The Farm Bill is now being “marked up” in the House Agriculture Committee. I’m not sure what that means, exactly, but I can sound authoritative saying it. The bill will likely be reported out to the full House by the end of this week. What seems most likely is that this bill will have about $16 billion in cuts to SNAP (food stamp) funding as opposed to the $4 billion in cuts to the program proposed by the Senate. While I am not sure about the proposal to block grant SNAP funding to states, the big savings for the House come from tightening the qualifications for “categorical eligibility.” That’s actually two words and what it means is that people who apply for food stamps don’t necessarily have to have lost their car, their house, or other fixed assets in order to qualify for the program. You can see how this makes it easier for people to get on the program.
It should also be clear that this is a way to make it easier to get off SNAP. A friend of mine is fond of saying that the first step to getting out of a hole is to stop digging. How far down do we really want people to go in order to receive help? It seems to me that if they go down so far that they don’t have a car or a house anymore, they are going to need a lot more help getting back up. While the Senate Bill does restrict the amount of money available through the SNAP program, it does so (as I mentioned before) without changing the fundamental structure of the program.
Not that the Senate is unwilling to look at fundamental changes. They are just not looking at SNAP to accomplish them. The Senate has taken a real swing at reforming the way farm subsidies work. Now “Farm Subsides” can be heard as a dirty word, especially in urban areas, but the truth is that some of these programs are really essential to making farming economically viable for the average farmer. Crop insurance, for instance, is there to make sure that “no farmer will lose the farm because of a few days of bad weather,” in the words of Sen. Debbie Stabenow, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. What the Senate has cut out are the massive payments to corporate farms that are taking advantage of system designed more than 40 years ago.
The House bill does not address subsidies at all, so if a bill does pass on the House floor, it will be a very interesting conference committee that comes up with a final version. That’s no small if, if The Hill is to be believed. As you can imagine, there are plenty of liberal Democrats who are not at all interested in voting for a $16 billion cut to SNAP. Likewise, there are plenty of Tea Party Republicans who have no interest in voting for $900 billion in overall farm bill spending, especially not in an election year. Caught in the middle are Democrats and Republicans from farm states, especially in the Mid-West, who have to get something passed by September 30th or all of the programs their farming constituents depend on will dry up like a baby pool in August.