It’s official: Congress will slash food stamp funding in the midst of a deep economic recession, when more people rely on food stamps than ever before.
Monday night, the Senate passed a five-year farm bill that contained $4.1 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over ten years. This ensures that the only debate now will be about how much to cut—and it’s likely to result in cuts much deeper than $4.1 billion.The House Agriculture Committee passed a farm bill last month that cut $20.5 billion from SNAP by removing “categorical eligibility” (more on that here), which would take food stamps away from 2 million Americans and hundreds of thousands of children.That bill has yet to be fully debated and passed on the House floor, and the push to make the cuts even deeper will be strong—conservatives have insisted on even deeper cuts. Representative Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget, for example, called for $135 billion in food stamp cuts, and on Tuesday, twenty-five House Republicans wrote to House Speaker John Boehner to remove food stamp funding from the bill altogether. (They just want the program debated on a separate track, but the barely implicit message in the letter is that they don’t want to be forced to agree to “only” $20.5 billion in food stamp cuts at the risk of killing the farm bill.)
this should be a eye opener for those base voters for the right wing this hits you in the butt as hard as anyone else, how will you eat and stay strong enough to stand in line for hours to give then a kiss on the cheek which one depends on you, for making it possible. they pick those who can't fight back or have binders full of lawyers.
there is a time to drop the act and step i to the real world last windom coming up fast 2014, mark it down.
Why did Democrats in the Senate head down this road? Some attempted not to—Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a bill last month that blocked any food stamp cuts, but only twenty-five of her colleagues, and zero Republicans, voted for it. It failed 70-26.Senator Debbie Stabenow, chair of the Senate Agriculture committee, has defended the cuts as designed only to stop “waste, fraud and abuse” in the SNAP program, and urged Democrats to vote against Gillibrand’s bill. “Every family that currently qualifies for nutrition assistance in this country continues to get that assistance,” she said. “We do make sure there is integrity in the programs.”
we know many innocent and needy will suffer this, broad brush is not reform it's equal punishment of everyone and why hasn't the rich loopholes not even get a mention in any story i've seen lately, plain to see who means more to who, and who deserves your vote and who doesn't.
