House Passes Tea Party Food Stamp Cuts, 6 Million Could Go Hungry
The House voted Thursday night to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program that helps feed hungry, low-income and often jobless people and families. As many as 6 million could be thrown off the rolls of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
The bill was aggressively promoted and adamantly backed by tea party Republicans, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). The vote was 217–210 , with all Democrats and 15 Republicans voting “no.”
In a floor speech before the vote, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said:
This legislation is preying—P-R-E-Y-I-N-G—on people, on children, on veterans, on seniors, on all those who are struggling to do their best in our country….Something is very wrong with this picture. But I know one thing is for sure: every person who votes for this Republican measure is voting to hurt his or her own constituents because we all represent people who at some time need help.
Rob Zeaske, the CEO of Second Harvest Heartland, which provides food to some 1,000 soup kitchens, food shelves and other providers in Minnesota and Wisconsin, said:
We will see more neighbors more deeply in poverty and more deeply in need of our services.
Alan Pike at Think Progress writes:
SNAP is one of the three most effective anti-poverty programs the government has, keeping 4 million people out of poverty last year alone. The cuts Republicans propose are likely to create greater costs down the road than what they save the government in the near term.
The Republicans who back the massive cuts to the program claim it has grown too big because there are too many people who shouldn’t be receiving help or are scamming the system. Salon’s Alex Pareene has a simple explanation:
Participation in SNAP has surged because of the recession and the still ongoing jobs crisis, nearly all food stamps recipients are quite poor, and there is very little “fraud” evident, though there are anecdotal and possibly apocryphal examples of “abuse” that circulate in the conservative media sphere like dirty magazines in an ’80s movie about sleep-away camp. SNAP increases when poverty increases , and if conservatives want to shrink the program their best course of action would be to improve the economy, or to improve the way the economy benefits Americans without large investment portfolios.
He also explores how the bipartisan welfare reform of the early 1990s was supposed to end Republicans’ decades-long assault on anti-poverty spending by making welfare less generous “in the hopes that doing so would make Republicans stop fighting to make welfare less generous. How has that worked out?”
Co-opting the conservative line on anti-poverty programs did nothing to halt conservative attacks on anti-poverty programs. Programs aimed strictly at the poorest Americans are always and forever under assault from a Republican Party…. The “Grand Bargain” is always going to accelerate the destruction of the safety net.
The bill now goes to the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said:
The Senate will never pass such hateful, punitive legislation.
