Say Anything Blog

Which, I think, is the point.  They won’t admit it, but the liberals want you to be dependent on the government.  The point of food stamps isn’t feeding people who need help.  It might have started out with that goal, but these days it’s about creating and promoting a culture of dependency.

MARTINSVILLE, Ohio — With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.

It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.

Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare.

While the numbers have soared during the recession, the path was cleared in better times when the Bush administration led a campaign to erase the program’s stigma, calling food stamps “nutritional aid” instead of welfare, and made it easier to apply.

Though this article wants you to believe that food stamp use has grown because more people need them, the truth is that food stamp has grown because we’ve expanded the qualifications for the program.  People who would never have qualified for food stamps now qualify.  And, increasingly, they’re taking the food stamps.  Not because they necessarily need them but because, heck, they’re available.

The reason we’ve seen a spike in people enrolling for food stamps is because government expanded the entitlement.

The 2007 US Farm Bill changed the name of the Food Stamp Program to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (all the better to fool the taxpayers into thinking this isn’t welfare).  It did more than just change the name of the program.  It expanded the benefits of the program as well.  Not only was the benefits amount of program raised, the qualifying income levels were expanded to.  This not only made the program more attractive to people who weren’t already signed up, it also made more people eligible.

And, low and behold, the number of people on food stamps increased.

It’s a bit like arrest numbers going up after more cops are put on the streets.  It’s not necessarily indicative of more crime.  There’s just more cops available to arrest more people. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.  And neither is the food stamps situation.

What this creates is a vicious cycle by which the government expands entitlements, more people use the entitlements, and then the government bureaucrats use that as a justification to expand entitlements even further.

And all the while, we foot he bill and the government gets more dependents which maximizes their power.