SNAP, Crackle, Starve

If you go to a Wal-Mart on the last night of the month, you’ll notice an odd scene. After 11 p.m., customers start to pour in, but they all check out after the clock strikes midnight. A similar phenomenon occurs at Kroger’s supermarkets and other 24-hour stores. The reason, as The Wall Street Journal’s Miguel Bustillo reported last week, is that electronic benefit accounts for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, colloquially known as “food stamps”) refresh at midnight on the first of every month. Since the recession hit, this has led to increased midnight business, so much so that Wal-Mart has had to increase staffing at those hours to keep up and make an effort to keep shelves stocked for the period.

The people conducting the midnight runs are not just poor, but poor enough that even waiting until morning would leave them without needed food. "If you really think about it,” Bill S. Simon, President and CEO of Wal-Mart U.S., explained to Bustillo, “The only reason someone gets out there in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they have been waiting for it.” These are workers for whom even living paycheck-to-paycheck isn’t enough to keep food coming in regularly. And with food stamp rolls increasing from 26 million in 2007 to 41 million this year (and still growing), these midnight rushes are only going to become more popular in the foreseeable future.

One might look at this situation and see cause for increasing benefits for food stamp recipients. Not too long ago, Congress did just that. In April 2009, the stimulus package boosted every food stamp recipient’s benefits by 13 percent, or $80 a month for a family of four. The increase was supposed to last until 2014, but thanks to lower food prices, it looked likely that the increased benefits could extend into 2015 or even 2018. It was a win-win situation: Congress spent the same amount, and poor families benefited for another few years.

Then Congress realized this was happening and immediately saw a way to cut SNAP. In August, the House and Senate passed an emergency bill to save public school teachers’ jobs and decided that the best way to fund this was by taking $12 billion from SNAP. If nothing changes, the increase will end abruptly in 2014, leaving families to face a sudden drop in income. The White House took another shot at the program last month, by pushing Michelle Obama’s childhood nutrition bill, which is funded by a $2.2 billion cut in SNAP. You read that right: The Obama administration wants to give poor kids healthy food in school by denying them food at home.

Thankfully, a group of House liberals killed that bill, but, if Republicans take over after November, more successful raids on SNAP could come, and they’ll be bipartisan raids to boot. The Washington Independent’s Annie M. Lowrey ’06-’07 estimated last month that passed and pending legislation from Democrats included a total of $27 billion in SNAP cuts. For context, the stimulus’s increase in SNAP funding totaled only $20 billion.

Policymakers could have paid for the teacher jobs bill by any number of less noxious mechanisms. They could have, for instance, canceled one of the Pentagon’s many wasteful purchases—the Sustainable Defense Task Force, a group of national security experts, has identified almost $1 trillion in wasteful spending that could be cut over the next decade. Eliminating the unnecessary F-35 fighter jet program, for example, would net $48 billion, more than enough for the teacher jobs program.

Or Congress could have cut the mortgage interest deduction, which serves mainly as a subsidy for rich homeowners and was a major contributor to the housing crisis. Even just limiting the amount of mortgage interest wealthy homeowners can deduct would save $208 billion over a decade. Congress could even just finance proposals like the teacher jobs bill or the childhood nutrition initiative through deficit spending. With interest rates low and the economy precarious enough that any budget cuts could hurt, the case for debt-financed spending has rarely been stronger.

Instead, Congress opted to make the most morally repugnant cut they could. But you don’t have to be a bleeding heart to object. There’s a strong economic argument for preserving, and indeed boosting, food stamps. Mark Zandi, a Moody’s economist, has used sophisticated modeling to determine which stimulus policies provide the most “bang for the buck”—that is, how a much a dollar of stimulus spending adds to the economy. The very best stimulus program, he found, is food stamps. A dollar spent on food stamps puts $1.74 back into the economy. For comparison, infrastructure spending puts back $1.57 for every dollar, and extending the Bush tax cuts contributes a measly $0.32.

If we want to get the economy humming again at as low a cost as possible, then, increasing food stamp funding is the way to go. In the meantime, however, Congress is treating the program as its personal piggy bank.

Dylan R. Matthews ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.