Reforming Welfare and Controlling the Poor
Ater handing out $1.5 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthy, President Trump has followed up with a budget that eviscerates the social safety net. Though the budget only outlines the Trump administration’s priorities, and is unlikely to be largely implemented, it’s clear that the administration would like to further eviscerate the nation’s skimpy excuse for an economic security policy. The budget, after all, represents the administration’s ideal world.
And what’s in this world? Little help for the poor with food, health care, and housing—and more poverty, disease, homelessness, and hunger.
The budget proposes gutting the country’s largest anti-hunger program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as food stamps), cutting spending by $213.5 billion over ten years. This would be achieved not only by limiting who is eligible for assistance, but by altering the most basic part of the program, which allows low-income families to purchase food using an Electronic Benefit Transfer card (similar to a debit card). Instead, the government would deliver (Blue Apron-style, according to budget director Mick Mulvaney, who was actually serious) boxes of government commodity food to most SNAP recipients for the value of about half of their benefits. Stacy Dean of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities writes that such a proposal, “would require operational capacity and infrastructure that neither USDA [the Department of Agriculture] nor states now have … [and] puts access to food at risk for one in ten Americans on the faulty assumption that government can buy and provide food more efficiently than millions of American households.”
http://prospect.org/article/reforming-welfare-and-controlling-poor
