A few years ago, before I moved to Madison, I was at a Walmart in Neenah. I can’t remember why. Either I was lured by the prospect of finding all my Armageddon supplies (Fruit Roll-Ups, Count Chocula, and a chest bandolier for my increasingly untidy heap of semi-automatic rifle ammo) in one convenient location, or I’d finally exhausted the patience of the Copps deli staff and was hoping for a lingering, awkward, yet reassuring hug from someone (such as the reliably affable greeter) who was somewhat less redolent of chipotle mayonnaise.
While there, I witnessed a scene that many of us are familiar with. A man who had loaded his cart with several junk food items got to the register and paid with food stamps.
I felt a jolt of anger, as many of us have in similar situations. Is this really what the food stamp program was designed for? It’s one thing for me to buy junk from time to time with non-government money, but why are we subsidizing unhealthy choices? You can’t buy tobacco with food stamps, so why can you buy sugar-laden soft drinks?
For a moment at least, I felt a backlash brewing inside me against the food stamp program as a whole. But then I tried to put it in perspective, and my pique faded within the warm embrace of yet another jumbo-sized bag of barbecue-flavored Corn Nuts.
Of course, all of us have mean, reactionary thoughts from time to time, but those thoughts rarely steer public policy — unless you’re a member of Congress.
As the Wisconsin State Journal reported on Friday, approximately 900,000 Wisconsin residents and 53,000 Dane County residents are currently seeing cuts to their food stamp benefits as part of an automatic $5 billion reduction in the program. Dane County’s share of that will be $5.6 million.
According to the State Journal story, a household of three will see a cut of $29 per month, while a household of four will experience a $36 reduction.
That may not seem like much to those of us who have little trouble paying for our weekly groceries, but if your budget already skates on the thinnest of thin ice, it’s significant.
Nationally, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBBP), the $5 billion reduction in the food stamp program means that the average benefit will be cut to less than $1.40 per meal. But even if you’re determined to play the skinflint when it comes to people’s personal monthly budgets, you have to acknowledge the impact of removing yet another stimulative benefit from the economy.
The November benefit cut will reduce, by millions of dollars in every state, the flow of money that not only would help families afford to eat, but also would inject money into the economy. Studies show that in a distressed economy, every dollar of SNAP benefits creates at least about $1.70 in economic activity, as SNAP recipients spend their benefits on food quickly. For example, California and Texas will each lose over $400 million in SNAP benefits that would have helped their residents eat in 2014; the potential economic impact is even greater.
The key phrase there is “spend their benefits on food quickly.” It’s one thing to give the Koch family another estate tax cut, but if you really want to make sure the economy stays afloat, you need to create demand. Cutting demand at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder is sure to suppress economic activity, while predictably increasing human misery.
And congressional Republicans aren’t done yet.
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The House is proposing another $4 billion in cuts to the program each year over the next decade. In relative terms, that $4 billion per year is peanuts to those who control the government’s purse strings, but it could make a big difference to children and families who depend on assistance. Indeed, according to the CBPP, almost half of those affected by the recent food stamp cuts (22 million in all) are children — a fact that puts all the continuing sturm und drang about society’s “takers” into proper perspective.
Personally, I would have no problem with putting some restrictions on food stamp purchases in exchange for concessions from Republicans, as this article suggests. I don’t really see how Funyuns benefit anyone not engrossed in a Friday night Harold & Kumar marathon. But this mean penny-pinching at the expense of poor kids ignores mountains of waste elsewhere in the government — waste that dwarfs our yearly expenditures on food stamps.
For instance:
- Our recent adventure in Iraq cost more than $2 trillion, according to one estimate, and could eventually set us back $6 trillion when all is said and done. For our efforts, we uncovered no WMD and removed a dictator who had nothing to do with 9/11.
- The U.S. military budget is approximately $540 billion more than that of China, which has the second-highest military budget in the world. We also spend $330 billion more than all Asian countries combined, $365 billion more than all of Europe, $479 billion more than the Middle East and North Africa combined, and $576 billion more than Russia and Eurasia. That’s a lot of Froot Loops.
- As long as we’re scolding poor people for buying junk food, we might want to consider cutting subsidies to agribusiness that help make all those chips and cookies so alluring. As U.S. PIRG noted in a July report: “At a time when America faces high obesity rates and tough federal budget choices, taxpayer dollars are funding the production of junk food ingredients. Since 1995, the government has spent $292.5 billion on agricultural subsidies, $19.2 billion of which have subsidized corn- and soy-derived junk food ingredients.”
And if you think all those subsidies are going to a broad base of small family farms, think again. As U.S. PIRG notes, “Of the total $292.5 billion allotted in agriculture subsidies, 3.8 percent of farmers collected $178.5 billion, while 62 percent of farms did not receive any federal funds.”
Setting a budget is about priorities, but too often we get caught up in petty, mean-spirited politics. Unfortunately, that’s a brutal fact that many of Wisconsin’s and Dane County’s poor are being forced to face as we speak.
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