On Thursday, the mainstream media once again marched in lockstep, ripping the Trump administration and accusing them of harboring ill will toward food stamp recipients, as the media parroted the line that the administration was cutting the number of food stamp recipients by 700,000.
The New York Times wrote:
The Trump administration, brushing aside tens of thousands of protest letters, gave final approval on Wednesday to a rule that will remove nearly 700,000 people from the federal food-stamp program by strictly enforcing federal work requirements. The rule, which was proposed by the Agriculture Department in February, would press states to carry out work requirements for able-bodied adults without children that governors have routinely been allowed to waive, especially for areas in economic distress.
The Washington Post iterated:
Republicans are all about boosting economic growth, so they say. Eking out a few extra bucks of economic activity is their top priority — more important than, say, curbing illness and death (hence, looser water pollution standards, fewer slaughterhouse inspections) or even reducing deficits (hence, those budget-busting tax cuts).
Unless it comes to punishing poor people. In which case, even the economy has to take a back seat. Just in time for Christmas, the Trump administration finalized the first of three new rules requiring more people to go hungry. This first rule will dump about 700,000 Americans from the food stamp rolls (officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) by tightening work requirements.
Yet here’s what the articles do not emphasize: the policy espoused by the Trump administration simply asks childless adults between the ages of 18-49 who are able to work spend 20 hours a week working. A 2017 Heritage Foundation poll found that 92% of respondents felt that able-bodied adults who receive cash, food, housing, and medical assistance should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving those government benefits.
White House Acting Director of the Office of management and Budget Russ Vought told Fox Business,
One of the most important things you can do is get people back to work; there’s a dignity in work. When you get people off of welfare programs and you get them back to work, their incomes can double and triple. Studies show that. What this administration wants to do is increase the labor participation rate in this country, and we want to enforce the law and we want to make sure that welfare is there for those people who need it. And for those who are using welfare an can work at the same time, we want them to get back into the labor force, have jobs, and get out of the cycle of dependency.
Vought continued, “All we’re asking the program to do is to have people who can work, able-bodied adults without dependents … we want those individuals to be able to get back into the work force and to have jobs and become a producer in this country.” After Fox Business’ Charles Payne pointed out that the U.S. economy “needs half a million manufacturing workers, 60,000 welders, and a whole lot of other jobs; seven million open jobs,” Vought responded, “When we talk about a work requirement, included in that is job training programs, job searching. So the notion of getting off of the sidelines into the labor force includes the building of the necessary skills to have these jobs. But many of these jobs, four out of five of the open jobs, don’t really require any previous work experience.”
The Department of Agriculture noted,
Over the years, States have taken advantage of these weaknesses to request and qualify for waivers of the ABAWD time limit in areas where it is questionable as to whether the statutory conditions for approval as outlined in section 6(o)(4) of the Act, an unemployment rate over 10 percent or a lack of sufficient jobs, are present. This manipulation is demonstrated by the fact that currently about half of the ABAWDs on SNAP live in waived areas, despite low unemployment levels across the majority of the country.