The House of Representatives budget proposal recommends a horrible way to remove food assistance from American families by block grant funding the food stamp program.
This means people turning to this program for the most basic nutrition will need to have faith in their state to administer and provide funding at appropriate times and at appropriate amounts. Instead of the program responding automatically to ups and downs in the economy, it will be up to the state to decide if their citizens really need the help and how.
Thankfully, many organizations and leaders are coming out against this idea. Here are the top arguments against this proposal.
1. It won’t save taxpayers any money.
To turn an entitlement program into a customized program will be a huge and expensive task for each state to research, fund and implement. There will be inefficiencies and errors as they figure out how to run the program correctly. All of this trial and error will cost money at the expense of families who need the help and at no additional savings to the taxpayer.
2. It could increase everyone’s grocery bill.
The food retail industry is not happy about this. Neither is the National Grocers Association. While states are scurrying away, trying to figure out how to run food stamps for their residents, supermarkets will have to know all of these rules for every single state. That’s a lot of expensive administrative wrangling for grocery chains. How will they manage the over 300,000 food items with over 15,000 new food items introduced each year? How will they appropriately help a person displaced by a natural disaster to another state with different SNAP rules? And then, there’s the risk of grocers violating any of these new rules, which can lead to penalties, which can lead to even more cost for retailers. Who do you think is going to pay for all of these new costs – the shareholder or the consumer?
3. It will make disasters, well, a disaster.
When hurricanes, floods, other natural disasters and even pandemics strike, D-SNAP, the disaster-specific food stamp program, springs into action to help victims. Meanwhile, food banks are on the front lines of disaster response, working in concert with the Red Cross, FEMA and other first responders. Block grants will make all of our work unnecessarily difficult and increase the potential for tragedies. In great moments of catastrophe, it is inhumane to create barriers for Americans to access food.
4. It won’t reduce SNAP costs.
The House budget boasts a savings of $125 billion by cutting food stamp benefits and providing block grants to states. But this does nothing to aid families in need but rather prolongs their suffering, making it even harder to lift themselves out of poverty. In the Wall Street Journal, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack suggests a better idea: help recipients with employment and job training, so they can earn a wage that doesn’t require them to need food assistance.
“If Congress were to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, from the current $7.25 an hour, that would reduce the cost of SNAP by as much as $46 billion over 10 years. …”
Remember, the ultimate goal is food security – where everyone can get enough quality food to sustain a healthy lifestyle in socially acceptable ways. There’s nothing more socially acceptable than giving Americans the opportunity to make their own food choices with their own money. The block grant proposal does nothing to help and everything to harm our country’s efforts.
5. Been there, done that.
We’ve been down this road before with welfare, a program now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or commonly known as TANF. It, too, was an entitlement program that responded to economic conditions before it was turned into a block grant program. We also know that TANF, specifically in Texas, has not responded to the economy.
SNAP served 1.3 million Texas households in 2013, lifting an estimated 469,000 out of poverty. The program serves mostly children, seniors and the disabled. There’s a lot at stake for people who cannot work or turn to some other source of income if the state does not respond with help when needed.
6. All of this leads to more pressure on charities like ours.
Have you seen this graphic?
In 2013, our advocacy partner, Bread for the World, released this graphic and fact sheet to explain the impact of cutting food stamps on charitable relief organizations. Our most recent research on hunger in Central Texas reveals that 44 percent of our clients receive food stamps and only 87 percent report their benefits don’t last the full month, forcing them to turn to us for help. Cutting the program, combined with making the program less responsive to the need through a block grant, will put a huge strain on our Food Bank. Our new building was designed to respond to the projected rapid growth of Central Texas and to fill the existing gap in hunger relief. This new development will make our goal of a hunger-free community even further out of reach.
