Food-Stamp Folly

[Geee]

National Review:

To hear critics such as Paul Krugman, the New York Times editorial board, Ezra Klein, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the president, etc., you’d think congressional Republicans want to slash food-stamp funding to finance handouts to defense contractors. But, in relation to the scope of the structural dysfunction of the food-stamp program, the reforms proposed by congressional Republicans are actually very modest.

The Food Stamp Program was originally included in the Department of Agriculture under the high New Deal logic that the federal government could prop up one sector (agriculture) by subsidizing others (“under-nourished inner city folks with outstretched hands” according to Milo Perkins, the program’s first administrator) to buy its products. This original reasoning no longer applies and is largely forgotten. Nonetheless, under the Farm Bill currently being debated in the Senate, the food-stamp program would account for $80 billion of the Department of Agriculture’s $100 billion budget. As a staff member of the Senate Budget Committee tells NRO, this is a Food Stamp Bill, not a Farm Bill.

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Such massive scocpe wasn’t always the norm for the Food Stamp Program (which was recently renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in a largely unsuccessful attempt to remove the stigma of “food stamps”). In 2000, only 17.3 million people were on food stamps. That number has ballooned to 46.6 million. Of course, it makes sense that participation in a countercyclical program would increase during a recession. But the number of people using food stamps has grown much more than the participation in other similar programs. For example, Medicaid spending increased 27 percent during the recession, while food-stamp spending has jumped 110 percent.

Conversely, as the unemployment rate has come down in the last couple of years, the participation rates have actually jumped. From FY 2009 to FY 2011 the number of people receiving food stamps increased by 11.2 million even while the unemployment rate declined modestly. Even according to the rosy economic predictions of the Congressional Budget Office, the number of people on food stamps is projected to drop back only to 33.7 million by 2022, a time in which the unemployment rate is expected to fall to 5.3 percent. This projection of 33.7 million recipients is still slightly higher than the number of people on food stamps in the heart of the recession in 2009, and it’s almost twice the number of recipients in 2000.