Doctors Slam Proposed Food Stamp Cuts: ‘The Dumbest Thing You Can Do Is Cut Nutrition’

BY SY MUKHERJEE/Think Progress

Doctors have a message for congressional lawmakers inching toward a compromise farm bill that would cut food stamps by nine billion dollars: It’s a terrible idea.

“If you’re interested in saving health care costs, the dumbest thing you can do is cut nutrition,” Dr. Deborah Frank of Boston Medical Center explained in an interview with the Associated Press. “People don’t make the hunger-health connection.”

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) offers benefits to over 47 million Americans. But the benefit level has fallen to the point that recipients only get about $1.40 per person per meal, even though food stamps often constitute the entirety of a family’s food budget. Doctors and researchers say that additional cuts on the horizon could increase the incidence of medical problems stemming in part from food insecurity, particularly diabetes and its related conditions.

For instance, a 2013 study by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that House Republican proposals to slash food stamps would increase national health costs for diabetes treatment by $15 billion over a decade. Those costs would disproportionately affect Medicaid, since the public insurance program for the poor — who are considerably more likely to have type 2 diabetes — covers an outsize portion of diabetes spending.

A separate study published this week in the journal Health Affairs illustrates the effect that food insecurity can have on poor Americans’ health in concrete terms. Researchers found that the number of poor Americans being admitted to the hospital because of hypoglycemia — a sharp drop in blood sugar that can be a complication for people with type 2 diabetes — rose by 27 percent in the last week of a month as compared to the first week, since these low-income individuals began to run out of money to spend on food. Wealthier Americans did not experience an analogous spike.

“These findings suggest that exhaustion of food budgets might be an important driver of health inequities,” concluded the study authors.

The food stamp cuts could be particularly harmful for low-income diabetics who live in red states refusing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Researchers from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that uninsured Americans with diabetes are significantly less likely to have a regular source of medical care, to have had a check-up in the past two years, to have access to urgent medical care, and pay almost ten times more out-of-pocket to treat their diabetes than diabetics with Medicaid coverage.

Many of the Republican-led states rejecting the Medicaid expansion have some of the highest rates of diabetes in the country — and the coming SNAP cuts could mean more of them ending up in the hospital without the means to pay for their treatment.

O'Reilly And Rivera Continue Fox Tradition Of Demonizing The Poor

OLIVIA MARSHALL/Media Matters For America:

Fox hosts Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera cited a U.S. census study which found that many poor Americans own appliances to paint entitlement recipients as lazy or unwilling to work. This analysis ignores the fact that 9 out of 10 Americans receiving entitlements are elderly, disabled, or were members of working households.

On the September 12 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly and Rivera claimed that government benefits are creating a disincentive for work. Rivera concluded that "it's one thing to be poor in India or even Mexico, it's another thing to be poor, according to these statistics, in the United States":

O'Reilly's attempt to demonize poor Americans as lazy, comfortable, or unwilling to work mischaracterizes the vast majority of Americans who receive benefits. According to a 2012 report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), 9 out of 10 Americans receiving entitlement benefits were either elderly, seriously disabled, or members of a working household in 2010:

91 percent of the benefit dollars from entitlement and other mandatory programs went to the elderly (people 65 and over), the seriously disabled, and members of working households.  People who are neither elderly nor disabled -- and do not live in a working household -- received only 9 percent of the benefits. 

Moreover, the vast bulk of that 9 percent goes for medical care, unemployment insurance benefits (which individuals must have a significant work history to receive), Social Security survivor benefits for the children and spouses of deceased workers, and Social Security benefits for retirees between ages 62 and 64.  Seven out of the 9 percentage points go for one of these four purposes. 

O'Reilly's segment on poverty in American also dismissed a September 3 report which found that income inequality is wider than it has been in almost a century. Rivera acknowledged the report but downplayed its findings, reasoning that government entitlements create a disincentive for the poor to work and "bootstrap themselves." 

Contrary to O'Reilly and Rivera's claims, the CBPP also notes that the safety net has become more work-based, as the United States has significantly reduced assistance to the jobless poor and increased assistance to low-income working families. Programs like SNAP, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and Medicaid have done much more to promote work over the last 30 years.  For example, the EITC has boosted employment among single mothers and has produced large declines in the number of single mothers receiving welfare.

This dishonest depiction of entitlement recipients is the latest example of Fox's longstanding tradition of maligning the poor. 

GOP Rams Farm Bill Without Food Stamps Through The House

By Alan Pyke and Andrew Breiner/Think Progress

With Thursday’s vote to sever food stamps funding from the federal spending that guarantees the agricultural industry a baseline income, conservatives in the U.S. House achieved a longstanding goal. The GOP has pressed to undermine or outright end food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) for years, as the ThinkProgress timeline below shows.

But Republicans appeared to realize that their long-awaited policy triumph invited Democratic criticism before the C-SPAN cameras.

Rep. Rob Woodall (R-GA) used a parliamentary tactic to silence Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL) after the Democrat said “Shame on the Republicans” in her remarks. Brown was baffled when the acting chairman told her to sit down, and her colleagues noted the Republican proclivity for attacking Democrats by name. After several minutes Woodall dropped his objection. (His office confirmed he had objected but declined to comment on his reasoning.) Brown finished her remarks with a reference to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, saying “you-all do not care about the 47 percent.”

UPDATE

Watch the Woodall-Brown episode:

A senior Democratic leadership aide told ThinkProgress that the majority enforced unusually strict rules throughout the day on how Democrats could voice their arguments on the floor.

Eventually, the House voted 216-208 to approve the food stamps-free farm bill, in a culmination of years of work to constrict and undermine the program. From President Bush’s veto of a food aid funding increase in mid-2008 to Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budgets that would cut the program by more than a hundred billion dollars, the GOP has sought to curb food stamps for years:

SNAP kept 4.7 million families out of poverty in 2011 alone. It has one of the lowest fraud rates of any federal program, and with a return of nearly $2 for every dollar spent it is one of the most efficient ways the government can spend money to help people. Experts say severing the program from the farm bill exposes it to being neglected or gutted.

Meanwhile, the farm bill conservatives approved Thursday guarantees that farm owners – most of them large corporations rather than family farmers – receive federal payments in any year the price of their produce falls below certain thresholds. In many cases the thresholds are near or even above 100 percent of the previous year’s prices. In effect, the House bill guarantees it will always be profitable to grow sushi rice, while leaving poor Americans’ access to food assistance unprotected.

How Right-Wing Media Assisted Food Stamp Removal From Farm Bill

JOHN KERR & ALBERT KLEINE/Media Matters For America

House Republicans reportedly plan to remove food stamp funding from the federal farm bill, a move that stands to further jeopardize the survival of the critical anti-poverty program. This move comes after years of right-wing media figures demonizing food stamp recipients as lazy or dependent, with Rush Limbaugh going so far as to propose dumpster diving as an alternative.

Here's a look back at some of the most egregious right-wing attacks on food stamps:

GOP Push To Split Farm Bill Leaves Food Stamps Vulnerable To Severe Cuts

By Alan Pyke/Think Progress

A House Republican scheme to strip food stamp funding out of the farm bill would lead to the program being weakened or even outright dismantled, according to poverty experts. Reports indicate that GOP leaders are having trouble finding the votes to support a split farm bill so far, but the tens of millions of Americans who rely on food stamps would be at risk should the political winds shift.

“Splitting the farm bill is the wrong approach,” according to Dottie Rosenbaum, a Senior Policy Analyst specializing in food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It would not only end the long-standing, bipartisan practice of bringing together supporters of agriculture and food assistance programs to produce more sound policy,” she told ThinkProgress, “but it has the potential to force cuts to food assistance even deeper and more harmful than those already rejected by the House.”

Those cuts – $20.5 billion over a decade, largely from changes to eligibility rules that would kick 2 million poor Americans off the food aid rolls – meant the House’s original farm bill faced a narrow path to passage. Many Democrats were reportedly ready to hold their noses on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts and support the full package. ButRepublican leaders killed the bill by endorsing a last-minute amendment they knew Democrats couldn’t tolerate. After the bill failed, with dozens of Republicans who’d voted for the amendment that chased Democrats away still opposing the final vote, House leaders opted not to return to a version of the bill that could pass. Instead, they began exploring splitting the bill up.

“Splitting the Farm Bill is an act of political gamesmanship that leaves SNAP vulnerable to attack or outright neglect from Congress,” said Joy Moses, Senior Policy Analyst for the Center for American Progress’ Poverty and Prosperity Program. An action alert sent Tuesday night from the Food Research and Action Center, the national anti-hunger advocacy group that sponsors the “SNAP Challenge,” agreed that the plan “seems to be one more attempt to harm SNAP.”

Moses added that while “we recognize that the needs of food insecure Americans should stand alone in being critically important, the blending together of multiple interests has led to positive outcomes in the past.” Indeed, the decades-long linkage of the farm bill’s anti-poverty components and agricultural subsidy programs has helped protect SNAP from some of the “reform” efforts that have damaged other anti-poverty programs. The amendment that killed the bill in June was designed to replicate some of those failed reforms in the SNAP program. If food assistance is sliced out of the legislation, it would become even more vulnerable to such ill-advised changes.

Conservatives say SNAP is a troubled program in need of some tough love. But in fact it has one of the lowest fraud rates of any federal program, despite being among the largest. The agricultural subsidies component of the farm bill actually has a higher rate of erroneous payments than does SNAP. Furthermore, the vast majority of food stamp recipients who are able to work do so.

The program kept 4.7 million families out of poverty in 2011 alone, thereby juicing economic growth for the nation as a whole. The food charities conservatives expect to pick up the slack from food stamp cuts say they lack the resources to do so.

Limbaugh: Being Unemployed "Is Not What It Used To Be" Because They Have "Flat-Screens And Food"

From the July 8 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:

 

 

 

 

 

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North Carolina Senate blocks testing themselves when passing welfare drug testing bill

By David Edwards/Raw Story

Republicans in the North Carolina state Senate on Monday pushed through bill that would strip public benefits like food stamps and job training for people who fail a drug test.

In 35-15 vote largely along party lines, senators passed SB 594. A single Democrat voted for the bill, and no Republicans voted against it.

The bill requires those applying for benefits to pay for their own drug tests. Applicants who test negative would be eligible to have the costs of their tests reimbursed. The policy could cost the state more than $2.1 million.

At the same time, senators rejected an amendment offered by Democratic state Sen. Gladys Robinson that would have drug tested lawmakers, the governor and cabinet secretaries.

“We receive state funds, we represent the law, we institute policy,” Robinson told senators on Monday night. “So, it should not be above any of us to submit to drug screening.”

Republican State Sen. Jim Davis said that he did not mind being tested, but insisted that he would vote against the amendment because it had no mechanism to provide him with a reimbursement for the $100 test.

Instead of voting on Robinson’s amendment, state Senator Tom Apodaca (R) used a substitute amendment as a parliamentary maneuver to kill the the proposal.

“The substitute amendment is offered to have the affect of killing the other amendment,” Democratic state Sen. Martin Nesbitt explained in a floor speech. “You need to know that before you vote because you’ll be killing the one that requires a drug test of the leaders of this state since we want to require it for the followers of this state.”

“And we seem to be getting into a situation where where we’re kind above the people,” he added. “Kind of looking down on them, telling them what to do or telling them to be quiet while we talk, and I just sense that it keeps on going.”

Watch this video from WRAL, uploaded April 22, 2013.

8-year-old follows Tenn. lawmaker around Capitol until he drops welfare bill

By David Edwards/Raw Story

A Tennessee lawmaker has relented and agreed to drop his bill linking academic performance to the family’s welfare benefits after an 8-year-old girl shamed him by following him around the state Capitol.

On his way to vote on Thursday, state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) was confronted by 8-year-old homeschooler Aamira Fetuga, who presented him with a petition signed by people opposing his welfare bill, according to the Tennessean. Nearby, a choir of about 60 activists sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

“You are so weak, to not listen to a child,” a parent said as Campfield walked away with the girl following.

“Why do you want to cut benefits for people?” 8-year-old Fetuga asked after she caught up with him on a Capitol escalator.

“Well, I wouldn’t as long as the parent shows up to school and goes to two parent-teacher conferences and they’re exempt,” the state Senator explained.

The confrontation continued during what appeared to be long, uncomfortable walk to the Senate floor for Campfield.

“Using children as props is shameful,” he grumbled at one point.

But the protest tactics may have worked because Campfield decided to withdraw the bill before Thursday’s vote after several other former supporters began to express doubts.

“You can say that withholding the money from the parents doesn’t harm the child, but you’re fooling yourself,” Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R) pointed out.

Under Campfield’s bill, families could have lost up to 30 percent of welfare benefits from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program if a child did not attend school regularly and make “satisfactory academic progress.”

Campfield, however, said he was not giving up on the idea. He asked the state Senate to further study the bill, giving him the opportunity to bring it back up next year.

“To me, it’s not a dead issue at all,” he told reporters. “This may be a slight detour, but honestly I think this could hopefully make it even better.”

As for the protests, Campfield remarked, “It is what it is.”

“There’s always going to be detractors.”

Watch this video from The Tennessean, broadcast April 12, 2013.

Cable News Obsessively Covers Cuts To White House Tours, Virtually Ignores Cuts To Programs For The Poor

By Aviva Shen and Adam Peck/Think Progress 

Thanks to Congressional gridlock, automatic budget cuts took effect 14 days ago, threatening 700,000 jobs and gutting fundsfor vital programs in housing assistance, early childhood education, disaster relief, and national security. Secret Service staffing was also impacted, prompting the cancellation of White House tours last week. Republicans immediately attacked the decision as a political move designed to turn the public against the sequester and 14 Republican senators signed a letter demanding information.

The media has also latched on to preserve the White House tours, while largely ignoring other much more devastating sequester cuts. As Ari Melber of The Nation pointed out on Wednesday, there are 12,000 news stories concerning White House tours and less than 1,000 about the sequester’s impact on housing assistance programs, which disproportionately affect low-income Americans.

ThinkProgress examined this trend on three major cable news networks — Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC — since March 6. White House tours were mentioned 33 times as often (Fox News had 163 segments, CNN had 59, and MSNBC had 42) as mentions of other sequester impacts hitting the poor. Any discussion of sequestration’s steep cuts to housing assistance, food stamps, and Head Start early education was virtually nonexistent on all 3 networks in the same time frame. Fox News mentioned Head Start three times, ignoring housing and food stamps entirely; MSNBC mentioned Head Start 4 times, food stamps once, and did not cover housing assistance cuts at all. CNN stayed completely silent on all three issues:

While covering budget cuts, cable news channels have also largely avoided discussing military tuition assistance programs, which were suspended by the Marine Corps and the Army shortly after sequestration. CNN and MSNBC each mentioned the cuts to tuition assistance once since March 6, while Fox News took the lead with 11 segments.

The media’s silence on the most brutal sequester cuts is well in line with the fourth estate’s normal approach to poverty. During the 2012 presidential campaign, just .2 percent of campaign coverage by major TV, radio, and print outlets addressed poverty in any substantive way. More recently, the media mostly ignored the effects of spending cuts in the so-called “fiscal cliff” at the end of 2012, preferring to discuss tax hikes instead.

In response to the highly publicized backlash over White House tours, Obama is now signallingsome tours may resume.

Tenn. lawmaker: Cut parent’s welfare benefits if child gets poor grades

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story

Tennessee State Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) on Tuesday defended his proposal to tie a family’s welfare benefits to their children’s academic success.

“We have a three legged stool for education,” he explained on MSNBC. “One part is the school, one part the teacher, and one part the family. Probably the most important part is the family.”

“Unfortunately we have some families who really don’t care about education, who don’t care if their kids get an education or stay in school, and what we are saying is, if your kid is quitting school, not showing up, showing up at 11 o’clock in his pajamas, that’s not a prepared kid to get an education,” Campfield continued. “We need to do something to motivate these parents to see how important an education is, and unfortunately, the only tool we have left is this cash payment that we make to these families.”

Under current law, parents can lose up to 20 percent of their benefits from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program if a child does not attend school. Campfield’s bill would increase the penalty to 30 percent and require children to make “satisfactory academic progress” in school. The TANF program is aimed at helping poor families pay for living expenses such as rent, heat, utilities and personal care items.

“Like I said, I don’t want these kids to be rocket scientists,” Campfield said. “I don’t want them to split the atom. Listen, passing a grade is not too high a standard. To say, ‘Listen, if your kid shows up at school at 11 o’clock in your pajamas, that kid is not ready for school.’ Families have to take a responsibility for having the kids prepared to go to school.”

Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:

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Louisiana GOP Governor Suggests Eliminating Corporate Tax, Paid For By Taxing The Poor

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) wants to eliminate both his state’s income tax and its corporate income tax, giving a big gift to the richest Louisianians and the state’s businesses. And he may pay for it by hiking the state’s sales tax, which will disproportionately hurt Louisiana’s poorest residents:

Gov. Bobby Jindal is proposing to eliminate Louisiana’s income and corporate taxes and pay for those cuts with increased sales taxes, the governor’s office confirmed Thursday. The governor’s office has not yet provided the details of the plan. [...]

Jindal said the plan would be revenue-neutral and that the goal would be to keep sales taxes “as low and flat as possible.”

The governor’s office has not yet confirmed or denied an article in The Monroe News-Star that reports eliminating the state income tax could require increasing the state sales tax from 4 percent to 7 percent.

Because low- and middle-income workers tend to spend all or most of their income, a sales tax hits them the hardest. And Louisiana’s tax system is already tilted towards the richest residents, with the richest 1 percent having a tax rate that is half the rate paid by the poorest 15 percent, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

As the Brookings Institution’s William Gale explained, “if you move the tax from income to consumption, you’re raising the relative burden on low savers, which are low and moderate income households, so almost any revenue neutral shift from the income tax to a consumption tax will be regressive in that manner.” Under the proposal, “some may benefit, some may lose,” said Senate President John Alario (R).

Billionaire Businessman Says Government Assistance For The Poor Makes People Lazy

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

During an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, businessman Sam Zell — whose net worth is nearly $4 billion — claimed that government benefits are “disincentivizing” struggling Americans from wanting to succeed. After questions by CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, Zell blamed increasing income inequality and America’s lack of economic mobility on health care reform, tax credits for low-income workers, and unemployment benefits:

ZELL:The reality is as follows: the whole focus has been on how the, quote, one percenters, the 10 percenters, whatever these top earners have moved ahead of everybody. I wonder if there’s any correlation between while they were moving ahead, the rest of the government was subsidizing, subsidizing more and more people and disincentivizing them. Why is it always assumed that somebody doesn’t succeed because he can’t, as opposed to he doesn’t want to, or isn’t incentivized to. [...]

SORKIN: There’s no suggestion, at least that I’ve heard, that the reason why people have had a harder time rising through the ranks today is a function of the fact that they’re disincentivized to rise through the ranks.

ZELL: Wait a minute. I think that they are disincentivized by, in effect, if you don’t have to pay for your health care, that’s another thing you don’t have to worry about…For every step contributing to the progress at the top, there’s an additional step on the bottom to increase the earned income [tax credit], to extend unemployment insurance for 28 years.

Watch it:

Both Zell and CNBC co-host Joe Kernen claimed that Europe proves their point of view, saying that the European populace has “learned helplessness” due to government, rather than learning to succeed. However, economic mobility is actually higher in many European countries(with large social safety nets) than it is here in the U.S., where “65 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths as adults, while 62 percent of those born in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths.” It is growing income inequality, spurred by policies that benefit those at the very top of the income scale, that is killing economic mobility.

Meanwhile, as ThinkProgress reported, the lion’s share of tax breaks actually go to the richest Americans, not to those in the middle or bottom of the income scale. The bottom 60 percent of earners only garner 20 percent of the total tax breaks. Zell’s Tribune Company benefited from some of these breaks, saving $1.8 billion by filing taxes as an “S corporation,” rather than paying the full corporate income tax rate.

Targeting the poor with GOP budgets

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Huckabee: Welfare changes show government wants to own people

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) on Tuesday decried changes to the Temporary Assistant for Needy Families (TANF) law, claiming the Obama administration was trying to make Americans more dependent on the government.

“It’s basically just a transfer of money from the taxpayer to the government, from the government to people who become beneficiaries of the government, because that way the government can own these people,” Huckabee said on Fox and Friends, according to Politico. “It is a trap, and it is like the roach motel. Once you get in, but you never get out.”

The TANF program — which helps poor families with children pay for living expenses such as rent, heat, utilities and personal care items — requires those receiving payments to be employed or looking for work. Nearly four million Americans currently receive TANF payments.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last week encouraged states to experiment with better ways to administer the program, informing officials that the department was willing to grant waivers to states that wished to opt-out of the work-requirement provision of the welfare law.

“When the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program was established as part of welfare reform in the 1990s, it was intended to give states flexibility to design effective programs to help parents move from welfare to work,” George Sheldon, acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, said. “Today, however, Federal rules dictate mind-numbing details about how to run a welfare-to-work program. Most States and experts agree that these aren’t helpful.”

Two states with Republican governors, Utah and Nevada, have already asked for waivers. California, Connecticut, and Minnesota have also asked about waivers, according to the HHS.

Huckabee claimed the waivers were illegal because they circumvented Congress. He also said the waivers would allow poor families to get “paid for essentially getting a massage.”

House Committee Votes To Take Food Stamps Away From Millions Of Low-Income Americans

By Zack Beauchamp/Think Progress

Today, the House Agriculture Committee approved the final version of the 2012 farm bill, complete with its draconian cuts for families struggling to put food on the table. The proposed bill cuts $35 billion from the federal food and nutrition budget, about $16.5 billion of which come from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — more commonly known as SNAP or food stamps.

The cuts work by eliminating “categorical eligibility,” which provides assistance to families whose assets or income put them slightly above the technical line for SNAP eligibility. Repealing categorical eligibility means that between two and three million Americans will lose access to food stamps and roughly 280,000 children will drop out of their automatic enrollment in the free lunch program at school. So the House bill has anti-hunger advocates up in arms:

“With the economy being in such bad shape, depriving that many people of nutritional assistance is going to have a devastating effect,” said Eric Olsen, [Feeding Hunger]’s senior vice president of government relations and public policy.

One needs simply to look to the story of Dorothy Moon, a stay-at-home mother in Texas whodepends on food stamps to feed her six children while her male partner looks for new work, to understand Olsen’s point. Of course, some in the GOP want to ignore “sob stories” about the plight of people who struggle to put food on the table.

SNAP assistance saved five million American from poverty in 2010 and halved the number of children in poverty in 2011.

Sen. Rand Paul: We’re giving food stamps to millionaires

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Wednesday called for an overhaul of the SNAP program — which provides food stamps — by requiring states to determine how they ration benefits instead of the federal government.

“Our system of helping ensure that no one goes hungry in our country is a noble one, but we’re now asking to spend $750 billion on food stamps,” he said on the Senate floor. “When we ask this, we need to remember that recently a woman in Chicago faked the birth of triplets in order to receive $21,000 in food stamps.”

“We need to remember that millionaires, including Larry Ficke, who won $2 million, are still receiving food stamps because he says he has got no income. He has got $2 million but no income.” 

Last year, Ficke won $2 million from the Michigan lottery, but was still allowed to collect food stamps because of a loophole.

“So we’re paying millionaires food stamps,” Paul added. “It’s out of control. It’s not about helping those in need. It’s about being wise with the taxpayer dollars and not giving people $20,000 a year in food stamps.”

Paul offered an amendment to the farm bill that would convert the SNAP program into block grants, requiring states to administer the program. The amendment would have cut $280 billion over the next decade by freezing annual funding at $45 billion, according to Paul. The amendment failed by a 65-33 vote.

The farm bill already proposes a $4.5 billion cut to the SNAP program over the next 10 years. The cuts would result in an average benefit cut of $90 per month for nearly a half a million households, according to Congressional Budget Office.

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube on June 13, below: