Close vote looms in U.S. House on big Republican food-stamp cuts

Food-stamp defenders appealed for two dozen Republican defectors to help kill their party's proposed $40 billion cut in the main U.S. antihunger program as a close vote nears later this week in the House of Representatives.

The reforms pushed by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and fiscal conservatives would end benefits for roughly 10 percent of recipients. They would restrict eligibility for a program that has doubled in enrollment and tripled in cost since 2004.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Tuesday "we do know of several Republicans" who opposed the cuts, but she declined to name them. Republicans control the House 233-200, so Democrats need at least 17 cross-overs to defeat the bill and Republicans need a party-line vote to pass it.

David Beckman, leader of antihunger group Bread for the World, said activists were talking to more than 20 Republican lawmakers in the hope of persuading them to oppose the bill. Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio, a leader in the group Food Policy Action, said: "We need 20 House members to do the right thing." Read more >>

The "Real" America: Near Record 20% Struggle To Afford Food

With US equity markets on a 7-day roll and excited TV anchors proclaiming the worst over and new all-time highs must signal recovery as they 'celebrate' five years on from Lehman, the following two charts of the state of real America should open a few eyes to just how blinded American has become to the truth (unless you live it).

A stunning 20.0% of Americans were found to have struggled to afford food in the last year - surging in recent months to its highest since the peak of the crisis in 2008 - as American's ability to consistently afford food has not recovered to pre-recession levels. Furthermore, Americans access to basic needs (13 factors including housing, healthcare, and food) hovers near record lows - dramatically lower than pre-recession levels. The Gallup polls point to a very different image of American than Dow 15,000 - and is set to get worse as the food stamp program is set to be cut in November.

More Americans are struggling to afford food -- nearly as many as did during the recent recession. The 20.0% who reported in August that they have, at times, lacked enough money to buy the food that they or their families needed during the past year, is up from 17.7% in June, and is the highest percentage recorded since October 2011. The percentage who struggle to afford food now is close to the peak of 20.4% measured in November 2008, as the global economic crisis unfolded. Read more >>

Households On Foodstamps Rise To New Record High: More Americans Live In Poverty Than The Population Of Spain

There was much discussion of Friday's "disappointing" non-farm payrolls goal-seeked, seasonally adjusted, X-13-ARIMA conceived jobs "number." The conclusion was that it showed an economy which one year after the start of QEternity was growing nowhere near where the Fed has projected and hoped it would be at this time. But in addition to the BLS jobs number, there was another just as important number that was released on Friday: the monthly foodstamp (SNAP) participation update.

There was no discussion of this particular number and for good reason. If the NFP number was at least meant to show some economic stability, if subpar, the monthly foodstamp update shows month after month that the greatest depression is nowhere near ending for millions of American living in poverty (83% of SNAP households have gross income at or below 100% of the poverty guideline ($19,530 for a family of 3 in 2013), and these households receive about 91% of all benefits. 61% of SNAP households have gross income at or below 75% of the poverty guideline or $14,648 for a family of 3 in 2013).

To wit: in June, the number of households receiving foodstamps rose to 23.117 million, an increase of 45.9k in one month, and also a new record high. As for the average monthly benefit per household: $274.55, just off record lows. Read more >>

American Households On Foodstamps Climb To New Record

Yesterday, briefly, we were confused by the eruption in the stock market following a not too bad sub-200K nonfarm payrolls number. Because we know that in the New Normal bad is always good, no matter what the well-coifed TV pundit du jour tells you. Then we remembered that yesterday is when the USDA releases its monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program data, i.e. Americans on Foodstamps.

It was here that the ramp was perfectly explained, because while the bad (for stocks of course) data was that individual foodstamps recipients rose by 170K in March - if just a whisker below all time highs - it was the number of American households on foodstamps, which rose to a new all time high of 23,116,441 (each collecting an average of $274.30 per month) that perfectly explained the Dow Jones' 200 point surge higher: the transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-classes to the 1% continues without a hiccup. Read more >>

JP Morgan’s Food Stamp Empire

JP Morgan Chase Tower (Photo credit: mheisel)

In 2010, President Obama signed into law the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The bill added $4.5 billion to child-nutrition programs over the next decade, put in place nutrition standards for school lunch programs and vending machines, and implemented training for the cafeteria workers who feed 31 million students a day through the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. It received bipartisan support, and was hailed as a compassionate victory for America’s poorest children.

The bill was also, however, a potentially good development for mega bank JP Morgan Chase. Why, you may be wondering, would one of the nation’s biggest banks benefit from a bill meant to feed poor children? A closer look at the legislation reveals the answer. The bill mandates that “all state agencies implement Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) systems by October 1, 2020” for those receiving money through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. And which company administers nearly half of all states’ EBT programs? You guessed it: JP Morgan Chase. Read more >>

US Households On Foodstamps Hit Record High

Record Dow, record S&P, record debt, record plunge in gold, and now: record US households on foodstamps. What's not to like. While today's gold selloff may be confusing to everyone, one can scratch off some 23,087,886 US households, or the number that according to the USDA were on foodstamps in January and just happen to be a fresh all time high, as the likely sellers, especially when one considers that the average monthly benefit to each household dropped to a record low of $274.04. This number probably ignores, for good reason, the once every four years fringe benefits of Obamaphones and other such made in China trinkets. Read more >>

Store owner arrested for using food stamps to stock shelves

A convenience store owner in Daytona Beach, Fla.was arrested Monday for running a food stamp scam, using tax dollars to stock his shelves.

Bassam Abu Diab and his son Matthew were buying food stamp cards for 20 to 40 cents on the dollar and using them to shop at Walmart and Save-A-Lot stores for items they sold in their convenience store, police said, according the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

An undercover agent sold EBT cards to Abu Diab, which he used to purchase items at other stores and then paid the agent less than half the value of the cards. Federal, state and local officers raided the Abu Diabs’ 4M Food Mart after a 3-month investigation.

“This guy is running a business on the taxpayers back,” said Daytona Beach Police Chief Michael Chitwood, according to local tv station WFTV Channel 9. “It’s a fraud. He’s unscrupulous and clearly he didn’t learn from the last time we hit the store.” Read more >>

Record 47,791,996 on food stamps

On Friday, the United States Department of Agriculture quietly released new statistics related to the food stamps program, officially known as SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). The numbers reveal, in 2012, the food stamps program was the biggest it's ever been, with an average of 46,609,072 people on the program every month of last year. 47,791,996 people were on the program in the month of December 2012.

The federal government also says that in a given month in 2012, the number of households on food stamps was 22,329,713.

The state with the highest average number of participants per month in 2012 was Texas, with an astonishing 4,038,440 folks drawing from the program. The second highest is California, with 3,964,221, and then Florida, at 3,353,064.

Washington, D.C., with an estimated population of 617,996, had an average of 141,147 participants. Meaning, roughly 23 percent of folks living in D.C. are on food stamps, according to the numbers provided by the federal government. The participation rate in Texas, which has an estimated population of 26,059,203, 15.5 percent. Read more >>

Federal Food Stamp Program Spent Record $80.4B in FY 2012

During fiscal year 2012, the U.S. government spent a record $80.4 billion on food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a $2.7 billion increase from FY 2011.  (Fiscal year 2012 ran from Oct. 1, 2011 through Sept. 30, 2012.)

According to the Monthly Treasury Statement that summarizes the receipts and outlays of the federal government, $80,401,000,000 went towards SNAP during FY 2012, which was a $2.7 billion increase from $77,637,000,000 in FY 2011.

The SNAP program is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which also runs other food assistance programs under the auspices of the Food and Nutrition Service Agency.

In total, nearly $106 billion was spent on food assistance in 2012, with $18.3 billion that went to “Child Nutrition Programs.” Read more >>

Foodstamps Soar By Most In 16 Months: Over 1 Million Americans Enter Poverty In Last Two Months

And we thought last month's delayed foodstamp data was bad. The just reported foodstamp number for September was a doozy, with 607,544 new Americans becoming eligible for foodstamps, as a record 47.7 million Americans are now living in poverty at least according to the USDA.

The monthly increase was the highest since May 2011, and with August's 421K new impoverished America, over 1 million Americans made the EBT card their new best friend. It is unclear just which atmospheric phenomenon will get the blame for this unprecedented surge in poverty, which comes at a time when the pre-election economic data euphoria was adamant that the US economy was on an escape velocity to utopia.

Instead what we do know is that in August and September, over three times as many foodstamp recipients were add to the economy as jobs (324,000). We also know that with the imminent impact of Sandy, which will send foodstamp recipients soaring, it is now looking quite possible that the US may end 2012 with just over a mindboggling 50 million Americans living in absolute poverty and collecting the $134.29 average monthly benefit per person, instead of working. Welcome to the recovery indeed. Read more >>

Foodstamps Surge By Most In One Year To New All Time Record

There was, however, another closely tracked number which perhaps is far more indicative of the economic "growth" in the past 4 years, which certainly had a delayed release. The number of course is that showing how many Americans are on foodstamps, and usually is released at the end of the month, or the first day or two of the next month.

This time the USDA delayed its release nine days past the semi-official deadline, far past the election, and until Friday night to report August foodstamp data. One glance at the number reveals why: at 47.1 million, this was not only a new all time record, but the monthly increase of 420,947 from July was the biggest monthly increase in one year.

One can see why a reported surge in foodstamps ahead of the elections is something the USDA, and the administration may not have been too keen on disclosing. Read more >>

U6 unemployment, the more relevant measure is 14.7%.

President Obama is speaking at George Mason University today (traffic is insane!). He has a long awaited jobs one-liner: the U3 unemployment rate fell to 7.8%. He probably won’t mention that U6 unemployment, the more indicative measure of true unemployment, remained at 14.7%. This is due to a large increase in the number of workers working part time for economic reasons. The number of part-time workers rose by 582,000 according to the Household Survey.

Change in nonfarm payrolls rose by 114,000, according to the Establishment Survey. Hardly comforting given the 12,088,000 unemployed. And remember that the survey of households uncovered an additional 800,000+ jobs last month, 187,000 of which were government workers. [This reminds me of the miraculous appearance of boxes of ballots during a close election].

The number of non-institutional population going on disability has increased dramatically, as has the number of households on the SNAP (food stamp) program. In fact, the number of people going on disability since July 2010 has been larger than the decline in unemployment by near a quarter of a million! Read more >>

The Unprecedented Increase in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Three years after the end of the 2007–09 recession, which officially began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, 47 million people each month are using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). At the beginning of the recession, fewer than one in 10 Americans received SNAP benefits. Nearly 15 percent of Americans now use SNAP benefits, formerly called food stamps, a program administered by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). This translates to more than one in 7 Americans currently using SNAP benefits, a record non-emergency high.

There is much concern surrounding this unprecedented increase in America's SNAP program, which began in 2008. Food stamp participation has always increased during a recession and in the initial stages of a recovery. The purpose of this report is to determine whether the recent increase in SNAP participation is comparable to increases during other recent recessions. Our results demonstrate that levels seen since the end of this recession are far higher than in prior recoveries (see Figure 1).

While the 36 month periods following the recessions of the early 1980s saw decreases in food stamp usage, the recessions of the early 1990s and in 2001 saw increases between 1 and 2 percent over the same period, in comparison with an increase of 3.5 percent following the recession ending in 2009. In addition to the difficult job market, this is because of changes in the program that began in October 2008, including expansion of benefits and elimination of the cap for child care expenses. Read more >>

Economy's long slump pushing many down the ladder

Jim Vavrek has experienced a lot of firsts in the last few years, and that has not been a good thing.
There was the first time he had his water shut off because he couldn’t pay the bill, and the first time he looked into applying for food stamps because he didn’t know how he could afford to eat.

And there was the first time he realized that despite insurance coverage, he still owed thousands of dollars from his late wife’s short fight with cancer – bills he could not afford to pay. “It’s amazing how fast everything happens,” Vavrek, 50, mused recently, as he drove from his job in New Brunswick, N.J., to his home in Point Pleasant, N.J.
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The commute was about to become a memory – Vavrek had just learned that he was going to lose the $13-an-hour contract job he’d landed about a year and a half ago. It had been a big financial step down from when he made $70,000, plus a bonus, several years ago, but at least it was a paycheck. Read more >>

More than 50 million Americans short of food

 More than 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy food at some point in 2011, according to federal data. Children in some 3.9 million households suffered from food insecurity last year, with their families unable to provide them with adequate, nutritious food at times.

Nearly 17 million Americans suffered from "very low food security," meaning they had to reduce the amount they ate, saying the food they bought did not last and they didn't have the funds to buy more.

They typically found themselves in this situation a few days a month for seven months of the year. The number of people in this category shot up by more than 800,000 from 2010, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report released Wednesday. Women living alone, black households and the poor and near-poor were affected the most. Read more >>

Brooklyn Deli Clerk's Face Slashed Open For Refusing To Sell Beer For Food Stamps

The face of Yemeni deli clerk Mutahar Murshed Ali was slashed nearly in two for committing that most grievous of offenses: refusing to "sell" a Colt 45 to a drunk 20 year-old in exchange for foodstamps (whose usage Zero Hedge readers know, recently reverted back to all time highs). 

Of course, Ali was perfectly in his right to refuse to exchange booze for EBT: wereported recently that "New York would prohibit welfare recipients from spending their tax-funded benefits on cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, and strip clubs under a bill passed overwhelmingly by the state Senate." That however appears to not have bothered the assailant, who nearly cut off the deli vendor's face off in retaliation for not getting the "entitled" quid-pro-handout. Read more >>

U.S. Debt Just Grew by $11 Trillion

Republicans and Democrats spent last summer battling how best to save $2.1 trillion over the next decade. They are spending this summer battling how best to not save $2.1 trillion over the next decade. In the course of that year, the U.S. government’s fiscal gap -- the true measure of the nation’s indebtedness -- rose by $11 trillion.

The fiscal gap is the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue. It captures all government liabilities, whether they are official obligations to service Treasury bonds or unofficial commitments, such as paying for food stamps or buying drones.

Some question whether “official” and “unofficial” spending commitments can be added together. But calling particular obligations “official” doesn’t make them economically more important. Indeed, the government would sooner renege on Chinese holding U.S. Treasuries than on Americans collecting Social Security, especially because the U.S. can print money and service its bonds with watered-down dollars.

For its part, economic theory sees through labels and views a country’s official debt for what it is -- a linguistic construct devoid of real economic content. In contrast, the fiscal gap is theoretically well-defined and invariant to the choice of labels. Each labeling choice changes the mix of obligations between official and unofficial, but leaves the total unchanged. Read more >>

Over 100 Million Now Receiving Federal Welfare

A new chart set to be released later today by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee details a startling statistic: "Over 100 Million People in U.S. Now Receiving Some Form Of Federal Welfare."

"The federal government administers nearly 80 different overlapping federal means-tested welfare programs," the Senate Budget Committee notes. However, the committee states, the figures used in the chart do not include those who are only benefiting from Social Security and/or Medicare. 

Food stamps and Medicaid make up a large--and growing--chunk of the more than 100 million recipients. " Read more >>

USDA partnering with Mexico to boost food stamp participation

The Mexican government has been working with the United States Department of Agriculture to increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps.

USDA has an agreement with Mexico to promote American food assistance programs, including food stamps, among Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals and migrant communities in America.

“USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible Mexican nationals living in the United States about available nutrition assistance,” the USDA explains in a brief paragraph on their “Reaching Low-Income Hispanics With Nutrition Assistance” web page. “Mexico will help disseminate this information through its embassy and network of approximately 50 consular offices.”

The partnership — which was signed by former USDA Secretary Ann M. Veneman and Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Luis Ernesto Derbez Bautista in 2004 — sees to it that the Mexican Embassy and Mexican consulates in America provide USDA nutrition assistance program information to Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals working in America and migrant communities in America. The information is specifically focused on eligibility criteria and access.

The goal, for USDA, is to get rid of what they see as enrollment obstacles and increase access among potentially eligible populations by working with arms of the Mexican government in America. Benefits are not guaranteed or provided under the program — the purpose is outreach and education. Read more >>

USDA suggests food stamp parties, games to increase participation

 "In the 1970s, one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today one of every seven receive the benefit."

While spending on the food stamp program has increased 100 percent under President Barack Obama, the government continues to push more Americans to enroll in the welfare program. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has embraced entire promotional campaigns designed to encourage eligible Americans to participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps.

A pamphlet currently posted at the USDA website encourages local SNAP offices to throw parties as one way to get potentially eligible seniors to enroll in the program. “Throw a Great Party. Host social events where people mix and mingle,” the agency advises. “Make it fun by having activities, games, food, and entertainment, and provide information about SNAP. Putting SNAP information in a game format like BINGO, crossword puzzles, or even a ‘true/false’ quiz is fun and helps get your message across in a memorable way.”

The agency’s most recent outreach effort targets California, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio and the New York metro area with radio ads. The ads have been running since March and are scheduled to continue through the end of June — at a cost of $2.5 million — $3 million, CNN Money reported Monday. Read more >>