"This is a time to get really, really angry" - and not about the NSA

It's that congressional representatives of both parties think the appropriate response to the worst long-term unemployment, income inequality and widespread poverty since the Great Depression is to ... wait for it ... slash funding for food stamps.

The Nation:

Monday night, the Senate passed a five-year farm bill that contained $4.1 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over ten years. This ensures that the only debate now will be about how much to cut—and it’s likely to result in cuts much deeper than $4.1 billion.

The House Agriculture Committee passed a farm bill last month that cut $20.5 billion from SNAP by removing “categorical eligibility” (more on that here), which would take food stamps away from two million Americans and hundreds of thousands of children.

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 Aside from being, well, cruel, the food stamp cuts in the Senate bill are also damaging to the economy. The Center for American Progress, in a study released in March, found that for every $1 billion cut from SNAP, 13,718 jobs are lost:

Kevin Drum can't take it any more:

Mark Bittman is appalled at the farm bill currently wending its way through Congress:

The current versions of the Farm Bill [] could hardly be more frustrating. The House is proposing $20 billion in cuts to SNAP — equivalent, says Beckmann, to “almost half of all the charitable food assistance that food banks and food charities provide to people in need.”
Deficit reduction is the sacred excuse for such cruelty, but the first could be achieved without the second. Two of the most expensive programs are food stamps, the cost of which has justifiably soared since the beginning of the Great Recession, and direct subsidy payments.
This pits the ability of poor people to eat — not well, but sort of enough — against the production of agricultural commodities. That would be a difficult choice if the subsidies were going to farmers who could be crushed by failure, but in reality most direct payments go to those who need them least.

I'm starting to lose my ability to write rationally about this stuff. I just don't know any longer what I'm supposed to think about a political movement whose primary raison d'être, one they no longer even bother to conceal, is an almost gleeful immiseration of the poor for the benefit of the rich. How is it that the wealthiest country on earth has come to this?

This would all be cruel enough even if the economy were good and you thought that folks on food stamps needed some motivation to get themselves off assistance and into jobs. Cruel but—arguably, anyway—perhaps best in the long run. But now? When the current level of SNAP spending is entirely due to the swollen ranks of the unemployed and underemployed, which makes it all but impossible for most recipients to entertain even a faint hope of either finding work or, for those lucky enough to have jobs, increase their incomes enough to escape poverty? Is there even a pretense of a reason for these cuts, aside from a desire not to reduce subsidies to agribusiness and not to raise taxes on the best off? Help me out. What is it?

Paul Krugman on how cutting food stamps does not just starve the poor, but takes food out of the mouths - and money out of the pockets - of you and me.

Food stamps have played an especially useful — indeed, almost heroic — role in recent years. In fact, they have done triple duty.

First, as millions of workers lost their jobs through no fault of their own, many families turned to food stamps to help them get by — and while food aid is no substitute for a good job, it did significantly mitigate their misery. Food stamps were especially helpful to children who would otherwise be living in extreme poverty, defined as an income less than half the official poverty line.

But there’s more. Why is our economy depressed? Because many players in the economy slashed spending at the same time, while relatively few players were willing to spend more. And because the economy is not like an individual household — your spending is my income, my spending is your income — the result was a general fall in incomes and plunge in employment.

We desperately needed (and still need) public policies to promote higher spending on a temporary basis — and the expansion of food stamps, which helps families living on the edge and let them spend more on other necessities, is just such a policy.

Indeed, estimates from the consulting firm Moody’s Analytics suggest that each dollar spent on food stamps in a depressed economy raises G.D.P. by about $1.70 — which means, by the way, that much of the money laid out to help families in need actually comes right back to the government in the form of higher revenue.

Wait, we’re not done yet. Food stamps greatly reduce food insecurity among low-income children, which, in turn, greatly enhances their chances of doing well in school and growing up to be successful, productive adults. So food stamps are in a very real sense an investment in the nation’s future — an investment that in the long run almost surely reduces the budget deficit, because tomorrow’s adults will also be tomorrow’s taxpayers.

So what do Republicans want to do with this paragon of programs? First, shrink it; then, effectively kill it.

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Look, I understand the supposed rationale: We’re becoming a nation of takers, and doing stuff like feeding poor children and giving them adequate health care are just creating a culture of dependency — and that culture of dependency, not runaway bankers, somehow caused our economic crisis.

But I wonder whether even Republicans really believe that story — or at least are confident enough in their diagnosis to justify policies that more or less literally take food from the mouths of hungry children. As I said, there are times when cynicism just doesn’t cut it; this is a time to get really, really angry.