One million adults to lose Food Stamps this year
Jan 05, 2015 4:16pm PST by gjohnsit Comment_large 104 135

Here are the first 1 million casualties of the GOP take-over.

Roughly 1 million of the nation’s poorest people will be cut off SNAP (formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) over the course of 2016, due to the return in many areas of a three-month limit on SNAP benefits for unemployed adults aged 18-50 who aren’t disabled or raising minor children. These individuals will lose their food assistance benefits after three months regardless of how hard they are looking for work.

That sounds pretty bad, but the real knee-to-the-groin is a couple paragraphs below.

The loss of this food assistance, which averages approximately $150 to $200 per person per month for this group, will likely cause serious hardship among many. Agriculture Department (USDA) data show that the individuals subject to the three-month limit have average monthly income of approximately 19 percent of the poverty line, and they typically qualify for no other income support.

That’s not 19% below the poverty line.
That’s 19% of the poverty line, or 81%below the poverty line.
These people will go hungry. Period.

Under the 1996 welfare law, adults aged 18-49 who are not physically or mentally unfit for work or caring for a minor child are ineligible for SNAP if they have received three months of SNAP benefits while unemployed during the previous 36 months. Months of SNAP receipt don’t count toward the limit if the individual is working at least half-time, participating in qualifying work or training program activities for at least 20 hours a week, or living in an area with high unemployment where the three-month limit is temporarily waived. When signing the welfare law in 1996, President Clinton singled out this as one of the bill’s most harmful provisions and called for it to be substantially changed.

The reason for so many people losing food stamps is because most states were granted federal waivers during the Great Recession. Those waivers are now expiring.
Kansas and Oklahoma were so eager to cut off food for the poor that they’ve moved to the head of the line. We can see what that did.

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Truthout does the kind of deep digging behind the scenes investigative journalism that used to be the heart of our strong democracy.

Tho many of today’s headlines are harsh on Republicans;Truthout has castigated corrupt and bad behaving Dems quite often so I don’t think they are a really partisan source. The Reps just happened to be the idiots of the week this week:-/

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