Surefire method to make a liberal quickly backpedal from gushing about the allegedly wondrous Obama economic recovery -- suggest cutting back on food stamps. Worth it just for the amusement of watching a cheerleader convert to Chicken Little.
Consider yourself warned, though -- doing this will surely lead to accusations of racism, misogyny, homophobia, cold-heartedness, etc., against you. Then again, conversations with liberals invariably get there anyway.
Federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, has soared nearly fourfold from $21 billion in 2002 to $76 billion last year, with most of the increase stemming the Democrat-created housing bubble that burst in 2008 and wrecked the economy.
Since then, the official jobless rate has dropped nearly half from its peak during the Obama presidency of 10 percent in late 2009 to 5.5 percent last month. Rare is the liberal who doesn't crow about this when discussion turns to the economy -- and just as seldom seen is the progressive who concedes that safety net spending should be reduced as the economy gets better.
Demonstrating this last night was House Democrat Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri during an appearance on MSNBC's PoliticsNation with host Al Sharpton --
SHARPTON: Let's talk about the plan to gut food stamps. It would cut roughly $125 billion from the food stamp program over 10 years (Sharpton citing a story at Slate), or roughly 15 percent at current spending levels and "end the federal entitlement program as we know it." I mean, would this be the end of food stamps if they got this through, congressman?
CLEAVER: Yes, this would end food stamps and also create a kind of society that we have not seen since the 1930s because when you're talking about older people, we're talking about people's grandmothers, some of them, many of them, perhaps the majority of them are Republicans, they're Democrats, they're black, they're white, they're brown.
And what I think what people need to understand is that there are a lot of people in this country who bought into a lie, probably millions, that this is a big wasteful program. The truth of the matter is, 92 percent of the money, according to the Government Accounting (sic) Office, goes for the people who need the service. And on top of that, the fraud component, based on GAO study, is one cent on the dollar. You can't get that from church spending, from the Vatican, from the most purified source in the world.
SHARPTON: It's outrageous, it's outrageous.
Got that? Funding for food stamps has skyrocketed nearly 400 percent in the last dozen years -- but cutting back a modest 15 percent after such an astronomical increase "would end food stamps," according to Congressman Cleaver.
Moreover, this allegedly drastic reduction would "create a kind of society that we have not seen since the 1930s," Cleaver claims, alluding to the Great Depression when one-third of Americans were "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," as Franklin Roosevelt stated in his second inaugural address. Entitlements were negligible before Roosevelt's New Deal -- but now constitute nearly half of all federal spending. A 15 percent reduction for food stamps barely changes that equation. The Republican plan would also shift federal control of food stamps to the states (and not until 2021)-- thus leading to Slate's claim that it ends the program "as we know it." This is liberal code, deployed whenever conservatives threaten the welfare state's perpetual job-creation boondoggles for bureaucrats.
As to be expected, neither Sharpton nor Cleaver mentioned that spending on food stamps has risen off the charts over the last decade -- because pointing this out risks undermining their hysteria. Cleaver also fudged on the facts when he claimed fraud is nearly non-existent in the SNAP program -- and the same GAO study he cited refutes him.
