Tag: snap
Kevin McCarthy

McCarthy's Cruel Budget Schemes Make Even Republicans Cringe

Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy spoke at the New York Stock Exchange Monday, attempting to convince Wall Street that if the nation defaults on its debts in a few months and causes a global financial crisis, it’s all going to be President Joe Biden’s fault. That’s a tough sell since it’s been McCarthy’s GOP that has been arguing for months that a default could be managed by the Treasury Department while they flailed around unable to come up with a plan of their own.

“He’s probably trying to reassure investors and Wall Street … that Congress is capable of doing something, and we’re going to do something,” Rep. Steve Womack told The Washington Post, calling it a “test” for McCarthy. He added that the “real problem” is whether McCarthy can find 218 votes among the GOP to pass any kind of bill, much less a plan to present to the White House.

One thing McCarthy apparently wants is to make people go hungry. A centerpiece to the budget-cutting message he took to Wall Street is steep cuts to food assistance programs. That’s getting a tepid response from Republicans in the Senate (where it’s not going to pass). One GOP Senate aide scoffed “I mean, Godspeed. Get what you can. We’re going to live in reality over here.”

Arkansas GOP Sen. John Boozman reiterated that reality, saying it “would be difficult to pass in the Senate with 60 votes.” He’s doubtful it would even get 218 in the House GOP. “You look at the margin in the House,” he said, “It might be difficult to pass it in the House.”

McCarthy has four votes to spare, and plenty of his members have constituents among the 41 million low-income Americans who get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program help. That includes a bunch of swing-state Republicans, including a new group of freshmen members from New York.

That’s just one aspect of the massive cuts McCarthy would have to pass to achieve the kind of spending reductions he’s talking about–cuts that he’s going to find impossible to find 218 votes for.

That’s just one reason he has no plan, as Biden was quick to point out. “Show me his budget,” Biden told reporters early Sunday morning, on his return from his trip to Ireland. Biden released his budget on March 9. McCarthy has released nothing. Not even an agreed upon outline for the cuts he’s demanding.

"I don't know what we're negotiating if I don't know what they want, what they're going to do,” Biden stressed.

That’s one reason the White House is as adamant as it is in arguing that the only option is a clean debt ceiling that is separate from budget negotiations. They can count to 218, even if McCarthy can’t. They can also point to plenty of evidence that just one side of this argument thinks that breaching the debt limit isn’t such a big deal.

Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, responded to the latest from McCarthy in a statement reflecting that. The House should “immediately take a default on our obligations–which would worsen the fiscal outlook–off the table.”

“House Republicans must address the debt limit; that’s their non-negotiable obligation under the Constitution,” Bates said.

House Republicans have spent more time putting together an inoperable plan for what the Treasury Department could do after a default rather than putting together any kind of budget to take to Biden to begin a real negotiating process. Taking the nation into default has actually become a thing that some Republicans think should happen. For real.

“My view is that the crisis at hand is the debt; it’s not that we might not pass the debt ceiling,” said Stephen Moore, a leading economist at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. “It’s that we can’t just stay on this path. There will be a financial train wreck.”

Meanwhile, on Wall Street, real economists’ hair is on fire. “It will be financial chaos,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, if the nation even comes close to default. “Our fiscal problems will be meaningfully worse. … Our geopolitical standing in the world will be undermined.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

How Trump’s Policies Made Us More Vulnerable To Recession

How Trump’s Policies Made Us More Vulnerable To Recession

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

As the coronavirus send the United States and the entire global economy hurtling toward recession, President Donald Trump and his defenders have claimed the administration’s policies have left the United States better prepared for the downturn. But in reality, the president’s effects on the course of the economy thus far have been greatly exaggerated, and many of his policies have actually put Americans at greater risk in the event of financial catastrophe.

To understand why Trump’s policies have put us at risk, you have to appreciate the best possible policy response to a recession: automatic stabilizers.

Many automatic stabilizers are actually very familiar to most people. The category includes, for example, SNAP (commonly called food stamps) and unemployment insurance.

These policies are critically important because as a recession worsens, they automatically start ramping up. As more people lose their jobs, more people go on unemployment, and the program starts paying out more money. When more people on short on cash and need help buying for food — a common occurrence in a recession — they apply for and get SNAP to feed their families. The government starts doing exactly what it should do in a recession: spending public money to make up for the private shortfall in spending.

The best policies are “automatic” in the sense that lawmakers don’t have to change the law in a recession for the programs to spend more money; they respond to the need, and if there’s more need, the programs spend more money.

This is a great way to fight a recession because it provides support to the people who are hurt worst by the downturn. That’s good for humanitarian reasons, but also in crudely economic terms because it means the money the government is almost guaranteed to be spent back into the economy. If you give money to people who are doing OK in a recession, they might just try to save it for later.

Since recessions are defined by a reduction in economic activity, policies that can efficiently promote economic activity will help soften the blow and speed the recovery. And since these policies ramp up automatically, there’s less uncertainty about how much support there will be, which can help reassure businesses and investors that the recession won’t be as severe as it might otherwise be. And you can skip entirely the interminable debates and political gamesmanship endemic to the U.S. Congress.

But because of the anti-government and anti-welfare ideology that still poisons the GOP and conservative movement, under the Trump administration, many automatic stabilizers have been significantly weakened.

For example, in December 2019, the Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue announced a plan that could kick almost 700,000 people off the rolls of SNAP. It imposes stricter work requirements on the program, which makes it harder for adults who don’t have jobs to get support. Purdue framed this as an effort to fight back against “dependency” on government:

“We need to encourage people by giving them a helping hand but not allowing it to become an indefinitely giving hand,” said Secretary Perdue. “Now, in the midst of the strongest economy in a generation, we need everyone who can work, to work. This rule lays the groundwork for the expectation that able-bodied Americans re-enter the workforce where there are currently more job openings than people to fill them.”

The administration has worked in other ways, too, to limit access to the program. Even in good economic times, these kinds of rules can impose large burdens on people who, for whatever reason, struggle to get or keep a job and need help buying food. If a recession hits, these restrictive measures are even worse. As recently as last week, BuzzFeed reported that the administration had considered delaying the implementation of the rule but had decided to push forward. On Monday, a federal judge halted the change, as Chicago Tribune reported:

“Especially now, as a global pandemic poses widespread health risks, guaranteeing that government officials at both the federal and state levels have flexibility to address the nutritional needs of residents and ensure their well-being through programs like SNAP, is essential,” wrote Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Howell halted the rule’s implementation until the court makes a final decision on its legality, saying it will likely be deemed “arbitrary and capricious” because it didn’t appear to consider the hundreds of thousands of submitted comments that raised concerns. The USDA had estimated 1.1 million people would be newly subject to the work rules and nearly 700,000 people nationwide were likely to lose food assistance as a result of the change. Some 36 million Americans are enrolled in SNAP.

But as the Tribune pointed out, tens of thousands have already been kicked off the rolls of SNAP because of similar federal rules under the Trump administration.

The problem goes far beyond SNAP. Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post reported that under Trump — as well as before him — states and the federal government have weakened other policies that could serve as automatic stabilizers:

Elsewhere, the administration has been demanding states add additional paperwork requirements for enrollment in both Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, causing eligible families to lose coverage.

The administration also recently announced a proposal to convert part of Medicaid to block grants. This would mean states would get a capped annual amount of federal dollars for the program. It would also limit states’ ability to expand enrollment during a downturn.

Then finally there’s the unemployment insurance program, yet another policy designed to serve as a safety net both for individual families and the macroeconomy as a whole. In theory, it allows jobless people to keep paying bills and patronizing local businesses.

This problem clearly pre-dates Trump. Even so, his administration has since encouraged states to add more bureaucratic hurdles — including by doing more widespread drug testing as a condition of benefit receipt. This appears to be a solution in search of a problem, based on the handful of states that have experimented with similar programs before. It’s also expensive, and it slows down benefit receipt.

And it’s not just public health insurance that has been diminished under Trump. After his extensive efforts to undermine Obamacare, the uninsured rate began rising under his administration after consistently falling under his predecessor. This, too, will impose greater burdens on Americans in a recession — especially a recession driven by a public health threat.

Rampell also noted that Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council under Trump, had touted the benefits of automatic stabilizers in the face of a recession without acknowledging how significantly they had been diminished.

Now, it does appear as if Congress and the administration are prepared to move forward with some non-automatic stabilizers to fight the coming recession. This could potentially be stimulus spending in the form of direct cash to families, which would likely be the best option. But many argue that Democrats — who generally favor such policies — should only agree to go along with such a plan if Republicans agree to make the policy automatic. That way, if a recession happens under the next Democratic president, the same beneficial counter-cyclical measures could ramp up without Congress needing to act. Because as Republicans proved in 2009, if a Democrat is in the White House, the GOP is much less willing to spend money to benefit the American people.

#EndorseThis: Should Children Eat? A Short Course In Trump’s Cruel Budget

#EndorseThis: Should Children Eat? A Short Course In Trump’s Cruel Budget

Stephen Colbert isn’t impressed by the grandiose title affixed to Trump’s first federal budget, “A New Foundation For American Greatness,” and notes that the president and his budget director Mick Mulvaney are “building that new foundation for American greatness on the ground-up bones of poor people.”

Among the many cuts that violate decency are huge reductions in SNAP, the food stamp program, and CHIP, the children’s health insurance program created by the late Senator Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, back in 1997 when she was first lady. (It has saved millions of children’s lives since then.)

“I know this is an unpopular position these days,” Colbert confesses, “but I believe children should go to the doctor and eat. Where do I find the courage?” He also points out the irony that seems to have occurred to everyone but the #MAGA crowd, namely that this budget “is particularly cruel to one minority group: Trump’s voters.”

And he’s worried by the ruinous spending cuts slated for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control: “Whenever that thing inside Steve Bannon bursts out and goes airborne, we won’t be prepared for it.”

It’s funny, if you take your humor very dark.

Fox News Caught Using Out-And-Out Lie To Push For End To Food Stamps

Fox News Caught Using Out-And-Out Lie To Push For End To Food Stamps

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Pathologizing poverty has been a long-term, ongoing—and sadly, highly successful—project of the right in this country. From Scott Walker’s recent appeal to PEOTUS Donald Trump to allow the state of Wisconsin to drug-test food-stamp recipients, to House GOP plans to make it harder to qualify for aid, the goal is to punish and stigmatize the poor while eliminating programs that help lift them out of poverty.

Fox News essentially functions as the media arm of the Republican Party, and on Wednesday it did its part to undermine a program that helps 44 million poor Americans. To that transparent end, an episode of “Fox & Friends” featured a segment titled, “Food Stamp Fraud at All-Time High: Is It Time to End the Program?” The piece goes on to claim that USDA figures reveal “$70 million of taxpayer money was wasted in 2016 due to food stamp fraud.”

There are a number of problems with this episode, from the false fact buried in the query to the absurd answer it proposes. Obviously, no, we shouldn’t scrap a program that serves 44 million needy people, because that would be disastrous for families, children and communities around the country. Especially since it’s an argument based on lies and obfuscation, as Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum points out:

First, I have no idea where Fox’s $70 million figure comes from—and I looked pretty hard for it. The Fox graphic attributes it to “2016 USDA,” but as near as I can tell the USDA has no numbers for SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] fraud more recent than 2011.

Drum goes on to note that even if the imaginary figure were real, it would account for a tiny fraction of cases.

That’s not all: $70 million is a startlingly low figure. In the most recent fiscal year, SNAP cost $71 billion, which means that fraud accounted for a minuscule 0.098 percent of the program budget.

So, less than 1 percent of program costs went to fraudulent cases. As Drum notes, that’s not to suggest that having $70 million go to people who weren’t eligible to receive the money isn’t problematic. But as the Washington Post points out, if we really wanted to make sure federal funds aren’t being wasted in unnecessary places, there are a few other sites we might want to look first.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post revealed that the Defense Department had deep-sixed recommendations that might save the agency up to $125 billion over the course of five years. “Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power,” our Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward wrote. “But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.” That’s a potential savings of $25 billion a year — 357 times the amount of waste in the SNAP program.

Another example. On Wednesday, we reported about a long-running scam operated by Leonard Francis, a Navy contractor who, over the course of several years, defrauded the government to the tune of $35 million.

“As of writing, Fox News has not questioned whether we should disband the Navy,” the Post wryly notes.

In fact, we can be 100 percent certain that the network would attack any messenger who suggests American military spending should be cut, though the U.S. spends more on its armed forces than the next eight nations combined. Yet Fox has no problem suggesting, based on flimsy evidence and illogical reasoning, that we should let millions of American adults and children go hungry. If the election of Trump wasn’t enough proof of the right’s complete and utter lack of morals, there’s new evidence emerging all the time.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

IMAGE: Fox News