The Sword Drops on Food Stamps

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/174753/sword-drops-food-stamps#axzz2W8PyByq9


A sign announcing the acceptance of electronic Benefit Transfer cards at a farmers market in Roseville, California. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

It’s official: Congress will slash food stamp funding in the midst of a deep economic recession, when more people rely on food stamps than ever before.

Monday night, the Senate passed a five-year farm bill that contained $4.1 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over ten years. This ensures that the only debate now will be about how much to cut—and it’s likely to result in cuts much deeper than $4.1 billion.

The House Agriculture Committee passed a farm bill last month that cut $20.5 billion from SNAP by removing “categorical eligibility” (more on that here), which would take food stamps away from 2 million Americans and hundreds of thousands of children.

That bill has yet to be fully debated and passed on the House floor, and the push to make the cuts even deeper will be strong—conservatives have insisted on even deeper cuts. Representative Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget, for example, called for $135 billion in food stamp cuts, and on Tuesday, twenty-five House Republicans wrote to House Speaker John Boehner to remove food stamp funding from the bill altogether. (They just want the program debated on a separate track, but the barely implicit message in the letter is that they don’t want to be forced to agree to “only” $20.5 billion in food stamp cuts at the risk of killing the farm bill.)



Read more: The Sword Drops on Food Stamps | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/blog/174753/sword-drops-food-stamps#ixzz2WHtaZLcL
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[Berlum]

1. "Let them eat their own freakin boot straps." - Republicans, Inc. (R)

[dawg]

2. The Senate is controlled by Democrats.

As much as I can't stand the Republicans, there's no sense in blaming *them* for this.

[Sheldon Cooper]

3. Exactly.

How can the Democrats in the Senate allow this to happen. Despicable.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

4. Don't worry....

Some courageous Senator will stand up and filibuster the bill

Sen. Sanders, Sen Franken, Sen. Brown, Sen. Anybody? Do something about this or you're all talk.