Thursday, March 27, 2014

States are using a loophole to negate Congress’s food-stamp savings « Hot Air

States are using a loophole to negate Congress’s food-stamp savings « Hot Air: "Earlier this year and after quite the drawn-out kerfuffle, both chambers of Congress finally managed to agree to move beyond the stopgap legislative maneuvering they’d been using in place of a long-term farm bill — and despite making very few and really only cosmetic changes to the shameless corporate welfare that is agricultural portion of the legislation, House Republicans and Senate Democrats settled on cutting the federal food stamp program’s almost $80 billion/year budget by a total amounting to one percent. Republicans had originally been looking for something more along the lines of a five percent budget cut, seeing as how the program’s enrollment went from about 34 million in 2009 to more than 47 million in 2013. Even though Democrats keep informing us that the recession is over, the economy is rebounding, and employment has genuinely improved, they loudly insisted that five percent in budget savings more or less amounted to a spitefully inflicted human rights violation. They still weren’t happy about the one percent cut, mind you — citing it as an example of Republicans’ allegedly perverse penchant for watching people starve, rather than their actual desire to pare down our tremendous national debt and metastasizing government and welfare state in an effort to grow the economy back to health — but Democrats went along begrudgingly.



For a hot second, that is."



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