Tag: food stamp cuts
Trump Budget Will Hit Medicaid And Food Stamps, But Boost Military

Trump Budget Will Hit Medicaid And Food Stamps, But Boost Military

President Trump will propose on Monday to reduce federal spending on safety net programs by billions of dollars, as well urging major cuts in other non-defense programs, according to administration sources who disclosed the plan to Politico.

At the same time, Trump will request a spending increase for the Pentagon as part of his $4.8 trillion budget plan for fiscal 2021.

The White House claims that Trump’s plan would reduce the federal deficit — now at a record high over $1 trillion — to $966 billion. Despite previous boasts by Trump that the budget will reach fiscal balance within ten years, this version acknowledges that the deficit will remain over $250 billion in 2030.

At least half of the anticipated savings, Politico reports, would derive from the administration’s plan to cut mandatory programs, with changes that would slash food stamp benefits and impose Medicaid work requirements. But those cuts, as the Politico reporters note, are “unlikely to be embraced by Congress.”

IMAGE: Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting White House chief of staff.

Danziger: Scrooged

Danziger: Scrooged


Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

Congressional Republicans Seek To Cut Food Stamps, Harming Trump Voters

Congressional Republicans Seek To Cut Food Stamps, Harming Trump Voters

Republicans may have failed to kick needy Americans off food stamps during Trump’s first two years in office — but that doesn’t mean they’re giving up.

Sixty-five Republican members of Congress wrote a letter to Trump Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue on Tuesday supporting Perdue’s plan to create work requirements for people to receive food stamps.

In the letter, Republicans peddled insulting, inaccurate myths about food stamp recipients, such as claiming they’re lazy and choose not to work because food stamps have become their “way of life” rather than a short-term fix when they’re in a financial bind.

This simply isn’t true. More than half of beneficiaries are children who can’t work in order to feed themselves, and the average length of participation in the program is seven to nine months.

The GOP lawmakers argued that food stamps have “disincentivized self-sufficiency,” which they claim is a “significant problem” that can only be solved with onerous work requirements. They say their plan to institute work requirements would save $15 billion over 10 years, or $1.5 billion annually.

To put that yearly amount into perspective, the tax scam Republicans passed adds at least $1.3 trillion to the deficit over the course of 10 years. Cutting food stamps to poor Americans would be a minuscule fraction of the cost the GOP incurred to give tax breaks to the richest in the U.S.

Work requirements are also a pernicious way to “save” money, since all they do is deny people the benefits they need without actually encouraging more people to work.

The “problem” Republicans lay out in their letter isn’t really a problem. Rather, it’s a long-stated goal of Republicans like now-former Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump — who has been demanding work requirements since he took office.

Republicans, however, failed to get their precious work requirements into the farm bill that passed Congress in 2018. That’s why they are now resorting to changing the rules via regulations — a tactic that Trump and the GOP relentlessly attacked former President Barack Obama for using.

The ultimate irony here is that Trump’s own supporters may be hurt most by any food stamp work requirement changes.

report in May 2018 found that food stamp work requirements “would disproportionately affect low-income residents in states that supported Donald Trump for president.”

Unfortunately for those folks, you get what you vote for.

Published with permission of The American Independent. 

Lying Again? Scholars Detect Deception In Ryan’s Poverty Report

Lying Again? Scholars Detect Deception In Ryan’s Poverty Report

For the sake of America’s poor, a sincere conservative effort to improve the programs that serve them is very desirable – especially so long as Republicans control the House of Representatives, where they habitually yearn to cut or defund those same programs. For months Washington has eagerly awaited the latest version of “compassionate conservatism,” promised by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and his publicists.

But what the House budget chair and 2012 vice-presidential candidate delivered on Monday must drastically lower any such expectations.

“The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later” produced by Ryan’s House Budget Committee staff is merely more of the same old right-wing propaganda against the safety net, and worse.

Promoted as a scathingly rigorous analysis of the impact of poverty programs since the Sixties, its 200-plus pages cite dozens of academic researchers. Yet it more resembles an ideological tract than the social science meta-study it purports to be. Having determined in advance that nearly all of the nation’s anti-poverty spending is wasteful, counterproductive, and damaging to the work ethic of poor people, Ryan and his staff perform an audacious statistical stunt: They prove those programs have failed by pretending those programs don’t exist.

Poverty in America is officially determined by household income, and any official measurement of the number or percentage of poor Americans – those living “below the poverty line” — is determined by their income alone. But in order to measure the effectiveness of government programs designed to reduce the impact of low incomes, it would seem logically necessary to add in those extra sources of cash, goods, and services. A family that receives food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit may be raised out of poverty, even if their income remained below the official poverty line.

But the Ryan report rejects such plain logic, relying instead on the official poverty numbers without assessing the impact of those programs – and then insists that because the number of families with low incomes remains around 15 percent, those programs have failed.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains in a pithy review:

The report features the “official” poverty measure even though analysts across the political spectrum — and all three witnesses at a recent hearing that Ryan held, including the two Republicans he invited — have warned that the official poverty measure is deeply flawed for tracking changes in poverty over recent decades and for evaluating the impact of the safety net today.  The official measure ignores a very large share of the safety net — including SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), tax-based benefits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, and low-income housing assistance, among other programs.  Using a more comprehensive measure of poverty that analysts broadly favor, known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), Columbia University researchers recently found that poverty had fallen markedly, from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012.  Ryan buries this fact, failing to note the deep reductions in poverty under the SPM since the 1960s until page 201 of his report.

Moreover, the SPM shows that in 2012, the safety net cut poverty nearly in half — shrinking the poverty rate from 29 to 16 percent.  Yet in its 200-plus pages, the Ryan report fails to mention these findings.

In other words, Ryan cooks the books (again!), this time to denigrate programs that the Republicans want to cut drastically, notably SNAP and Medicaid.

If such manipulations aren’t troubling enough, it now appears that some of Ryan’s copious academic citations are also misleading and perhaps fraudulent, with the same distorting effect. According to the Fiscal Times, a group of Columbia University researchers whose work is cited in the report complain that Ryan omits critical data from their study, which examines progress against poverty between 1967 and 2012. For reasons best known to the Wisconsin Republican, his team simply left out the data from 1967 to 1969 – and artfully diminished the very substantial improvement gauged during those years.

Not so impressive for a politician claiming wonk status.

Said a surprised Jane Waldfogel, one of the Columbia professors who co-authored the study cited so misleadingly by Ryan: “In my experience, usually you use all of the available data. There’s no justification given. It’s unfortunate because it really understates the progress we’ve made in reducing poverty.” 

Like any faithful House Republican, Ryan and his staff also ignore the beneficial impact of health care reform. Based on completely outdated figures, they insist that poor families are discouraged from working (as if there are plenty of jobs) because they fear making too much money to qualify for Medicaid. But as CBPP also points out, that problem has been erased by the Affordable Care Act, which sharply increases the amount that a household can earn before losing Medicaid to 136 percent of the poverty line. Above that line, a working family can qualify for Obamacare subsidies and retain its insurance. But the Ryan report conceals that salient fact, too.

The report does offer a few brighter moments — including its advocacy for an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is proposed by President Obama in his budget today as well. Time will tell whether House Republicans join the White House to improve that traditionally bipartisan program, a favorite of both Presidents Reagan and Clinton. A safer bet is that they will surrender instead to the Tea Party caucus, which abhors any cooperation with this president.

Either way, there is nothing in Ryan’s latest effusion to dispel the impression of intellectual impoverishment left by his first foray in the direction of “compassionate conservatism” – always an embarrassing oxymoron, and now a synonym for scholarly deception as well.

Photo: Speaker Boehner via Flickr