Food stamp programme cut makes life even tougher for America’s poor

David Usborne

For millions of Americans, the trip to the supermarket came with a sting as the first reductions in the history of the food stamp programme, a key component of the welfare safety net for the poor, came into effect.

While relatively modest in scope – the drop in benefits starting today was about 7 per cent, or $10 a month per person or $36 for a family of four – the cuts may only be a foretaste of what is to come as conservative Republicans in Congress push for stricter eligibility rules further to shrink the programme.

But anti-poverty groups warned that even today’s change to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (Snap), caused by the expiry of a temporary boost in benefits authorised by Congress in 2009 as part of a wider economic stimulus law, will bring real pain to households already struggling to get by.

“People are living at the margins,” said Ellen Vollinger, Snap advocate and legal director at the Food Research and Action Centre, an anti-hunger organisation in Washington DC. “It’s not an abstract metric for people. It’s actual dollars to keep food in the refrigerator.”

It is also coming at a time when food purchasing picks up before Thanksgiving and Christmas, which has charities fearing a surge in demand for help. “Most of these families, those food stamps only last them about three weeks out of a month, so, with a cut of $36 a month that they are going to be experiencing, now they are going to be lucky to make that stretch to two to two-and -a-half weeks,” said Jon West of the Atlanta Community Food Bank.

Yet, the drive in Congress for still more severe cuts is unlikely to slow amid claims from conservatives that the burdens of Snap on the federal budget and middle-class taxpayers have become untenable. While in 2007, before the recession, about 26 million Americans were receiving food stamps, the number today is nearly 48 million. About 11 per cent of all spending for “food at home” is through food stamps, which now take the form of a swipe card accepted by most grocery shops and chains such as Walmart which is topped up monthly by the government.

Defenders of the programme say the numbers enrolled have swollen so dramatically because there is a genuine need due to a sluggish recovery that reaches down to the poorest levels of the population last. Most households using the benefit are living on about $8,000 (£5,000) a year or less.

That growth in dependency has meant that the cost to Washington has gone from $20bn a year a decade ago to almost $80bn. Republicans in the House of Representative want to trim the budget by $39bn over 10 years. Negotiations on a compromise with the Democrat-controlled Senate, which wants only about a tenth of those savings, resumed last week.