1. Religious Education
2. Capitalism
3. The Tax Bill (the part congress played in it)
4. Healthcare
5. SNAP
6. Government Assistance (Other)
7. Veteran Wave
8. Where Democrats Stand
9. GOTV and Nancy
2. Capitalism
3. The Tax Bill (the part congress played in it)
4. Healthcare
5. SNAP
6. Government Assistance (Other)
7. Veteran Wave
8. Where Democrats Stand
9. GOTV and Nancy
I have been collecting these articles throughout the year. The part in green is a direct quote from the article in the link before or after it. I also very specifically stuck to reliable news sources. Actual fact based news sources like Politico, CBS News, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The LA Times and others.
SNAP:
It’s no secret that the GOP wants to end entitlement
programs. SNAP, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. All benefit the poor.
All of them are in desperate need of MORE funding. Yet, one reason the tax bill
was passed was to create a NEED to cut funding for these essential programs! It
frustrates me how many people rely on these programs to survive then vote for
the very people looking to take these safety nets away. They aren’t
“entitlements” they are “safety nets”!!!
Remember around
Valentine’s Day when Trump threw in the distraction of cutting SNAP benefits in
half and replacing them with harvest boxes? It was a distraction so we wouldn’t
notice Congress cutting food aid to the poor.
“I don’t think there’s really any
support for their box plan. And, I worry that it’s a distraction from the
budget’s proposal to cut SNAP by some 30 percent. That’s the real battle.” said
Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities, a progressive Washington think tank. “The danger are
these other proposals to cut benefits. But all anyone is talking about today
are the boxes.”
Senator Debbie Stabenow, the ranking
Democrat on the agriculture committee, doubted the motives behind the plan.
“This isn’t a serious proposal and is
clearly meant to be a distraction,” Ms. Stabenow said.
(later in the article)
Still, the idea landed with a thud. It
was quickly dismissed by two Republican committee chairmen, Senator Pat Roberts
of Kansas, who leads the Senate agriculture committee, and his counterpart in
the House, Representative K. Michael Conaway of Texas.
Mr. Conway is drafting a farm bill
that is expected to slash billions in spending in the SNAP program through the
tightening of some eligibility requirements. Mr. Roberts is overseeing an
effort to craft a version of the bill that is expected to include fewer cuts in
hopes of gaining the bipartisan support needed to push the measure through the
Senate
(later in the article)
But Mr. McGovern said the
administration was painting “a distorted picture” of the poor and ignoring the
fact that most SNAP recipients are employed and more than a quarter are
disabled and unable to seek work.
“They have to stop playing to the
cheap seats,” he said. “The majority of people in the program are children and
seniors and people working in jobs that pay too little to feed their families.”
.(link below)
In March there
were problems passing the Farm Bill. That’s because of cuts to SNAP, formerly
known as “Food Stamps.” It’s about 80%
of the cost for the farm bill. Republicans wanted to add strict work
requirements to cut people off it. Apparently, they think getting a job that
pays a living wage is easy. It isn’t. “Job training” doesn’t guarantee living
wage jobs. If you make less than a living wage, you still qualify for SNAP.
But, minimum wage jobs are harder to get too.
Democrats, however,
are refusing to consider “extreme, partisan policies” that they say would slash
spending on food stamps — a bulwark of the social safety net for more than 50
years. The program currently helps more than 40 million low-income Americans
buy groceries each month. Support for the status quo also comes from the
country’s biggest retailers and food companies, who see the program as a
substantial chunk of their business. Farm groups, too, are unlikely to support
big changes, with the understanding they would threaten the whole bill.
…………………………………………………..
The details of the
SNAP proposal remain very much under wraps, but Democratic staff members told
reporters Tuesday that the bill would impose stricter work requirements on as
many as 5 million of the 42 million Americans who rely on the program — a
number that would mostly target able-bodied adults without children, as well as
millions of school-age parents who are currently exempt in many states.
Able-bodied adults
without children or other dependents are already required to participate in a
training program for 20 hours per week or to work to keep their SNAP benefits
longer than three months over a three-year period. However, states largely
exempted participants from those time limits during the Great Recession. The
waivers have been slowly lapsing as the economy recovered. But about 36 percent
of the U.S. population lives in an area where that rule is still waived, and
the House bill is expected to rein in that flexibility.
Conservative groups,
including the Heritage Foundation and the Foundation for Government
Accountability, have urged Congress to drop the waivers to push more SNAP
recipients into the labor market.
On the other side of
the Hill, Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) could release his
version of the farm bill next month. Roberts has pledged there will be no big
changes to SNAP on his watch — a reflection of the fact that Republicans
control just 51 votes in that chamber.
“I think we can make
efficiencies, but we’re not going to drastically change that program,” Roberts
told reporters earlier this month. “Quite frankly, I need 60 votes.”
My idea solves the "funding" problem that republicans like to claim these programs have. Tax businesses the exact amount their employees collect in any form of government assistance. All they have to do to avoid the tax is pay their employees a living wage.
The economists Hilary Hoynes of the
University of California, Berkeley, and Marianne Bitler of the University of
California, Davis, pointed out in a recent paper that “the safety net for
low-income families with children has transformed from one subsidizing
out-of-work families into one subsidizing in-work families.”
And yet, as many unemployed Americans
discovered the last time recession hit, government benefits that require
recipients to hold a job become worthless when there is no work to be had.
Consider what happened the last time
around, when the bursting of the housing bubble pushed millions of workers out
of their jobs. The Fed quickly slashed interest rates to zero. Months later it
started buying billions of dollars’ worth of bonds from financial institutions
to lower long-term interest rates and encourage borrowing.
The Obama administration hurried to
cobble together an economic stimulus package of more than $1 trillion to get
money to families that needed it most. It expanded the eligibility for
unemployment insurance to its longest duration ever, 99 weeks. It raised the
earned-income tax credit for low-wage workers. It more than doubled the budget
for food stamps — the poor’s last line of defense.
The economy failed to snap
back as the administration hoped. Unemployment remained at 9 percent or more
for over two years. But the administration’s intervention to bolster the
nation’s welfare programs made a decisive difference for millions who otherwise
would have fallen through the cracks of the nation’s threadbare safety net.
Using a broad definition of
income and poverty that includes the effects of the complete array of
government tools to support low-income families, Professors Hoynes and Bitler concluded that
food stamps were critical to stem poverty.
Had food stamps not been
available, they estimated, the share of Americans under 65 living below the
poverty line would have exceeded 11 percent in 2010, almost 1.5 percentage
points more than was the case. The share of Americans in extreme poverty — with
less than half the resources of the simply poor — would have exceeded 4
percent, about a third more than it turned out to be. Unemployment insurance
had a roughly similar impact on poverty levels.
What is critical to note is
that each of the two programs did more to relieve extreme poverty during the
depths of the Great Recession than even the earned-income tax credit, the main
source of government support for low-income Americans.
Indeed, expenditures per
capita from the earned-income tax credit increased only modestly after the
recession hit. And spending by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the
patchwork of state-run programs that emerged from welfare reform in 1996 to replace
the poor’s entitlement to federal cash assistance, did not respond to the recession at all.
This is a problem for
vulnerable Americans bracing for the next economic shock, because if Mr. Trump
and his colleagues in Congress have their way, the only surviving bit of the
social safety net when the next recession hits will probably require
beneficiaries to work. The earned-income tax credit is likely to survive
unscathed. Food stamps are not.
Assiduously looking for places
to cut spending to temper a growing budget deficit, the White House seems more
than willing to pare the safety net. The budget it unveiled this month called
for a 27 percent cut to the food stamp budget and a 20 percent cut to Section 8
housing assistance by 2028.
The administration already
allows states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries to shave the program’s costs. And the
latest White House budget requested a 22.5 percent cut to Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies by 2028 by repealing and replacing the
Affordable Care Act.
While the Trump administration
is unlikely to end unemployment insurance, the Emergency Unemployment
Compensation program expired at the end of 2013. In some states, benefits
expire in as little as 12 weeks.
Yet somehow I can’t see Mr. Trump and
Republican allies like the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, allowing
able-bodied Americans off the hook. They may not quite endorse the infamous
words attributed by President Herbert Hoover to his Treasury secretary, Andrew
Mellon, as the Great Depression bore down on the economy — “Liquidate labor,
liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate” — but I
wouldn’t be surprised if all they have to say when the next recession
liquidates work is “Get a job.”
Come September the house and senate were
working on combining farm bills that would leave nearly 2 million low-income
Americans stripped of SNAP benefits. It includes “work requirements”. That is
laughable since most low-income Americans are working.
Nearly two million low-income Americans, including 469,000 households with
young children, would be stripped of benefits under the House version of the
farm bill being considered this week by congressional negotiators, according to
an analysis by a nonpartisan research firm.
The bill, a multiyear spending measure that narrowly passed the House in
June, includes a proposal to reformulate income and expense criteria for the 42
million recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Under the bill, states could remove about 8 percent of those receiving aid
from the rolls, according to the research firm, Mathematica, which used data
from the Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service.
About 34 percent of seniors in the program, or 677,000 households, would
lose benefits under the proposal, according to the study. More than one in 10
people with a disability, another 214,000 households, would also lose
eligibility.
Those estimates do not account for another proposal in the measure, which would
impose strict new work requirements on beneficiaries. An additional 1.2 million
people could be stripped of aid under that plan, according to a separate analysis released in May
by the Congressional Budget Office, the study’s authors said.
At least the “tight majority” senate is a
little better:
By contrast, the Senate’s version of the farm bill, which had bipartisan
support, did not include tougher work requirements or the new benefit formula,
and negotiators are struggling to reconcile such differences.
Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, who serves as chairman of the
Senate Agriculture Committee, has been noncommital about the House version of
the bill, telling reporters this week that while he supported work requirements
and an overhaul to the nutrition program, passing the measure quickly was his
“paramount” priority.
The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, K. Michael Conaway,
Republican of Texas, expressed impatience with the progress of talks, urging
the Senate to “pick up the pace” to address a growing agricultural slump in the
farm belt that has been exacerbated by Mr. Trump’s trade war with China.
“Today my colleagues in the House and Senate highlighted the urgency in
farm and ranch country and just how desperate times are as net farm income is
slated to fall again this year,” he said.
The focus on agricultural subsidies, Senate staff members said, makes it
less likely that the House proposals will be part of a final deal. But
advocates for the poor were concerned that some, if not all, of the cuts could
make it into the final version.
“Those who rely on SNAP — two-thirds of whom are children, older adults and
people with disabilities — should have access to benefits without undue
barriers,” said Jasmine Hall Ratliff, a program officer for the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation, which funded the Mathematica study.
Earlier Wednesday, the Agriculture Department said that 15 million households
reported being “food insecure” in 2017. That is a slight decrease from the
previous year, in terms of percentage, but still above levels seen before the
economic downturn a decade ago.
“We must not accept mass deprivation in the wealthiest nation in world
history as any sort of ‘new normal,’” said Joel Berg, the chief executive of
Hunger Free America, a nationwide advocacy group. “Hunger is unacceptable in
any society, but it’s particularly outrageous in the United States.”
SNAP. A necessity. What is keeping some people alive. It never covers the entire month's worth of food for even an individual. As food prices rise, it become more crucial. The different between life and starving to death. It might mean being able to pay the electrical bills each month. It might mean being able to send your child to school with a sandwich instead of just an apple.
Republicans like taking about God and God's teachings. The biggest lesson from God is to help those in need. SNAP does that. It helps those who need it. It's very hard to qualify for in the first place. When you get it, it literally is the different between life and death sometimes. Supporting SNAP is helping those who need it. So why are these so-called Christian republican congressmen and congresswomen so intent on making the poor literally starve to death?
As for the voters who don't like paying for other people's food, I hope you never find yourself needing these programs someday. Because it just takes one layoff in a recession to put you for months or even years in the place of needing these programs just to get by. That person you are judging in the grocery line, that could become you with one twist of very bad luck. You are not "down of their luck rich" you are "one step away from poor". so SNAP out of it and start having the compassion you will need if you ever end up that unlucky.
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