By Bread for the World
WASHINGTON — Leading Christian leaders, including Bread for the World, today (Sept. 16) urged members of the House of Representatives to vote “No” on a proposed bill that will further cut SNAP (the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps) by $40 billion over the next 10 years.
The proposed bill is expected to be brought to the full House for a vote this week. If passed, the bill would leave up to 4 million poor, childless adults hungry and 210,000 children without free school meals. These cuts would be on top of substantial across-the-board cuts coming on November 1 due to the expiration of the 2009 Recovery Act.
In letters to their members of Congress, the Christian leaders expressed deep moral outrage over these proposed new cuts and their effects on the nation’s most vulnerable people. Copies of their letters are available online at www.circleofprotection.us.
The leaders are from the Circle of Protection, a coalition of more than 65 heads of denominations and religious agencies, plus more than 5,000 church pastors. They have been working for more than two years to resist federal budget cuts that undermine the lives, dignity, and rights of poor and vulnerable people.
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SNAP program need to be reigned in. It has got way out of control. Only those in need should be eligible. That is not the case today. I have observed this being used by persons who obviously are not in need and for things that have nothing to do with nutrition.
To be eligible for SNAP benefits a household of four could have a net income of at most 23000 per year. At that income level, SNAP benefits would amount to about $90 per month, or about 75 cents per person per day. Items that CANNOT be purchases with SNAP benefits include (among other things) alcoholic beverages, tobacco, hot food or food sold for on-premises consumption, pet foods, soaps, paper products, medicine, vitamins, household supplies, and cosmetics.
Attempts to further restrict food items that may be purchased are often defeated by the food industry lobby, in some cases legitimately so given the difficulty in classifying and policing hundreds of thousands of food items, and in some cases not legitimately. One could also note that the subsidies soaked up by industrial and corporate farming and indirectly food processing have supported an upside down situation in which less nutritious processed foods are much less expensive than their more nutritious counterparts.
If Mr. MacDonald wishes to solve a problem, perhaps rather than cutting benefits for those in poverty one could look at the effects of weak or non-existent campaign finance law or the lobbying practices of the agriculture industry.