Jared Bernstein: House Republicans Dangle the Keys on SNAP (aka, Food Stamps)

[flpoljunkie]

What is wrong with these people? Surely, they understand that food stamps offer the best 'bang for the buck' putting $1.73 back into the economy for every dollar spent!

House Republicans Dangle the Keys on SNAP (aka, Food Stamps)

Sep 16, 2013

The key word is “downturn.” The key-danglers want to paint recipients of food support as bilking the program—the one that provides them with a buck-and-a-half per meal—instead of working, but when the jobs are there, SNAP-receiving households with able-bodied, non-elderly adults are well connected to the job market. Among those families, 82% were employed during the year right before or after their SNAP receipt.

In other words, it’s a safety net program designed to ramp up when work disappears so poor families can avoid nutritional privation. And that’s what it did.

Why hasn’t it ramped down yet? Because the job market remains weak, something the SNAP critics themselves promulgate every chance they get. But apparently the part of their brains that think SNAP recipients are willfully avoiding work hasn’t met the part that argues there aren’t enough jobs.

Here it is in a nutshell. The families getting food stamps did not tank the economy. They didn’t invent the securitization schemes that inflated the housing bubble that did, in fact, cause the great recession from which we’re still recovering. That is, from which some of us are still recovering. The economic elites—the denizens of the penthouse in the income distribution—have more than recovered. And it would apparently behoove them and the politicians they fund if we looked elsewhere right now.

So, no—dangle the shiny keys all you want. I’m not going to look over there at the SNAP rolls elevated by the weak job market, instead of over here at historically unprecedented levels of income inequality. Such key dangles may have worked on you and me when we were babies. But they don’t anymore.

http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/house-republicans-dangle-the-keys-on-snap-aka-food-stamps/

[Myrina]

1. They don't want money IN the economy.

They want the money supply locked up tight so they can continue to suppress wages, eliminate benefits, etc ... make people desperate enough that they're willing to take ANY crap-ass job to feed & house their families, meanwhile maximizing their offshore bank accounts.

Welcome to the early 1900's.