Rep. Paul Ryan, a Very Serious politician with a very serious plan to make children go hungry.
(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan's proposed budget would cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, by $133.5 billion, or 17 percent, over 10 years. That's a giant cut for a program that provides food, and only food, to people who would otherwise go hungry. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
details what this would mean for beneficiaries:
Cuts in eligibility: If the cuts were to come solely from eliminating eligibility for categories of currently eligible households or individuals, more than 8 million people would need to be cut from the program, if the cuts began taking effect in 2013. If the cuts did not begin until 2016, an average of almost 10 million people would have to be cut from the program in the years from 2016 through 2022 to achieve the required savings. [...]
Cuts in benefits: If the cuts were to come solely from across-the-board benefit cuts, SNAP benefits would have to be cut by about $22 to $27 per person per month in 2016 dollars. This would require setting the maximum benefit at about 86 percent of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), USDA’s estimate of the minimumamount that a family needs to afford a bare-bones, nutritionally adequate diet.
Those would be our choices, as a nation, if Paul Ryan and his fellow Republicans had their way: cut millions of people off from a source of food, or cut many more people's food assistance to the point where they could not afford even a barely adequate diet. Ryan justifies these choices partly through sheer heartlessness, of course, but also through an inaccurate claim that the nutritional assistance program is growing ever faster; in fact, as the economy improves, the growth of the program slows because people are doing better financially and no longer need assistance. It is true, though, that if Ryan's proposed budget were to be passed, more people would need food stamps, since his budget would
kill millions of jobs.
It's not a hypothetical that people would go hungry if this essential program was cut. As the CBPP points out:
- SNAP lifted more than 5 million Americans above the poverty line in 2010, including 2.2 million children and 350,000 seniors.
- SNAP kept more children — 1.3 million — from falling below half of the poverty line in 2010 than any other program.
Already, "Emergency food providers report that more people ask for help in the latter half of the month, after their SNAP benefits have run out." Paul Ryan and any Republicans who embrace this plan are literally calling for children to be chronically hungry.