An Urban's Rural View

Judged by its budget, USDA should be USDF: United States Department of Food. Some 70% of USDA's $154 billion budget goes to nutrition programs like food stamps, which nearly 48 million Americans receive.

And food stamps occupy a privileged position as mandatory spending. When the $85 billion federal-budget cut known as "sequestration" kicked in, some farm programs were trimmed. Food stamps were exempt. When Congress takes up farm bill legislation again, there will be a tussle over where the cuts cut deepest -- food stamps or farm programs.

For many reasons, then, farmers have an outsized interest in the food stamp program and might find an article that puts the program in perspective interesting. Check out The Wall Street Journal's, "Use of Food Stamps Swells Even as Economy Improves" (http://tiny.cc/…).

A sluggish job market and rising poverty rate are the main reasons, the Journal says, for the 70% increase in food-stamp recipients since 2008. Many of those who lost jobs have had a hard time finding new ones, or have had to take low-paying employment.

A strong supporting reason, though, is the relaxation by states, encouraged by the federal government, of rules for qualifying for the benefit: Recipients get more than they used to, can keep receiving benefits longer and, in 43 states, are eligible even if they have more than $5,000 in savings.

The thinking behind the relaxation was plausible. Making people wait until they're absolutely destitute before they can receive benefits would actually make it harder for them to get back to work.

"Policy makers," the Journal reports, "wanted to allow newly poor families, such as those where the breadwinner was temporarily unemployed, to have enough money to put gas in the cars and pay phone bills -- two necessities for finding and retaining jobs."

Still, critics would like to change the program radically. Paul Ryan, the Republican chair of the House Budget Committee, has proposed turning the program into a block grant to the states, which would mean cuts.

According to the Journal, Ryan has said, or anti-poverty programs generally: "Do we have an economic policy of social mobility, of upward mobility? Are we attacking poverty at the root causes, or are we simply merely treating the symptoms of poverty to make it, you know, easier to tolerate and therefore perpetuate?"

No newspaper article covers every aspect of anything, and this one doesn't delve into the other problem critics have attacked in the food-stamps program: fraud. USDA says it's only 1% but admits that 1% of a bigger program means more fraud. The critics think the fraud rate is higher.

Still, the article is worth a look because the controversy is likely to remain with us. With poverty on the rise and benefit levels expanded, the Journal says, the program will not just wither away as the unemployment rate falls. "The Congressional Budget Office predicts unemployment will drop to 5.6% by 2017 but that SNAP enrollment will drop slightly to 43.3 million people, down 4.5 million from the current level."

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