Kevin Drum at Mother Jones nicely defends the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from Fox News’s latest poorly sourced and exaggerated attack on our efforts to help our neighbors eat. The feds have done good work in reducing fraud and waste.
SNAP participation is trending down in 39 states and the District of Columbia. South Dakota is among those decliners. The Bureau of Finance and Management charts our food stamp enrollment since FY2012:
South Dakota households and individuals on food stamps have trended down each year since 2013. The most recent data from October show about 95,000 South Dakotans on SNAP. That’s one in nine of our neighbors getting our help in putting food on the table.
Related Relief: On the private-sector side of helping hungry people, Feeding South Dakota has received a pledge to match dollar for dollar every donation received between now and December 31, up to $10,000. Turn your Christmas change into food for your neighbors by donating to Feeding South Dakota online.
I have read posts about the decline of agriculture income from several reports. John T. has a recent one regarding a producer from New Underwood, South Dakota stating that ag revenues are off some 70 many percent negative. That is huge and unsustainable. This brings me to the point of SNAP, why is it that the producers of quality agriculture products seem like they are so against hungry people eating their products? It seems to me that by making food more available to the hungry, they would increase their markets. Of course, this would not work with anything other than American produced agriculture goods in my view. The producer would not take a haircut for the goods produced either, they would be put on the market the same as the others but it would be labeled that it was grown and processed complete in the USA. Instead of snacks, put packaged fresh beef. Instead of gut bombs, put out packaged fresh pork. Why encourage unhealthy eating when you could put out the USA’s best?
As you note, there are many many of our citizens hungry in a land of plenty. Donations for food drives are great, but what about the hungry producers and why are they so quiet about demanding an increase in SNAP to their government?
And all the good Republicans will hold up the abuses of SNAP with sugary foods, pop and Twinkies.
For all our good GOP friends who are all up in arms over the least of us getting help, here’s who profits. This is from Breitbart of all places, so Lee, Troy et. al. go ahead and weigh in on which you despise most…corporate of family welfare. Kristi, John and our lesser Senator all are looking at pulling out the safety nets for people who are…well…not like them, but yet they profit from the very companies that push SNAP.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2012/07/19/food-stamps-inc/
“This is not an uncommon story; big business colludes with big government in the name of the public’s interests while they are making themselves rich with regulation, bailouts, corporate welfare, and government contracts. Americans don’t bother to get riled up about it because they expect it, because human nature reduces itself to whatever conditions the culture allows.”
sugar is cheap, added to nearly every processed food, it addicts so we have a trillion dollar health bill and at the top of the list is diabetes, next cardiac disease and on and on. so sugar drives our extraordinary health spending. smart CEOs.
Fake Fox was whining about $70 million in a budget of $70 billion? Fakes all kinds, I guess. .001% waste? There is a bigger waste on its mangled apricot hellbeast way to the White House in less than a month.
http://www.sheilakennedy.net/2016/12/labels-arent-analyses/
Interesting POV from a serious conservative on welfare that doesn’t work.
What makes SNAP so important is our friends and family that are disabled and elderly. Why is there so much hate for the disabled? The idea in life is to become elderly, so why is that the elderly are hated? Don’t even think that working people would ever need SNAP, just ask some of the Walmart workers as an example. http://www.cbpp.org/research/contrary-to-entitlement-society-rhetoric-over-nine-tenths-of-entitlement-benefits-go-to How can it be that we allow this to happen just to allow politicians to keep stealing from us all for the wealthy. Have we forgotten that the 1% is even more hungry than before? Wait a few more weeks and you will see Thune and Rounds coming after Medicare and Social Security, they write about weekly in your papers. Wait a few more weeks and you will see NOem bleating the same tired crap she always bleats about, you can read that as well. They don’t even try to hide their intent, why are we allowing them to do that?
It has always been my belief that feeding the poor and disabled is not only a moral obligation it is a matter of national security.
Poor people will always find a way to feed themselves whether it is legal or not. If conservatives and republicans get their way by cutting or eliminating SNAP crime rates will increase and mobs will be formed demanding food.
Also to be considered if SNAP is cut or reduced are those that will be hurt the most, financially.
Walmart, Safeway and other grocery chains will take a significant hit and the mom and pop main street grocers will be crying to their congressmen.
And like I said, while retailers are weeping about their profit losses, poor people will still find a way to eat.
You are correct Roger. All one has to do is look to the Middle East to see what was the cause of the Arab Springs that we are up to our fannies in. The question is really, can we be like Tunisia, where the Arab Spring started http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/tunisias-relative-success-story-five-years-arab-spring-428815923 or will we be Syria? The Arab Spring was ignited because of hunger and the cost of food. As long as your people are fed, they will not revolt, the times when you stop that food source, ya better hang on. When you play with fire, sometimes you get burned and there is really nothing more dangerous than the hungry animal mass we will become.
Interesting CBPP report, Jerry: it shows that 9% of entitlement payments go to non-elderly, non-disabled, non-working households. But it shows that 10% of entitlements go to folks in the top 20% of the country by income. Thus, we could argue that we could save more money by reducing benefits for relatively wealthy people than we could by cutting off the relatively young “able-bodied” folks, as Governor Daugaard liked to call them when he was resisting Medicaid expansion.
Jerry, Roger, I’m alarmed that we Americans aren’t anywhere near the kind of hunger that provoked the Arab Spring, and we got the Trumpist revolt. What happens when Trump tanks the economy and we get really hungry?
Poors start mobs, they will get tossed in jail and wingnuts can restart their private prison buildup again. Then korporate amerika can let the gubmint pay them to force prisoners to work for little or nothing, increasing profits and putting amerika back to work.
Of course, ka still won’t pay taxes so debt will increase and wingnuts will just blame it on the prisoners and get re-elected.
A state with a meat packing plant could start expanding SNAP very easily as a regional hub for fresh meat products. The plant could label the products for SNAP consumption as well as being locally COOL produced. These then could be marketed in a regional setting, say a 5 state area for the good of all as a pilot program. Economic development would be achieved with the packing plant, producers would find a willing market, suppliers would find a steady source of meat, and the most important, our people would be able to ingest fresh nutritional beef.
Instead of who knows where it came from, boxed beef from IBP in Sioux City, it would come from a several states in the United States for production and consumption.
mfi, thanks for the link. This observation by the author really struck me as both unfortunate and remarkably perceptive:
Right as rain, Bear.
South Dakota Department of Social Services will get a bonus for taking care of those who need assistance. https://news.sd.gov/newsitem.aspx?id=21235 This is their second bonus if I am correct.
99.25% correct payment rates in South Dakota? Dang, Jerry—I’d say that’s a pretty good performance record… better than GOED on EB-5 and DOE on GEAR UP!
https://www.sheilakennedy.net/2016/12/peter-the-citizen-and-less-appealing-indiana/
Wingnuts make welfare less appealing so people can’t live on it.
When you have the federal authorities gauging your work, you tend to do it correctly. This is why the state of South Dakota wants to be able to screw the old and disabled with block grants for Medicaid. That way the Feds are not gonna monitor the grand theft as grandma, gramps and your disabled cousin, Fredricka, move to your living room because of lack of federal and state funds.
http://crooksandliars.com/cltv/2016/12/abby-huntsman-apologizes-false-food
Fake Noise faked a food stamp story and got caught. Had to apologize. It is all Obama’s fault coming in 3,2,1……
Jerry, that’s the best local reason I’ve heard not to let Trump and Congress devolve these programs to the state. Oversight, oversight, oversight….