Millions to starve with a pandemic benefit ending
Tens of millions of Americans are tottering on a “hunger cliff,” guaranteeing mass suffering and maybe even starvation.
That is the refrain from CBS News, Salon, Business Insider and plenty other outlets. But the latest hysteria over food stamps ignores how the program is subverting Americans’ health.
During the pandemic, anyone who qualified for food stamps was automatically given the maximum benefit.
Individuals who had some income and would have collected only $23 in monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits got $281 a month.
Congress voted in December to end the bonus benefits, but the media are acting like Ronald Reagan rose from the grave to smite food-stamp recipients.
Eighteen states already phased out the excess benefits, and the bonus ends this month for the remaining 32 states.
Even after the end of the bonus, food-stamp benefits are still higher than in 2019.
President Joe Biden issued a decree in 2021 permanently boosting food-stamp benefits by 23%. Higher benefits were justified in part, the US Department of Agriculture said, because so many food-stamp recipients are now obese and need extra food to provide “sufficient energy to support current weight status.”
The Government Accountability Office concluded that Biden violated federal law with that edict, since Congress has jurisdiction.
But GAO has no power to make Uncle Joe obey the law.
Any reduction in food stamps, however, sends the media into a panic mode.
Food banks are citing more demand for free food, which is being trumpeted as proof of a pending catastrophe.
On Saturday, The Washington Post published a piece showing a mile-long line of cars in Kentucky waiting for free food.
Many of the vehicles were pricey late-model cars — not like the rattly old truck from “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Regardless, the Post hyperventilated: “From the front to the back of the line, the sea of despair and hardship along this desolate Kentucky highway foreshadowed what may be in store for millions of Americans.”
The Post miraculously read the minds of everyone in the mile-long queue: “All described feeling hunger.”
That included people smoking cigarettes while lamenting the cost of food.
The Guardian profiled a Battle Creek, Mich., single mother who decried the “horrible timing” of the benefit cut.
She wailed that her youngest son “wouldn’t be able to eat two bowls of cereal every morning any more.”
But every student in Battle Creek Public Schools is entitled to free breakfast and lunch. How many bowls of cereal does that kid need?
How many journalists failed math classes in college?
USA Today whined, “Some seniors may feel a double whammy” because “after receiving a 8.7% cost of living adjustment in January . . . some seniors already saw their SNAP benefits drop.”
The paper failed to explain how recipients are worse off despite a net increase in government benefits.
Food banks have proliferated in recent years, but their aid doesn’t always relieve the neediest.
According to New York Post contributor Jason Curtis Anderson, “Churches do food drives and give people full grocery bags from Trader Joe’s. Recipients take the food and sell it at the East Village thieves market, combined with things they stole from pharmacies.”
Measuring hunger by the demand for free food never made sense. If prostitutes offered free sex to needy men, the number of guys claiming to be sex-starved would skyrocket.
Activists invoke federal food-security surveys to claim higher food-stamp benefits are needed.
But those surveys mostly tabulate how many people voice concerns about missing meals at some future time or are unable to afford more expensive food they prefer.
The feds choose not to measure actual hunger so politicians can perpetually proclaim emergencies to justify more handouts.
The latest uproar ignores how “SNAP households actually spent slightly more than non-SNAP households per month on food to be eaten at home,” the American Enterprise Institute reported.
Food-stamp recipients, unlike working Americans, receive automatic benefit boosts to compensate for inflation.
Federal food assistance has been a dietary disaster.
Food-stamp recipients are twice as likely to be obese as eligible non-recipients, according to a 2017 BMC Public Health study.
Harvard nutrition professor Walter Willett observed in 2015, “We’ve analyzed what SNAP participants are eating, and it’s horrible food. It’s a diet designed to produce obesity and diabetes.”
But Team Biden opposes reforming food stamps to end payments for sugar-sweetened beverages and junk food.
That fix would do far more to curb unhealthy eating than Biden’s decree to force companies to “reformulate food products.”
Tens of millions of Americans are being slammed by the soaring price of food — one of Biden’s worst legacies.
We can have sympathy for hungry individuals without perpetuating the excesses of a federal program that is bloating America.
James Bovard is the author of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.
