Today, Explained - Oh, SNAP!

Episode Date: April 26, 2018

Next up on the chopping block? Food stamps or SNAP as it’s now known. A new farm bill, fresh out of the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, could force over two million people off the program. Vox�...��s Tara Golshan explains why Republicans want to put SNAP recipients to work, and Stacy Dean from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities talks about the program’s bipartisan past. ************************************ Today (April 27), a jury found Bill Cosby guilty on all counts of drugging and molesting a woman. It’s actually the second time Cosby’s been tried on these same counts. We recently asked if Cosby’s accusers would be heard differently post-#MeToo. You can hear that episode here: https://art19.com/shows/today-explained/episodes/5f3a10a5-5dfd-4909-9ce6-6de999f8c06a Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 ZipRecruiter.com slash Explained. Hello. Great to see you again. I'm here. Are you ready? I'm ready. Today is the big day. Is it?
Starting point is 00:00:06 No, it's not just bring your kids to work day. It's also post your intern position to ZipRecruiter.com slash Explained Day. Ooh, that's my favorite holiday. Is it? Yeah. Okay, let's do it. You ready? I'm ready.
Starting point is 00:00:19 Here we go then. I'm Stacey Dean, and I'm the Vice President for Food Assistance Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She has a better name for that. The anti-hunger community. The anti-hunger community. What's that? That is a group of thousands of people around the country who work to make sure we don't have hunger. Meals on wheels, food banks. Sounds like a good community.
Starting point is 00:00:48 We are a great community. I didn't know that community had a name. We throw great parties. Well catered, I imagine. We get so mad, we really, we dance it out, as they say. Why is the anti-hunger community so mad? This language is so unworkable and so out of touch and quite frankly so insulting to the most vulnerable in our country. Republicans on the House Committee on Agriculture want to make big huge cuts to SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps. This bill cuts SNAP benefits by over $20 billion and it reduces or eliminates benefits for nearly 2 million kids, veterans, working families, and other vulnerable adults.
Starting point is 00:01:27 It is shameful. This should stop now. But will it? This story starts with a farm bill. There's a farm bill. There's a farm bill. There's a farm bill. What is the farm bill? The farm bill is this $100 billion program.
Starting point is 00:01:49 It usually comes up every five years that gives subsidies to farmers and the agricultural community. It kind of dictates what kind of nutrition programs get funding. Does farm bills get more attention than they usually do? 80% of the farm bill is funding nutrition programs. And the biggest one is food stamps or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It's also called SNAP. Tara Golshin is a congressional reporter at Vox. Usually, this is a bipartisan piece of legislation. Because Republicans kind of want to push this entitlement reform mission through, House Republicans really want to impose harsher work requirements on those programs.
Starting point is 00:02:32 The problem with this bill is the work piece. Unfortunately, the chairman told me that that was the one non-negotiable provision in the bill. What are the work requirements? Could you tell me in greater detail what those are about? So currently SNAP or food stamps does have work requirements and it requires able-bodied adults without dependents between the ages of 18 and 49 to work 20 hours per week to receive aid. This proposal would like to harshen those requirements. So it would increase the age to 59. And if they don't meet those requirements, then it would kick them off the program for a year. If they don't meet it again, they keep violating these requirements, it could kick them off for up to three years.
Starting point is 00:03:14 So these are really harsh penalties. How many people would this affect? How big a cut might it be? They expect that it would cut $20 billion from the program over the next 10 years. And they think that it will ultimately kick off 2 million people from the program. And just to be clear, how big is this program? Who's on it? About 42 million people in the United States rely on these programs. It's huge.
Starting point is 00:03:39 Demographically, SNAP is majority white. So it's 40% white, 26% 10 hispanic two percent asian around one percent native american and the rest don't report how radical a move is this from the republicans on the agricultural committee to propose these sort of harsher work requirements on on snap so this issue came up in 2012 and it delayed the entire farm bill process for two years. And in 2014, when they passed the farm bill and it was this bipartisan effort, it was kind of this idea that they'd moved on from these partisan policy tricks. But in the past year, we've seen Republicans trying to get their conservative policies through. And in the past month,
Starting point is 00:04:23 the White House has also put out a directive to the administration and different agencies to kind of find every place they can put work requirements possible. In terms of the scheme of Republican ideology and how they see these welfare programs, it's not completely out of the blue. But in this farm bill and kind of this bipartisan area of legislative debate, it is more surprising. Do Republicans know that two million of some 40 something million people will lose this program? Is that why they're proposing these work requirements or do they have some other motivation? I've talked to a lot of Republicans that say that it's a bloated program. In the past decade, the program has become more efficient at reaching
Starting point is 00:05:06 out to people and making sure that people who need to be on the program are on the program. So it's working well. Yeah, it's working well. And it's grown in size. But that means that it's doing better, and it's more efficient, not that it is bloated and reaching people that don't need it. So I think there's this interpretation that there are people on it that are abusing it and that there are too many. But when you actually look at the numbers, that's not the case. I feel like doing this just to cut two million people from getting food stamps doesn't sound like a popular policy proposal or something that would be popular.
Starting point is 00:05:39 So there must be some other defense of it. So the kind of golden examples for Republicans are in Maine and Kansas, which reinstituted these work requirements. And Republicans will say that it drastically reduced the number of people on the federal rolls. OK. That statement does not say anything about the well-being of these people. It just means that the federal government is paying less money. So you can see kind of the hole in that argument. So this right now, just to be clear on the timing of this, this is what they call in committee?
Starting point is 00:06:18 So it has passed out of the Agricultural Committee. Okay, so it's passed out. It's on the floor somewhere. They are thinking of bringing it up in the floor in early May. Which is like next week. Because Republicans have a big enough margin in the House, they can pass this without any Democratic votes. Democrats left conversations about writing this bill earlier in the process. I didn't walk away. We didn't walk away. It was largely written behind closed doors.
Starting point is 00:06:41 It passed committee with only Republican votes. No Democrats voted for it. Democrats gave these very big speeches about how this was a horrible partisan policy push. We were pushed away by an ideological fight. I repeatedly warned the chairman not to start. If it makes it onto the floor for a vote, you expect that it would probably only get Republican support. Do you think it would probably only get Republican support. Do you think it'll get unanimous Republican support the way it did in the committee? Probably not. I mean, I've talked to a lot of Republicans who have said taking up entitlement
Starting point is 00:07:13 reform and welfare reform after passing a massive tax cut is maybe not the best optics. Like, they're aware of what this looks like. You wouldn't think it in 2018, but snap, food stamps. They've got a bipartisan origin story. The United States wouldn't have food stamps were it not for Bob Dole. Bob Dole, not male, not female, not even human. Bob Dole, beam of pure energy. How about that? Never tires, never ages.
Starting point is 00:07:53 That's after the break. Okay, here we go. ZipRecruiter.com. Slash explain. Have you been to this website? Oh, yeah, I have. Okay, first thing go. ZipRecruiter.com. Slash explain. Have you been to this website? Oh, yeah, I have. Okay, first thing they're asking. There's a nice-looking lady.
Starting point is 00:08:12 How many employees do we have? Today Explained is a team of six. We're looking for our seventh, our intern, our summer intern. Our lucky seven. Your name. Hello. Today Explained. Email? TodayExplained at Vox.com.
Starting point is 00:08:24 Password? We could use my go-to password, which is Oh, that's a really good password. Yeah, right. How many jobs do you need to fill? Just one. Job title? Today Explained intern. Job location? Washington, D.C. Why work at this company? Creative freedom, exciting startup environment, and a cool little team of people making something fun and serious. Compensation range. Do you know how much you're making on this thing? Ah, $15 an hour.
Starting point is 00:08:51 $15 an hour? 40 hours a week. All right. ZipRecruiter.com slash explained. I've entered all of my credit card information. Should I click it? Yeah, click away. Drum roll.
Starting point is 00:09:02 Post my job now 100% satisfaction guaranteed. Complete! Whoa! We did it! We did it! My name is David Johnson. I live in Euclid, Ohio. I've been on SNAP off and on probably over 10 to 12 years.
Starting point is 00:09:37 I'm a veteran. Disability is my basic only source of income. So by the time I'm done paying all my utilities, gas, lights, rent, there's literally no money left. SNAP is a lifeline for me and my family. There's usually times during the month where I myself won't eat. I'll go up three or four days. I'll just drink water or liquid so that my wife and my children can have food. We are already struggling with what we have now. And if people get kicked out of SNAP, it would make it very difficult. You know, the people who make the guidelines for SNAP, they don't live my life. They have no idea what struggles that I have to go through to make it month to month.
Starting point is 00:10:27 Don't judge me until you walk a mile in my shoes. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firman. Right now, there's a partisan fight going down in Congress over SNAP, but food assistance used to be the kind of thing everyone could just agree on. Stacey Dean has been working on food assistance policy here in D.C. for a quarter century. The original program began during the Great Depression, and that's where we got the name stamps. Blue stamps and orange stamps were issued to low-income households so that they could go use them in their local grocery store to buy food with that. The modern version of the program is a creature of the late 60s and early 70s, part of the Great Society. There was a growing recognition in the
Starting point is 00:11:22 mid-60s by policymakers and the public of the extraordinary levels of poverty and hunger that we had in this country. What was going on in the 60s that led to sort of a heightened awareness of poverty and hunger? Well, you had a pretty amazing CBS documentary called Hunger in America that looked at pockets of hunger in different parts of the country. What do you tell your children when they come home and there is no food? That we haven't got anything to eat and we just have to lay down like that until the next day, see if we can find something to eat. Just come and drink some water and go to bed. I think that really shocked the country to see that we had levels of malnutrition akin to developing countries.
Starting point is 00:12:09 We also had Bobby Kennedy did the hunger tours. What we have here, of course, is a considerable amount of hunger. We have the children with distended stomachs, children as well as grownups suffering. And in response to that, Senator Dole, Republican from Kansas, Bob Dole, Bob Dole, Bob Dole and Senator McGovern, a Democrat from South Dakota, came together and helped to create SNAP as we know it today
Starting point is 00:12:39 as a strong federal response to say that whether you're a child that is born in Mississippi, here in D.C., or northern Minnesota, you should not go hungry. Your belly needs to be filled so that you have the same opportunity that kids in other communities do. How has the bipartisanship around SNAP and food stamps changed throughout the decades? There have been detours in the past. President Reagan proposed pretty deep cuts to food stamps and other programs in the safety net in the early 80s. Did he get them? He got some, and then many of them were rolled back. And then the 1996 welfare reform law included very deep cuts to SNAP and some other changes, many of which were reversed afterwards. Skipping ahead to 2018, how many people are on this program now? How big is it now?
Starting point is 00:13:29 One in eight Americans, one in four children. About two-thirds of recipients are children, elderly or disabled, and a little bit more than three-quarters of benefits go to households that include children. And is it urban, rural, everything, or is it more one or the other? Poverty and hunger is in every community. So it is rural, urban, suburban. People that you meet and work with, encounter every day are probably SNAP participants. And how long is someone typically on the program? It's about 10 months. For many people, it's transitional. They use the program once and they're off. And for others throughout their lives, when they're in and out of work, when they experience, let's say, again, a sick kid, just something happens where they need a little bit of help.
Starting point is 00:14:11 They may cycle on and off the program a few times over the course of their life. I'm curious what the step-by-step process to sign up for SNAP is. Let's say some fictional guy, Bob Snap, wants to sign up. How does he do it? Bob would go down to his local human services or welfare office and fill out a pretty lengthy form where he details who's in his household. So let's say for Bob, it's Bob and his two kids. And how much money he has coming in and how much money he's spending on things like rent and utilities. So they really dig in on that. They ask for a whole lot of evidence, give us pay stubs. And then they take a look at what his net income is. How much money does he
Starting point is 00:14:57 have left for food? And they calculate out his benefit. So it's a pretty rigorous review process. And then the local welfare office will be checking what Bob says against other databases. So if Bob's typical, he's going to get an average benefit, which will be about $1.40 per person per meal. And that benefit will be issued to him on a debit card. And he can go use that at one of the more than 200,000 stores in the country that take the benefit. There are restrictions on what he can buy with that card? Any kind of food is allowable except hot and prepared foods, which drives me as a mom nuts.
Starting point is 00:15:35 I thought that hot prepared chicken is a go-to for me. It's good. It's clutch. It does feel like that ought to be included. And Republicans are now pushing for these new work requirements. How would those really work? Chairman Conaway is saying that everyone between the ages of 18 through 59 who doesn't have a kid under six and isn't receiving a disability check. So this is sort of the able-bodied group. They've got to be working or in a job training program 20 hours a week. On the snap side, we believe that breaking this poverty cycle is really important.
Starting point is 00:16:06 Okay. That on its face sounds reasonable, but you're now asking millions of people every single month to reprove their status. So this month I worked an average of 21 hours a week. Okay. But next month, maybe my employer won't give me the hours or maybe I have a sick kid and I don't have paid leave. So I dropped down to an average of 17 hours. I've got to file paperwork and provide proof that that was beyond my control. And the state may say, we don't believe you. So you need to now go to job training those extra three to four hours a week to make up the difference. Yeah. I mean, I guess there's lots of variables there when you set some sort of standard like that. Like what if you're suffering from mental health issues and just can't get yourself in the place to go work 20 hours one week and then you have to file paperwork on top of that? It feels like it could be in a lot of circumstances even more crippling.
Starting point is 00:16:59 Yeah. How do you prove that every month? I think that's one group. But the group that I'm really surprised that they're making it so hard for are workers themselves. You know, a lot of workers have jobs where they don't control the hours that they get. People come to SNAP when they're unemployed. So instead of letting them go back out and find a job, as the evidence shows, the vast majority will, this is going to say, we're going to keep you busy 20 hours a week. Well, how does that help them get right back into the labor market? It's not informed by what's actually happening, which is most SNAP participants who can work do.
Starting point is 00:17:31 And that those that don't often have caregiving responsibilities or, as you said, health issues, asking them to fill out forms every month isn't going to resolve that. And is there evidence that SNAP works, like that it ushers people out of poverty? There was a pretty amazing, very rigorous study that took a look at kids who got SNAP when they were in utero or as infants and toddlers relative to those who didn't. And this occurred when the program was rolling out in the late 60s and early 70s. It looked at those kids as they grew up and they were adults. They had higher rates of high school completion. They had better overall health and higher rates of employment. What's the urgency? The last farm bill included a very comprehensive work demonstration pilot where they invested
Starting point is 00:18:18 $200 million in trying a whole bunch of different types of job training programs to see which ones worked with respect to employment outcomes and earnings. And the results of those aren't due back for another year or so. Okay. Why not just wait for that evidence to then inform what to do later? Why preempt that and jump ahead with a proposal that will affect millions of people that isn't well sufficiently funded and that's not based on the evidence. Something here that just doesn't quite coalesce then. It's strange that people are very much pro-feeding people and that this program has been around for almost a century and clearly, you know, isn't hurting anyone.
Starting point is 00:19:10 Right. But it's reasonable to debate in exchange for government assistance, what can the government ask of you? I worry a little bit that listeners might think that there's a partisan divide over work. Work is the most fundamental pathway out of poverty. Yeah. But we have a whole lot of folks in this country who don't have the skills or the access to those kinds of jobs. So what's the best way to tackle that? The fact that's missing is that there's an extraordinary amount of work on the part of people who are living in poverty. I mean, they are working. So how do we turn that into something that doesn't leave them in poverty anymore?
Starting point is 00:19:56 Special thanks today to Carolyn Newberry and the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. And one more thing. Today, a jury found Bill Cosby guilty on all counts of drugging and molesting a woman. It's actually the second time Cosby's been tried on these same counts. And he's been accused by many, many, many more women of similar crimes, drugging them, sexual assault, rape. We recently asked on this show if Cosby's accusers would be heard differently post Me Too. You can hear that episode by scrolling back to April 12th in your feeds.
Starting point is 00:20:31 This is Today Explained. You know, they say after you go to ZipRecruiter.com slash explained, post an intern position, you feel a certain euphoria because 80% of employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site in just one day. Oh, euphoria. Are you feeling it? This certain euphoria because 80% of employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site in just one day. Oh, euphoria. Are you feeling it? This is euphoria?
Starting point is 00:21:10 We've made it. I don't think I've ever felt euphoria before if this is euphoria. Welcome, ZipRecruiter.com slash explained. To the euphoric experience. To the new you. To the new me. Are you excited to see how many hits we get by tomorrow? I'll be checking it every 10 minutes.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.