The gap between America’s rich and poor, and between the super rich and everyone else, is the greatest it’s been in nearly a century. So what is the Trump administration doing as Christmas 2019 approaches? It’s working to cut food aid to the nation’s poorest people, among them children.
Three major rule changes have been proposed, and one affecting work requirements for able-bodied adults has already been approved.
A recent report from the nonpartisan New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute noted that one of the two remaining proposals could eliminate federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program Benefits (SNAP), better known as food stamps, for 3,500 New Hampshire households. Many of those households include children who could lose not just the aid that puts food on the table at home, but free school lunches as well, since the latter benefit is often tied to the receipt of SNAP benefits. In August 2019, “73,959 individuals in New Hampshire received SNAP benefits and 28,512 of them were children, with a majority being in elementary or middle school,” the policy center reported.
The changes, driven by conservative fears of freeloaders and Reagan-era “welfare queens,” are cruel and counterproductive. Children deprived of adequate nutrition suffer health effects that can include reduced intellectual development, tend to do poorly in school, earn less as adults, and cost society more in welfare and incarceration costs. Denying food stamp benefits to childless adults – the recently approved rule makes it exceedingly difficult for states to waive the 80-hour per month work rule to qualify unless the unemployment rate is 7% or higher – one of the two layers of work requirements in the program – does not help anyone get or keep a job. It makes it harder.
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, in an opinion piece explaining the changes, said, “In 1996, Democrats and Republicans came together to reform our welfare programs to restore the system to what it was meant to be: ‘a second chance, not a way of life,’ in the words of then-President Clinton.” But that’s not what happened this time.
Last year, Congress, in a bipartisan vote, rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to slash food stamp benefits. The new rule changes are designed to accomplish by fiat what the right wing couldn’t achieve legislatively. Perdue went on to say, “Our SNAP program should be structured to work with our changing economy, not be stuck in the past.” It’s septuagenarians Perdue and Trump, however, who are stuck in the past.
The newly implemented rule, related to certain childless adults, fails to recognize that the “gig economy” has replaced many full-time jobs or that data analysis allows employers to hire only the number of workers needed on a given day or at a given time, making it hard for workers in retail or food service to work 20 or more hours per week or predict their earnings.
Under one of the proposals that has not been finalized, a rule denying SNAP benefits to households with more than $2,250 in total assets would be expanded to everyone in the program. The plan fails to recognize that that sum amounts to little more than a security deposit and one month’s rent on an apartment. There is a failure to recognize the low wages earned by Americans with less education or fewer skills, even for full-time work, are not enough to cover the cost of living decently. There is a failure to recognize that cutting SNAP benefits for an estimated 3.5 million people means grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods could close. There is a failure to recognize that, according to the Agriculture Department’s own statistics, 44% of households receiving SNAP help include at least one person with a job.
Churches and charities can’t make up for the cuts in food assistance. Food stamp beneficiaries are the poorest among us. More than half, 55%, make less than $10,390 per year for a family of three. Starving them in the richest country on Earth is not just wrong and cruel, it’s immoral.
(Clarification: An earlier version of this editorial was unclear about the status of the changes to federal SNAP policies. Only one of the three proposed rule changes, which is related to the work requirement for able-bodied adults without dependents, has been approved. The other two proposals have not been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The projected SNAP disenrollments published by the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute are related to one of the rules still undergoing review.)