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Budget Cuts Series: Trump's 2020 Budget has $220,000,000 Cuts to Food Stamps
For over two years, Smart Dissent's Budget Cuts Series has exposed Trump's proposed budget cuts, finding savage proposals hidden beneath the surface. The Trump White House proposed their third budget in mid-March 2019 and we're finally catching up now in May.
In today's Budget Cut Series, Trump, Mulvaney, and their criminal enterprise propose $220 billion in cuts to SNAP – food stamps for families to put food on the table. Food so children don’t have to go to bed hungry.
SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, is the nation's most important anti-hunger program. In a typical month in 2017, SNAP helped more than 40 million low-income Americans afford a nutritionally adequate diet. SNAP provides important nutritional support for low-wage working families, low-income seniors, and people with disabilities living on fixed incomes. Close to 70 percent of SNAP participants are in families with children; nearly a third are in households with seniors or people with disabilities. After unemployment insurance, it is the most responsive federal program providing additional assistance during economic downturns.
SNAP gives on average just $1.40 per meal. It lifts 8 million out of poverty. And Trump would eviscerate it. We're talking on the order of a 1/4 cut to SNAP. How disgusting. I don't care who you are, no one should go hungry.
USDA's budget proposes a cut in SNAP, or food stamps, to support 3 million fewer recipients in 2020. It would also make changes that would make food stamps available for fewer working families and limit the number of schools that can provide free meals to all students.
The Trump administration... will leave many Americans scrambling for a way to feed themselves adequately. And it will... cost the economy jobs — lots of them. They estimate 200,000 positions in 2020 and as many as 2.8 million job-years over the next decade.
SNAP is one of the most effective ways to stimulate the economy we know. The money is spent, and it’s spent almost immediately. Studies show 80 percent of the benefit amount is spent within 14 days. This money is pumped into the local economy, helping businesses expand and supporting jobs at local retailers and farms. A 2015 study found that during the Great Recession, expanding SNAP benefits was one of the most effective forms of fiscal stimulus the government undertook on a dollar-to-dollar basis.
Trump's Republicans propose the following instead, a series of proven stupid ideas:
Trump proposes to resurrect his food-box idea to replace food stamps, a stupid proposal from 2018 that would have increased administrative costs for states and saddled recipients with food supplies they couldn’t use. Trump calls the idea “innovative.”
Trump is proposing to tighten work requirements on SNAP as well as Medicaid, despite a lack of evidence that such requirements do anything to help people find jobs and growing evidence that they result in needy families being thrown off the programs by the thousands. As a report this year by the National Academy of Sciences concluded, “It appears that work requirements are at least as likely to increase as to decrease poverty.”
Republicans, as always, govern as if only the wealthy and large corporations matter. Government is intended to work for and on behalf of EVERYONE.
One thing you can say about any member of the Trump administration: They are consistent in their hatred of almost anyone who needs a financial helping hand. And they will pursue that hatred to the point of damaging the American economy.
.... it's part of Republicans' broader efforts to undermine welfare programs and say even if those specific cuts are rejected by Congress, history suggests the administration will still try to pursue welfare reform and work requirements in other ways.
Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, called the proposals a "collection of years worth of bad ideas."
Source:
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-trump-budget-20190312-story.html
https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap