take food from the mouths of our poorest citizens in order to secure health care and education? Congress and the President are saying yes. And they’re willing to let people like Ginny pay for it with an average cut of $47 each month to their Food Stamp benefits. Ginny is one of over 40 million Americans who use Food Stamps to keep their families from going hungry. And now, she’s going to have to struggle that much harder to protect her child from hunger.
Our legislators might think that $47 a month isn’t much to sacrifice. But at very low income levels, the loss of even a seemingly small sum is devastating. For example, the likelihood that a child will go hungry is twice as high for families living at the poverty level than for people with only slightly higher incomes. So for Ginny, that $47 is the difference between having to skip meals herself, and having to see her child miss meals, too. It’s the difference between having breakfast ready for her son in the morning, and sending him to school on an empty stomach.
I don’t question the value of investing in education and Medicaid. Education, in particular, is an essential investment in our children and we need to fund it in order to remain competitive as a nation. But our children need to be prepared in order to reap the gains of that investment. They need to come to school fully nourished and ready to learn. Cutting Food Stamps works against that because - let’s not forget - 50% of Food Stamp recipients are children.
This latest cut is just the first salvo in the assault on the Food Stamp program and those who rely on it. Yet another cut is on the horizon for when Congress reconvenes in September after their summer recess. At that point, they will determine the future of all child nutrition programs, including school meals. The Senate has already unanimously proposed that improvements to these programs be partially funded by even more cuts to Food Stamps. There is still hope of undoing this perverse decision-making if the House can make some tough choices about where to find funds.
Targeting Food Stamp recipients is the easy route for politicians to take. After all, the poor can’t afford to make campaign contributions. They don’t have armies of lobbyists. They don’t have unions and trade associations protecting their interests from election-year horse-trading. It’s hard to imagine a group whose pockets are easier to pick over and over again.
It’s a travesty to cut Food Stamps to pay for education and medical care. And it’s downright insane to fund child nutrition programs with money pared from Food Stamps. What message does that send? That children living in low-income households should get less food at home and be more dependent on school meals? That kind of gimmickry is the budgetary equivalent of taking money out of one pocket, putting it in the other, and then declaring a profit. It simply defies logic.
With the economy sputtering and deficits ballooning, we all have to make some unpleasant tradeoffs. That is just as true for our legislators as it is for individual Americans. We must insist that Congress not take the easy way out yet again by putting the onus on those lacking a voice in the halls of power. We know it’s hard to say no to special interests lining campaign coffers. It’s hard to close tax loopholes that lobbyists insist on keeping. But it’s also hard to imagine that there isn’t something less vital than food aid to be sacrificed in the sprawling $3.8 trillion federal budget.
* name changed