Julia Belluz, May 25, 2017<\/p>\n
The Administration’s budget proposal would cut SNAP spending by a quarter.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s new budget proposal has been panned for its magical thinking<\/a> on economic growth and sloppy accounting errors<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of the big cuts proposed would also take a sledgehammer to a safety net program that\u2019s been remarkably effective.<\/p>\n The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has been helping keep Americans from going hungry since the 1960s. Formerly known as food stamps, the program began as a pilot under President John F. Kennedy in 1961<\/a> as part of the war on poverty. Today, SNAP is the biggest and most important nutrition assistance program: About 45 million Americans<\/a> living below the poverty line \u2014 nearly half of them children \u2014 rely on SNAP to purchase food.<\/p>\n If Trump had his way, though, the number of SNAP recipients would soon be drastically cut. The administration\u2019s first comprehensive budget proposal<\/a> would trim SNAP spending by $191 billion over the next decade \u2014 which is about a quarter of the program\u2019s funding. (The program costs the federal government $80 billion<\/a> a year, which is a large amount of money \u2014 but a relatively small fraction of the budget.)<\/p>\n This move shouldn\u2019t come as a major shock. Republican leaders like Mick Mulvaney<\/a> and Paul Ryan have long<\/a> viewed welfare programs like food stamps as ineffective, arguing that they discourage people in need from getting jobs. As Mulvaney said at a White House briefing on Monday, \u201cIf you are on food stamps and you are able-bodied, we need you to go to work,\u201d referring to stricter employment requirements the administration wants to add to SNAP.<\/p>\n So is SNAP actually ineffective? It\u2019s a well-explored question. A number of major studies have evaluated the program\u2019s impact, and they consistently show that SNAP delivers results on a range of problems, from improving health outcomes like diabetes to reducing the number of people who go hungry.<\/p>\n In fact, researchers who study poverty and food policy say throwing people off SNAP is a silly idea because it\u2019s one of the government programs that really works. As the Trump Administration\u2019s own Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said earlier this week of SNAP<\/a>, \u201cYou don\u2019t try to fix things that aren\u2019t broken.”<\/p>\n The research on food stamps impact is very positive–and not just on hunger<\/strong><\/p>\n SNAP is administered by the states, and low-income people who meet the eligibility criteria<\/a> get access to \u201cElectronic Benefits Transfer\u201d cards (which are essentially debit cards) with money that they can use to purchase food. The lower your income, the more benefit you get (up to a monthly maximum of $194 per month for individuals and $771 for a family of five).<\/p>\n So let\u2019s start with the low-hanging fruit: Does this system actually help people buy food and reduce the chances that they\u2019ll go hungry?<\/p>\n When researchers have looked at SNAP\u2019s effects on food insecurity (having too little or uncertain access to food), they\u2019ve found consistently positive effects. In a 2012 paper<\/a>, researchers found SNAP cut the prevalence of food insecurity by at least 13 percentage points. In another 2013 study<\/a>, researchers found exactly the same reduction in food insecurity when they studied variation in state-level policies that affect access to SNAP. Other studies<\/a> have found<\/a> the same association <\/a>between SNAP participation and a decreased risk of food insecurity, albeit by varying amounts.<\/p>\n SNAP has proven health benefits throughout life:<\/strong><\/p>\n But the program\u2019s effects have been shown to be broader than simply helping people buy food when they can\u2019t afford it.<\/p>\n In the 1960s and 1970s, food stamps were rolled out in different counties at different times \u2014 and researchers have used this variation as a natural experiment to examine the health impacts of SNAP. From improving birth weight to reducing obesity, food stamps were associated with a number of positive health effects.<\/p>\n In one paper, published in 2011 in the Review of Economics and Statistics<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> researchers found that SNAP decreased the risk of having babies who weigh too little<\/a> \u2014 a health outcome that\u2019s associated with a slew of complications, from breathing and neurological problems to infection. Specifically, the researchers found that pregnant moms who began getting food stamps three months before their deliveries had babies with healthier weights compared to the children of moms who didn\u2019t get SNAP. (The effect was particularly pronounced among black moms living in high-poverty areas.)<\/p>\n In a 2016 paper, in the American Economic Review,<\/em><\/a> researchers used the same county-level roll-out variation to see if they could find a link between access to food stamps early in life and health outcomes later. Here too they found SNAP was effective: \u201cAccess to food stamps in utero and in early childhood leads to significant reductions in metabolic syndrome conditions (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes) in adulthood.\u201d (There\u2019s a growing body of evidence<\/a> linking food insecurity to obesity \u2014 particularly among women \u2014 which helps explain this finding.)<\/p>\n SNAP lifts families out of poverty:<\/strong><\/p>\n SNAP has been associated with positive economic impacts, too. For people under the age of 65<\/a>, food stamps lift more people out of poverty than any other government program aside from the Earned Income Tax Credit. (For people over 65, Social Security is the most effective poverty alleviator.)<\/p>\n One of the researchers who has studied this effect<\/a>, James Ziliak of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky, said SNAP is also the most effective program at reducing deep poverty, which is families that live below half the poverty line. \u201cThe reason for the deep poverty difference is in order to get the Earned Income Tax Credit, you have to work. And those families who are in deep poverty, if they are working it tends to be a limited amount of work. So the SNAP program is most effective for that population.\u201d<\/p>\n According to a policy brief<\/a> from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin Madison, \u201cIn a typical year over the 1988\u20132011 period, SNAP lowers the poverty rate by 5% to 10%, and this effect is stronger in recessionary periods.\u201d On deep poverty, the effect was even bigger: \u201cOver the past two decades, the fraction of people living on incomes below one-half the poverty line is lowered by 10% to 20% by accounting for SNAP. In terms of the number affected, in 2011, roughly 4 million persons were lifted out of poverty and another 3.5 million were lifted out of deep poverty by SNAP benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n SNAP is an effective recession buffer:<\/strong><\/p>\n Again and again, researchers have found upticks in SNAP enrollment coinciding with recessions<\/a>, which is why food stamps are referred to \u201cautomatic stabilizers<\/a>.\u201d When the economy gets worse, more people enroll, helping them afford food; when the economy improves, they drop off the SNAP rolls.<\/p>\n You can see that association very clearly in this diagram: [Go to article link at bottom.]<\/p>\n The \u201cSNAP program is very responsive to recessions,\u201d Ziliak said. \u201cWhen you have a negative hit to your income, the SNAP program is there to provide that buffer against that income shock, allowing you to purchase food which frees up the other aspects of your budget to maintain costs.\u201d<\/p>\n In the last recession, SNAP did what it was supposed to do: More people signed up for the program. That rate has been coming down since then \u2014 but not as quickly as some people thought it would, a fact researchers attribute to the nature of work today<\/a>. People may not have regular hours, or they have a smaller hourly wages, which means they still sometimes need assistance buying food.<\/p>\n \u201cAs more and more go back to work because the economy\u2019s recovered, they\u2019re still getting (low) wages, and food stamps and Medicaid have come to supplement those bad wages, and bad benefits,\u201d said Jim Weill of the Food Research and Action Center<\/a>. \u201cSo these proposals [to cut] Medicaid and food stamps as well as the other programs really pull the rug out from under working poor families.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s also research demonstrating that SNAP helps people redirect<\/a> money previously spent on food to other essential expenses, keeping people from falling behind on medical bills, rent and utilities.<\/p>\n SNAP doesn\u2019t discourage people from working: <\/strong><\/p>\n One oft-repeated Republican party line is that benefits like SNAP discourage people from working. But according to the researchers who study SNAP, there\u2019s no good evidence that it acts as a work disincentive<\/a>. In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities<\/a> points out, the majority of non-disabled, working-age households that start to get SNAP don\u2019t actually stop working.<\/p>\n Craig Gundersen<\/a>, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois who studies SNAP, explained why in the Washington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n What makes SNAP perfect is that the tax on each additional dollar of income is 24 cents. There\u2019s not a disincentive to work, except insofar as all taxes are disincentives to work. And I don\u2019t think that 24 percent is a high tax rate in this context.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also no cliff effect with respect to SNAP, because as your income increases, your benefits gradually go down.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There\u2019s also little waste and fraud in the program. Some 95 percent of federal dollars spent<\/a> on SNAP go directly to benefits. The USDA also takes SNAP abuse very seriously<\/a>, which is why the rate of SNAP fraud has declined dramatically over the years.<\/p>\n Will SNAP cuts go anywhere?<\/strong><\/p>\n Trump\u2019s budget proposal is not likely to go very far<\/a>, as Vox\u2019s Dylan Matthews explained. And the cuts to SNAP in particular may see some particularly strong opposition.<\/p>\n SNAP is part of the farm bill, and part of the program\u2019s original intent was to support the production of food in this country. The agriculture and food industries like SNAP since it increases the demand for food. And so that\u2019s two powerful lobbying groups that are going to push back against cuts that\u2019ll shrink the size of the program.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the political fallout to consider. Food stamps are disproportionately popular among Trump voters. As Politico\u2019s Helena Bottemiller Evich pointed out<\/a>, \u201cSeven of the 10 states with the highest rates of SNAP participation relative to population \u2014 including Mississippi, West Virginia and Louisiana \u2014 went for Trump in November.\u201d<\/p>\n The proposal is also expected to rile up anti-hunger campaigners whose support is needed to pass the farm bill. \u201cSNAP is the only thing that\u2019s left of the safety net. And there\u2019s so much evidence that it\u2019s an inadequate safety net,\u201d food policy professor Marion Nestle said. \u201cYou don\u2019t want social unrest like you had in revolutionary France. You don\u2019t want people starving.\u201d<\/p>\n\n