Tag: food stamps

How Cutting Food Stamps Can Add Costs Elsewhere

New York Times logoWhen people eat better, they enjoy better health, reducing not just suffering, but also some expenses.

The Department of Agriculture recently finished work on a new rule that may take food stamps away from nearly 700,000 Americans by tightening work requirements. Several times in the past year, the government has proposed cutting food stamp eligibility. The new rule is intended to save almost $8 billion over five years.

It’s not clear how much money would actually be saved, research suggests, given the costs that might come from a decline in the health and well-being of many of the country’s 14.3 million “food-insecure” households.

The Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. It affects low-income, single-parent, and black and Hispanic households the most, but it cuts across many demographic lines and affects 11 percent of American households over all. Continue reading

White House wants to update poverty thresholds. It could affect food stamps and Medicaid benefits

Critics say move could weaken public assistance programs and increase hardship for low-wage earners

The White House Budget Office is considering its first update to inflation adjustment guidelines for poverty thresholds since 1978, with potential consequences for benefit programs serving low-income households.

The initiative is part of a re-evaluation of six inflation indexes used to track the impact on consumers of rising or falling prices. One of the indexes is used to adjust poverty thresholds, which underlie the calculation of eligibility for a number of benefit programs including Medicaid, food stamps and school lunches and breakfasts for poor children.

The Office of Management and Budget, which has provided guidance to agencies on the current measurement that hasn’t changed in four decades, wants to consider whether updates are warranted.

View the complete May 13 article by Paul M Krawzak on The Roll Call website here.

As U.S. budget fight looms, Republicans flip their fiscal script

The following article by the Reuters Staff was posted on their website December 31, 2017:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of a conservative Republican faction in the U.S. Congress, who voted this month for a huge expansion of the national debt to pay for tax cuts, called himself a “fiscal conservative” on Sunday and urged budget restraint in 2018.

In keeping with a sharp pivot under way among Republicans, U.S. Representative Mark Meadows, speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” drew a hard line on federal spending, which lawmakers are bracing to do battle over in January. Continue reading “As U.S. budget fight looms, Republicans flip their fiscal script”

I never knew how wrong I was about people on food stamps — until I was one of them.

The following commentary by Anthony Smith was posted on the mic.com website December 18, 2017:

Before the Great Recession, Dawn Pierce was a paralegal for a successful bankruptcy attorney. But then the American economy collapsed and she lost everything except her family.

Pierce, a mother of one from Boise, Idaho, never thought she’d be in a position where she couldn’t provide for her family. But with a son to feed and no real source of income to buy groceries, she had no choice but to apply for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a federal entitlement better known as “food stamps” that helps lower income families purchase food. Continue reading “I never knew how wrong I was about people on food stamps — until I was one of them.”