Millions of Americans are teetering on “hunger rock,” guaranteeing mass suffering and perhaps starvation.
It’s a refrain from CBS News, Salon, Business Insider and many other outlets. But the recent hysteria over food stamps ignores how the program works reversal Americans’ health.
During the pandemic, anyone who qualified for food stamps was automatically given maximum benefits.
Individuals who had some income and would have collected only $23 in monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits would receive $281 a month.
Congress voted in December to end bonus benefits, but the media is acting like Ronald Reagan rising from the grave to bash food-stamp recipients.
Eighteen states have already phased out the additional benefits, and the bonus ends this month for the remaining 32 states.
Even after the end of the bonus, food-stamp benefits are still higher than in 2019.
President Joe Biden issued an executive order to permanently increase food-stamp benefits by 23% in 2021. The higher profits were justified in part, The US Department of Agriculture saidBecause many food-stamp recipients are now obese and need extra food to provide “sufficient energy to support current weight status.”
The Government Accountability Office concluded that Biden violated federal law with that order, because Congress has jurisdiction.
But the GAO has no power to make Uncle Joe comply with the law.
Any reduction in food stamps, however, sends the media into panic mode.
Food banks are citing high demand for free food, which is being trumpeted as evidence of impending doom.
On Saturday, The Washington Post published a piece in which A Mile long line of cars Waiting for free food in Kentucky.
Many of the vehicles were expensive late-model cars – not unlike the vintage truck from “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Even so, the Post hyperventilated: “From the front to the back of the line, the sea of despair and hardship along this desolate Kentucky highway foreshadowed what might be in store for millions of Americans.”
The post miraculously read the minds of everyone in the mile-long queue: “All described feeling hungry.”
It consisted of people smoking while lamenting the cost of food.
guardian Profiled A Battle Creek, Mich., single mother decried the “terrible timing” of benefit cuts.
She lamented that her youngest son “will no longer be able to eat two bowls of cereal every morning.”
But every student in Battle Creek Public Schools deserves it free breakfast and lunch. How many bowls of cereal does that child need?
How many journalists failed math classes in college?
USA Today whined“some seniors may feel a double whammy” because “after receiving the 8.7% cost of living adjustment in January . . . some seniors have already seen a reduction in their SNAP benefits.”
This paper fails to explain how recipients are worse off despite a net increase in government benefits.
Food banks have grown in recent years, but their support doesn’t always bring relief to those in need.
According to a New York Post contributor Jason Curtis Anderson, “Churches do food drives and give people full bags of groceries from Trader Joe’s. Recipients take the food and sell it at the East Village flea market, along with items they have stolen from pharmacies.
Measuring hunger by the demand for free food never makes sense. If prostitutes offer free sex to men in need, the number of guys claiming to be sex hungry will increase.
Activists call for federal food-security surveys to justify the need for higher food-stamp benefits.
But those surveys mostly tabulate how many people have a voice Worries about missing food At some point in the future or they are unable to prefer more expensive food.
Choose not to fade Measure actual hunger So politicians can declare a permanent emergency to justify more handouts.
The latest uproar ignores how “SNAP households spent slightly more per month on food at home than non-SNAP households,” American Enterprise Institute reported
Food-stamp recipients, unlike working Americans, receive automatic benefits to offset inflation.
Federal food aid has been a food disaster.
According to a 2017 report, food-stamp recipients are twice as likely to be obese than eligible non-recipients. BMC Public Health the study
Harvard nutrition professor Walter Willett was seen In 2015, “We analyzed what SNAP participants are eating, and it’s terrible food. It’s a diet designed to cause obesity and diabetes.”
But Team Biden opposes reforming food stamps to end payments for sugar-sweetened beverages and junk food.
This fix will do much more to curb unhealthy eating than Biden decree to force companies to “improve food products”.
Millions of Americans are saddled with rising food prices — one of Biden’s worst legacies.
We can have compassion for starving individuals without perpetuating the excesses of a federal program that is bloated America.
James Boward is the author of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.
