Tag Archives: food stamps

It’s Jobs, Not the Deficit

The deficit for FY 2013, which ended on September 30, was $680 billion.  To economists, what matter is not the amount of the deficit, but what percentage of GDP it represents.  In this case, it’s 4.1% of GDP.

For FY 2009, the deficit was 10.1% of GDP.  So the deficit has fallen by more than half.

Right now, our most immediate concern is (or should be, GOP) jobs, not the deficit.  Yes, we have longer-term deficit problems, but the most important thing to do now is not to make those future deficits worse by failing to create jobs.  To the extent we do that, we generate more tax revenue and we reduce demand for unemployment benefits, Medicaid, and food stamps, so the government automatically gets more and spends less without cutting the safety net or raising taxes.

“An Almost Pathological Meanspiritedness”

From “Hunger Games, U.S.A.,” Paul Krugman, NYT:

“Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we’re talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.

“The occasion for these observations is, as you may have guessed, the monstrous farm bill the House passed last week.

“House Republicans voted to maintain farm subsidies — at a higher level than either the Senate or the White House proposed — while completely eliminating food stamps from the bill.

“To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something like this: ‘You’re personally free to help the poor. But the government has no right to take people’s money’ — frequently, at this point, they add the words ‘at the point of a gun’ — ‘and force them to give it to the poor.’

“It is, however, apparently perfectly O.K. to take people’s money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy.

“Food stamp usage has indeed soared in recent years, with the percentage of the population receiving stamps rising from 8.7 in 2007 to 15.2 in the most recent data. There is, however, no mystery here. SNAP is supposed to help families in distress, and lately a lot of families have been in distress.

“In fact, SNAP usage tends to track broad measures of unemployment, like U6, which includes the underemployed and workers who have temporarily given up active job search. And U6 more than doubled in the crisis, from about 8 percent before the Great Recession to 17 percent in early 2010. It’s true that broad unemployment has since declined slightly, while food stamp numbers have continued to rise — but there’s normally some lag in the relationship, and it’s probably also true that some families have been forced to take food stamps by sharp cuts in unemployment benefits.

“What about the theory, common on the right, that it’s the other way around — that we have so much unemployment thanks to government programs that, in effect, pay people not to work? (Soup kitchens caused the Great Depression!) The basic answer is, you have to be kidding. Do you really believe that Americans are living lives of leisure on $134 a month, the average SNAP benefit?

“Still, let’s pretend to take this seriously. If employment is down because government aid is inducing people to stay home, reducing the labor force, then the law of supply and demand should apply: withdrawing all those workers should be causing labor shortages and rising wages, especially among the low-paid workers most likely to receive aid. In reality, of course, wages are stagnant or declining — and that’s especially true for the groups that benefit most from food stamps.

“Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness….  If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold.”

That Solves That Problem

The farm bill didn’t pass the House because the GOP hated the food stamp part of the bill.  Why don’t those lazy hungry children just get jobs?

But they want the agricultural subsidies to continue…  What to do?

Why take food stamps out of the farm bill, of course, and vote on them separately!

I think we can guess which way GOP House members will vote on each.

Ultimate Government Waste

The military is destroying $7 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan rather than ship it home.  I’m just glad we’re finally getting the hell out of there, but still, this seems like incredible waste.

Meanwhile the GOP is obsessed with cutting food stamps.  Any society that can blithely throw away $7 billion in military gear can afford to see that its kids get enough to eat.

The GOP — Garbage In, Garbage Out

From “Paul Ryan’s budget:  Social engineering with a side of deficit reduction,” Ezra Klein, Washington Post:

“Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25 percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

“But the real point of Ryan’s budget is its ambitious reforms, not its savings. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, turns Medicaid, food stamps, and a host of other programs for the poor into block grants managed by the states, shrinks the federal role on priorities like infrastructure and education to a tiny fraction of its current level, and envisions an entirely new tax code that will do much less to encourage home buying and health insurance.

“Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career.”

“The problem is that these ideas are not, on their own, popular.  In fact, they’re deeply unpopular, and considered quite radical.  That’s why Newt Gingrich rejected Ryan’s initial budget as ‘right-wing social engineering’….  But presented on their own, Ryan’s plans scare people.

What Ryan has found is that the way they’ll get a hearing is if they’re presented as necessary, prudent measures to forestall an even more dramatic debt crisis.

“But whether these are good or bad ideas, they are not, under any reasonable definition of the term, necessary ideas.”

We’ve got Paul Ryan using phony scare tactics on the budget, and Rand Paul doing the same on the drones.  When I think of the GOP today, I think, “Garbage in, garbage out.”  We have neither a debt nor a drone crisis.  How can we solve  our real problems when one party is so focused on imaginary ones?

Maybe We All Just Agree

The sequester was set up in 2011 because it was supposedly so awful that the Dems and the GOP would definitely do a budget deal rather than let it take effect.

But now that it’s here, it seems to everybody involved to be a better option than the available alternatives.  The GOP would rather live with the defense cuts that were supposedly anathema to them than raise taxes even on very rich people and corporations.  Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is no Neville Chamberlain, and he’s saying the Pentagon cuts won’t hurt our national security.  The GOP senators who are claiming they will, like John McCain and Lindsey “Butters” Graham, are really outliers even in their own party — after all, they both want to stay in Afghanistan forever, and that’s not where either party is.

The Dems would rather live with the cuts to non-defense spending than accept a deal without more revenue.  The cuts won’t affect things like Medicaid or food stamps.  You’re not going to see sick or hungry children sobbing in the streets.

Americans believe the sequester isn’t big enough or relevant enough to their lives to get upset about.  Yes, people agree with the President that we shouldn’t do big cuts or reform entitlements without raising taxes, but people aren’t rising up against the GOP because the sequester isn’t that significant, either in dollars or affected programs.  Nobody’s Social Security check gets cut, nobody’s Medicare benefits get reduced.

People just aren’t feeling the outrage the President is trying to inspire, and if he keeps it up, he might well lose his good will.

It really feels as if we have a bizarre moment of consensus here — Democrats and Republicans and Independents, in and out of government, seem pretty calm about and comfortable with the sequester, especially if it’s tweaked to give department heads flexibility on where to cut.

The GOP has been cast as having the political disadvantage here.  But if these cuts take effect, and people don’t feel pain from them, voters might say, “Hey, let’s cut a little more.”

GOP Show and Tell

After the election, the GOP promptly turned on Mitt Romney, blaming his 47% percent speech as a dooming and damning moment in Mitt’s out-of-touch campaign.

But since the election, the GOP has amply shown that they agree with exactly what Mitt told us.

How else do you explain their refusal to raise taxes even on those making $1 million or more, while insisting on cutting Medicaid and food stamps?  They support the rich and spit on the sick and struggling.

Mitt admirably represented his party, a party that in no way currently represents the overwhelming majority of the country.