Riot Warnings Over Food-Stamp Cuts

Rollback ‘will be close to catastrophic for many people’

WND

By John Aman

The 5 percent rollback in food-stamp funding that hit at the start of November has unleashed a wave of familiar scaremongering.

The reduction returns food-stamp benefits to the level they would have been without the infusion of stimulus cash since 2009. That money is now spent, and the average individual monthly benefit is dropping from about $133 to $125.40. Roughly $7.60.

Democrats and the anti-hunger lobby treat the reduction as a cruel and draconian cut.

Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., contends it “will literally take food right out of the mouths of poor children as well as their families, the elderly, the unemployed and the underemployed.”

The rollback “will be close to catastrophic for many people,” a spokesman for Feeding America, a leading hunger relief organization, told CBS News.

One food-bank executive implied that riots may soon follow.

“If you look across the world, riots always begin typically the same way: when people cannot afford to eat food,” Margarette Purvis, president and CEO of the Food Bank for New York City, told Salon.com.

The sharp criticism ignores the fact that federal food-stamp spending has doubled since 2008 and is now nearly $80 billion. One in seven Americans, 47.6 million people, are now on food stamps, with 20 million added since 2008.

Unemployment, relaxed eligibility standards and aggressive marketing to recruit food-stamp participants all contributed to the swelling food-stamp rolls. The number of able-bodied adults under the age of 50 without children on food stamps grew by 163.7 percent from 2007 to 2011.

A Cato Institute report reveals that combined federal and state spending to market food stamps is more than $41.3 million annually. Food-stamp recruiters in Florida have a quota of 150 new enrollees a month.

Talk of catastrophe around the corner over food-stamp benefit cuts also fails to acknowledge that food stamps are “just one of 80 federal means-tested programs that provide food, housing, medical care to poor and low income Americans,” asserts Heritage Foundation policy analyst Rachel Sheffield.

Total welfare spending has increased 16-fold since 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty and is now more than $1 trillion annually.

Read More Here

Reposted with permission.