Lawmakers in both chambers of US Congress have reportedly reached a deal to cut almost $9 billion from the food stamp program on which nearly 47 million Americans rely to afford food.
The cuts to the program, which will affect nearly a million households over the next decade, are part of multi-year farm bill which sets spending levels for federal agriculture and food policy.
The giant piece of legislation is expected to get a vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, after which it will be subject to a vote in the Senate.
The cuts are a compromise between nearly $40 billion in cuts to the program approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a $4 billion reduction approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has already undergone a $5 billion cut when a temporary increase in food stamp dollar expired on Nov. 1.
A household of three lost $29 in food aid per month as a result of the cuts that left each person to spend an average of $1.40 per meal.
The new farm bill, on which lawmakers across the aisle have agreed, will save around $23 billion over a decade.
American doctors and food banks across the country have already warned against the consequences of the planned cuts to the programs.
According to the American medical community, increased rates of diabetes and developmental problems for young children are among the health risks of hunger which would be a direct result of cutting funding for the SNAP.
Food banks also face an increase in the number of their visitors and say they have to turn people seeking help away because they do not have enough supplies.
“Make no mistake, if the food stamp program is cut, we’re going to see much longer lines of people seeking help with their food budgets, and we can’t help them all,” said Nancy E. Roman, executive director at the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, D.C.
Margarette Purvis, the president of the Food Bank for New York City, the largest food bank in the US, has also warned against the cuts, saying “devastating cuts [to the SNAP] have pushed thousands of low-income New Yorkers and emergency food providers to the very brink of survival.”
The vast majority of Americans are uninformed or misinformed as to how the federal government transacts business and pays its bills. For example, the Congress appropriates money to pay its bills and fund its operations one year at time each year. Government contracts routinely contain termination clauses which allow the government to cancel contracts for fiscal funding and also for the convenience of the government. The way the process used to work was that the president would propose a budget for the nation which the Congress then approves, rejects or changes. Even if the president and Congress approve a budget, the Congress can appropriate funding for items & projects not contemplated or included in the approved budget and annual appropriations legislation. Some tricks presidents and Congress have used in the past to deceive & defraud the taxpayers are funding by way of Continuing Resolutions and the so-called ‘ Omnibus Spending Bills.’ The Ominbus Spending Bills, just like Obamacare, are so large that no member of Congress actually them and actually knows what’s in them and more importantly, what they are approving and obligating the American people to pay. This is how and why waste, fraud and abuse run rampant throughout the government and neither the Congress nor the present takes ownership of it nor do they almost always never suffer and political consequences for their deliberate mistakes. Now then, the food stamp program has been dramatically expanded under Barack Obama and he is aggressively recruiting more people to sign up for it – even by way of direct advertising in Mexico. Furthermore, during his State Of The Union Address, Barack Obama encouraged the Congress and the nation’s employers to increase the minimum wage. Even the village idiot knows that as the minimum wage goes up, so do the consumer prices of the goods & services that minimum wage workers produce or supply. This causes the price of food to rise which makes food less affordable to minimum wage workers, the poor and the unemployed This forces many more people to enroll in and rely on the food stamp program and become even more dependent on the government.