Over the past two years, I've traveled throughout New York meeting with farmers and anti-hunger advocates to develop our priorities for the 2012 Farm Bill. Based on these conversations, I fought for and won several provisions in the bill such as improved crop insurance for fruit and vegetable farmers, rural broadband services to support small business development, and grants and loan financing to build grocery stores in rural and urban food deserts.
These conversations also made it clear to me how important SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) is, not only to our struggling families who rely on these benefits to put food on their tables, but to farmers whose produce is being purchased by so many Americans at farmers markets and grocery stores using food stamps.
The fact is that food stamps are an effective investment. For every dollar that's invested into the SNAP program, we get $1.71 back in return. This money pays the salaries of grocery clerks as well as the truckers who haul the food and produce across the country. In addition, the USDA estimates that 16 cents goes back to the farmer who grows the produce. As Moody's economist Mark Zandi put it, "The fastest way to infuse money into the economy is through expanding the SNAP/food stamp program."
In the end, however, the Farm Bill that passed out of the Agriculture Committee last month proposes cutting $4.5 billion from the SNAP program over 10 years in the name of fiscal belt-tightening. Under this current bill, families will be less food secure than they are right now.
In real dollar terms, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), this would mean a loss in benefits of about $90 a month, a devastating amount of money for millions of struggling families including 190,000 low-income families in New York City and nearly 300,000 throughout New York State. Half of all beneficiaries of food stamps are children. As the mother of two young boys, I can think of no more simple or elemental thing that a family must provide than food for their children. Children need food to grow, they need food to learn, and they need food to reach their God-given potential.
This is why I voted against the Farm Bill in committee last month and it's why today I introduced an amendment to restore the $4.5 billion in funding to SNAP. My amendment would pay for the restoration of this funding by reducing federal subsidies for crop insurance companies that are already making huge annual profits.
Earlier this week, I was honored to stand at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City with Chef Tom Colicchio, as well as representatives from NYC Coalition Against Hunger, Food Bank for NYC, Environmental Working Group, AARP, United Way of New York City, Cornell Co-op Extension, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), RWDSU, NYS Hunger Action Network, Rural-Urban Alliance Committee and the Food and Research Action Center to speak out against these severe cuts. I appreciate their support and strong advocacy as we fight together to reverse these cuts on the floor of the Senate.
We can afford a fully funded SNAP program that provides our struggling families with the nutrition and assistance they need. We should all be able to agree that the last thing we should be doing is protecting subsidies for insurance companies making huge profits at the expense of the most vulnerable in our society, particularly hungry children.
I was on Politics Nation to discuss this issue, I hope you'll watch:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Follow Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SenGillibrand
Jim Wallis: The Missing Religious Principle in Our Budget Debates
The biggest benefactor in the food stamp industry is J P Morgan....and the jobs involved are not given to Americans.
"JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States. JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes."
http://www.alternet.org/rss/1/446636/jp_morgan_makes_big_bucks_from_food_stamp_growth,_then_hires_workers_in_india_with_our_tax_dollars
Yeah. And while we're at it, I want a pony.
Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist for Moody’s, testified that the food-stamp multiplier in 2009 was 1.73 or about 6 times more powerful than a dollar spent extending the Bush tax cuts (multiplier = 0.29).
In sum, for every $100 billion spent on food stamps, the economy grows a robust $173 billion. For every $100 billion spent on the Bush tax cuts, the economy grows a paltry $29 billion. And for every $100 billion spent on tax cuts for the rich, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the economy could grow as little as $10 billion.
http://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/Economic_Stimulus_House_Plan_012109.pdf
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10682/Frontmatter.2.2.shtml
My point is that the $1.73 for $1 is a lie. Hogwash.
You don't "spend money" on tax cuts. The money is NOT coerced from the person who earned it.
Sound nice. How?
There is sincere harm in furthering the entitlement attitude in the US and it starts with continuing the promotion that handouts are necessary for hardworking people. For a month or two maximum-that would be true.
Try dealing with public assistance recipients on a daily basis and you will learn the true harm you are promoting. Kids grow up hearing how all hardworking people need help and there's no shame in getting handouts. That's how we see the expansion of multi-generational welfare.
Work in a grocery store that accepts food stamps. When I did I chronically saw recipients buying convenience foods and snacks/candy that I could never afford. And why not? They don't have to pay anything for their healthcare either.
We have become a nation where the working class supports a large class of non-workers. Non-workers get better healthcare and have far less stress. They are starting to live longer than the working class. This system allows for elected officials to get voted into their jobs because non-workers have nothing else to do but go vote to keep forcing others to support them.
It is not a system that can sustain itself or keep a nation healthy and prosperous.
Hunger is never a social 'ill' that needs to be 'improved' through further, and worsening, starvation. Of any age group - let alone our small, undefended ones.
"Food insecurity" is a nice enough 'label' - for being constantly hungry & never consistently eating well enough to maintain healthy growth, activity, and vitality, and @ the same time courting illness through intolerable, constant duress from NEVER getting good meals on a regular basis - and is a cheapening of the realities that too, too, many of us - of all ages - are undergoing currently.
It leads to a child's body, mind, heart, and spirit breaking - they are not responsible for these conditions, and are in one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives. And it IS here; Charles Dickens would be able to write a few more, worse, volumes of OUR children's childhoods...and the shame is ours. Please, please continue to shed light on these sobering facts that point out the need to regenerate our thinking into resolution that makes sense on BOTH ends of this spectrum: there IS a more effective way to address a win-win, & remove our children as political pawns, in a terrible charade of Hunger Games as entertainment.
The CBO is obviously run by a bunch of dunder-heads if they think that we are getting a positive ROI from food stamps.
I notice that no one ever questions this stat that is so often thrown out there. With the inefficiency of gov't, how much they lie and steal, how bloated they are, how many tax dollars did it take to get that $1 to "invest" into food stamps? No one has done that study yet but I know how inefficient our government is. I'll bet it took $3 tax dollars in order to invest that $1 that returned $1.71.
The real social 'ill' is that too much political, kaleidoscope-like overview skews the dialogue away from simple measures that would remedy.
Hungry children are not abstract.
When the economy has essentially stopped, or as it was, has fallen and the rate of fall is increasing, our experience has been that only the Government has the where-with-all to pump money into the economy to get it un-stuck, and moving in the right direction. Richard Nixon called it "priming the pump", and when he used the ability of the Government to pump money into the economy to kick start it, he quipped, "we are all Keynesians now".
The cheapest way to pump money into the economy, is to give it to people in a way they will spend it, and it will be spent over and over. That is why the huge Obama tax cut went to workers in their pay checks instead of in one check that came in the mail. Food Stamps and the Pay Check Tax Cut are investments in the expansion of the economy, which leads to small businesses hiring extra help. It has always worked in the past, including in the first two years of the Obama administration. Bush lost 8 million jobs. Obama has gained back 4.3 million jobs.
Ask yourself, when the CBO tells you that $1 turns into $1.71, how and where did they get that dollar and with what level of efficiency? Therein lies the reason why things have become worse with all this stimulus.
Why aren't there any jobs? Because New York is #49 of the top 50 places to do business in the country.
Why is New york #49 of the top fifty places to do business? Taxes and excessive regulation.
You should come Upstate once in a while Senator and see the devastation brought on by big government liberals like yourself and your Daddy Chuck Schumer.
Now, it is even worse, people expect the Government to pay for food for children even though birth control pills have been around for nearly three quarters of a century or more. People still don't know how to do the math before having children to decide if they can afford to buy food for their children or not. The next thing people will expect is free babysitting service that is paid by Government, too.
However when a girl or woman has become pregnant, isn't the health of the born child the most important concern of all of us? Don't we all want the healthiest, brightest, child with the best opportunity in life born at the end of nine months? That means the mother must be well fed and the best pre-natal care, that the mother eat well after the birth, that she be encouraged to nurse for six months, and that she and the baby continue to eat well after the birth. What would help even more would be child care while that mother goes back to school, so she will be prepared to go to work once that child is in school, that she be given sex education because you would be surprised at how many don't know how they got pregnant, and that our society does these things so these children won't follow suit.
With the new Health Care Law, women and girls will be covered for pregnancy prevention medication, that will prevent unwanted pregnancies. Much better than unwanted abortions. Let's love all babies, cherish all mothers, and do everything we can to help women learn how to build a healthy and responsible life for themselves and their children.
Unlike some in congress who say, "If you can't feed your family, blame yourself, " those same twisted misfits are going to also have to say, "If you little critters don't have a home, blame me."