Ok, well first of all it’s not called “Food Stamps” anymore. It’s call “Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program” or “SNAP.” Unless you live in North Carolina where “SNAP” stands for “State Nutritional Assistance Program” and provides money for commodities to be bought and distributed to people who might go hungry otherwise. In North Carolina, the program that used to be called “Food Stamps” is now simply called “Prince.” Not really. It’s called “Food Nutrition Services” or “FNS.” Not as catchy as “SNAP” huh?
Nor is it as ingrained as “Food Stamps” but we don’t have those anymore. Nobody gets an actual physical piece of paper to take to the store and buy stuff. They get what is essentially a debit card, and they push the button on the little machine that says “EBT.” Yes, that’s what that means. So the name has been updated because the process has been updated too. And just in time, because there are, in fact, more people accessing FNS benefits than ever before.
Do you know why? Of course, because it is all a big political patronage scheme by the Democratic Party. But you can’t just put people on food stamps. You have to be smooth, and I don’t know how President Obama got the economy to tank prior to becoming President so that he could score all those points by putting people on food stamps, but he is just that good. LOLJK. Except about the unemployment part.
Use of SNAP (or FNS or Food Stamps, whatever) goes up when unemployment goes up. It goes down when unemployment goes down. The average time a person spends collecting benefits is 8 months. Not to be overly dramatic, but think about the kinds of choices a person does not have to make for those 8 months: the choice between buying food or medicine, buying food or paying rent, buying food or getting a car running so that they can find a job or get to a job that pays so little that they have to collect SNAP benefits. Shitty choices.
Made shittier by a person who casts these benefits in the light of government handouts to lazy people. Which is not exactly what Newt did, but it is close enough for anyone listening to walk. Certainly a large number of liberal pundits walked there and assumed that the lazy, government handout taking people were not white. I don’t know that Newt was being racist, but I do know that he was being an ass. And he was not being a thoughtful conservative.
Sure, Food Stamps (or FNS or SNAP, whatever) are transfer payments. On the whole, conservatives don’t like transfer payments. Thing about these payments, though, is that they get spent almost immediately in communities all across the country. One dollar worth of benefits stimulates another $1.70 or so of economic activity. Grocers keep employees and keep buying food. Farmers keep selling food and keep farming. Benefit recipients retain a shred of dignity because they are not standing in line at the soup kitchen.
By playing on the worst assumptions about FNS (enough with the initials) Newt Gingrich is distorting the truth about an effective government program to score a cheap point. I have to give it to the guy that he sounds good saying it, but what he says is dislocated not only from reality but from decency. It is, in fact, something for us to celebrate that our safety net is working. And I think we are all looking forward to the time when plentiful jobs mean that the folks on food stamps are few and the time they spend on them is extraordinarily brief.