Paul Krugman: Free to Be Hungry

Why do conservatives want to reduce funding for the food stamp program?:

Free to Be Hungry, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: ...Conservatives ... have just voted to cut sharply ... the food stamp program — or, to use its proper name, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)... Conservatives are deeply committed to the view that the size of government has exploded under President Obama but face the awkward fact that public employment is down sharply, while overall spending has been falling fast as a share of G.D.P. SNAP, however, really has grown a lot,... from 26 million Americans in 2007 to almost 48 million now.

Conservatives look at this and see what, to their great disappointment, they can’t find elsewhere..., explosive growth in a government program. ...

The recent growth of SNAP has indeed been unusual, but then so have the times... Multiple careful economic studies have shown that the economic downturn explains the great bulk of the increase in food stamp use. And ... food stamps have at least mitigated the hardship, keeping millions of Americans out of poverty. ...

But, say the usual suspects, the recession ended in 2009. Why hasn’t recovery brought the SNAP rolls down? The answer is, while ... the income of the top 1 percent rose 31 percent from 2009 to 2012,... the real income of the bottom 40 percent actually fell 6 percent. Why should food stamp usage have gone down?

Still, is SNAP..., as Paul Ryan ... puts it, an example of turning the safety net into “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”

One answer is, some hammock: last year, average food stamp benefits were $4.45 a day. Also, about those “able-bodied people”: almost two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries are children, the elderly or the disabled, and most of the rest are adults with children.

Beyond that, however, you might think that ensuring adequate nutrition for children, which is a large part of what SNAP does, actually makes it less, not more likely that those children will be poor and need public assistance when they grow up. And that’s what the evidence shows. ...

SNAP, in short, is public policy at its best. ... So it tells you something that conservatives have singled out this of all programs for special ire.

Even some conservative pundits worry that the war on food stamps, especially combined with the vote to increase farm subsidies, is bad for the G.O.P., because it makes Republicans look like meanspirited class warriors. Indeed it does. And that’s because they are.