WHITE HOUSE SLAM GOP'S FOOD STAMP REFORMS IN THANKSGIVING MESSAGE

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama's White House politicized Thanksgiving to promote the reauthorization of the SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) or "food stamps" as part of the farm bill at a time when a record number of Americans are receiving assistance. 

In an email, the White House urged Americans sitting down for Thanksgiving Dinner to remember: "For decades, Congress has authorized SNAP in a bipartisan fashion through the Farm Bill. They don't have to do it in a way that hurts children, seniors, veterans, and vulnerable families. Learn more, and pass it on."

The White House linked to a report about how SNAP is boosting the economy and accused Republicans of undermining the program's reauthorization. 

Congress could not agree on a bipartisan farm bill because Democrats would not agree to make reforms to SNAP. Robert Rector, the godfather of the landmark welfare reform bill in the 1990s, has suggested the food stamp program be reformed by moving the program from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Health and Human Services, because "the food stamp program is a means-tested welfare or anti-poverty program, not an agricultural program," and "the USDA’s expertise is in farming, not welfare."

He has also recommended means-testing, anti-fraud measures, drug testing, and converting the program to a "work activation" program while ensuring benefits do not go to illegal immigrants. 

As Breitbart News has reported, food stamp enrollments "have remained over 47 million for an unprecedented 13 consecutive months." And that number has indeed benefited a certain sector of the economy. As the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI) discovered, corporations are also incentivized to pressure the government to maximize the number of people on food stamps because of the profits companies like J.P. Morgan make from EBT card transaction fees. 

The program also has been riddled with fraud, and those with EBT cards have often offered to sell them for cash on social media sites like Twitter. 

Via: Breitbart

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Obamacare could increase food stamp rolls

Republicans have another reason to hate Obamacare: It could grow the number of people on food stamps.

The Obama administration has ordered a study to determine whether the Affordable Care Act, by increasing the number of people eligible for Medicaid, will also increase the number of people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program based on how states enroll people

The outcome of the study could show an increase of 3 percent to 5 percent in food stamp recipients in some states from people who were already eligible for SNAP benefits but had not enrolled in the program — which could translate to millions or even billions more in federal spending, Greg Mills, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who is conducting the study, told POLITICO.

“So in percentage terms, it’s not going to be very large, but we’re talking about a very large program,” said Mills, who is investigating the effects of the health care law on SNAP on behalf of the Department of Agriculture’s Food Nutrition Service, the agency that monitors food stamps.

(See POLITICO's full Obamacare coverage)

“It would have a substantial financial effect.”

The likely increase would come from a greater overlap in eligibility between Medicaid under Obamacare and SNAP.

Via: Politico

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Deep cuts to country's food stamp program start Friday

WASHINGTON –  Forty-eight million Americans will have their food stamps benefits slashed starting Friday, when a recession-era boost in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program expires.

The move to cut back benefits will be the first wide-scale change to the program affecting nearly every single participant. The 13.6 percent cut comes out to about $36 a month less for a family of four getting government assistance or $420 a year, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Since 2000, the costs for the plan have increased more than 358 percent.

Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, cites lax eligibility requirements as one of the reasons behind the increase.

Enrollment in the food-stamp benefits also rose during the 2007-2011 recession.

Many anti-poverty groups have warned that cutting the program will leave millions of Americans vulnerable.

"People are living at the margins," Ellen Vollinger, legal director and SNAP advocate at the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger organization, told Reuters. "It's not an abstract metric for people. It's actual dollars to keep food in the refrigerator."

The slash in the program also means less money for discount grocers, dollar stores and gas stations that rely on low-income shoppers.

SNAP is the largest anti-hunger program in the country.

Via: Fox News

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Feds Will Spend $18M to Develop ‘Reliable’ Climate Change Predictions

(CNSNews.com) –The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have plans to spend up to $18 million over the next five years to develop “reliable” climate change predictions for the next few decades.

The “funding opportunity enables interagency cooperation on one of the most pressing problems of the millennium: climate change and how it is likely to affect our world,” according to NSF’s official request for bids. (See NSF Decadal & Regional Climate Prediction.pdf)

“This solicitation is intended to support development of reliable regional and decadal climate predictions that take into account the influences of living systems and are essential for projecting how living systems might adapt to climate change and its consequences for their physical environment,” the program solicitation explains.

Current methods of predicting future climate change have proved to be wildly inaccurate. For example, none of the 73 computer models used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that there would be no statistically significant global warming for the past 17 years as determined by actual temperature records stored in five different databases worldwide.

Via: CNS News

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Top 10 Wasteful Government Programs

The Motley Fool, a financial publication with a sense of humor, recently compiled a list of the top 10 wasteful government-funded programs.

The first on the list was originally reported by The Daily Caller’s Paul Conner.

    1. There’s an app for that

    So many wasteful programs, I hardly know where to begin! How about with $100,000 in prizes offered by the Department of Energy to develop an energy app that would help users track their energy usage in their home. It’s a novel idea as our energy resources are finite and the DOE has pushed both consumers and businesses to utilize the available green energy subsidies available to them. However, there’s just one slight problem with the DOE contest: Apps that do this already exist — at least five of them to be exact. Perhaps someone should invest in an app that tracks apps for the DOE?

    2. Alms for the rich

    Just because you made $66 billion in net revenue doesn’t mean you won’t take a handout when one is offered… right PepsiCo. (NYSE: PEP ) ? According to Coburn’s report, Pepsi and Theo Muller Group are teaming up to open a yogurt manufacturing facility at the Genesee Valley Agri-Business Park in New York. Unable to use the supplied municipal water in the yogurt-making process, or the $4.2 billion in cash on its balance sheet, Pepsi gladly accepted slightly more than $1.3 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce to build a new aquifer-direct water supply system, a new road leading to the plant, and to improve the parks’ wastewater capacity.

Via: Daily Caller

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160! – We have 160 Federal Programs That Deal With Housing

Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) senior communications advisor and speechwriter, Amanda Carpenter, who was recently a columnist for The Washington Times, penned an interesting post on the senator’s page, the Pickpocket, concerning how many federal programs deal with housing.  A whopping 160 federal programs is “how many the Government Accountability Office tallied in a recent report that noted, ‘fiscal realities raise questions about the efficiency of multiple housing programs and activities across federal agencies with similar goals, products, and sometimes parallel delivery systems.”

The post, which Carpenter wrote on September 20, also reported that:

…HUD runs the majority of the programs, 91. The United States Department of Agriculture, which also administers farming aid and the nation’s food stamp program, offers 18 different types of housing assistance as well. The Internal Revenue Service has 14 programs. The Department of Treasury offers 8 programs; the Department of Veterans Affairs 7; the Department of Labor 2; Federal Home Loan Banks 3.

The rest of the activities are run through a number of organizations, such as the Department of Interior,  the Federal Reserve System, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, Farmer Mac, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to name a few.

Here’s GAO’s complete inventory of programs, available in the “Table of Contents” on this page.

If President Obama had truly wanted to consolidate wasteful government programs, he sure had the chance. Especially when it comes to housing. He just never took it.

GAO recommended that the government begin taking action to consolidate programs at HUD, USDA, and Treasury, a goal completely compatible the Single Family Housing Task Force that the Obama Administration announced in February 2011.

Carpenter noted that this finding has amounted to little more than a press release.  However, it’s another episode in the annals of government inefficiency.  For a minute – I thought that this could be the foundation for a good movie, but I forgot that it’s already been made.

Via: Green Room

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