The One Statistic The Media Won't Report About That 'Draconian' Cut To The Food Stamps Program

• Soopermexican
• On November 3, 2013
• http://soopermexican.com

Over and over, the media will treat your eyes and ears to the cut in food stamps that will apparently throw America in a zombie apocalypse and destroy the entire galaxy. They love to repeat over and over the size of the cut to the program – $5 billion sure sounds like a lot.
In most of the news articles about the supposedly draconian cut, there’s little mention of the size of the budget, which seems to be pretty important context. In 2012, we spent $78,437,000,000 on the program, meaning that a $5 billion cut amounts to about 6.3%. Extrapolated for the growth in the program until June (the last month for which numbers are available), America will spend about $81 billion in 2013.
Here’s the statistic no one dares report.
As the graph below shows, with a $5 billion cut, the budget for the SNAP program simply reverts back to 2011 levels.

Now I ask you – was there a zombie apocalypse I missed in 2011 because the government wasn’t spending
enough on food stamps? I don’t think so.
Keep in mind, even with the $5 billion cut to the program, its budget still will have grown by 116%!
Further, we’re supposed to believe that Obama has created millions and millions of jobs, right?
And yet somehow, we need to keep tossing more and more into the budget for food stamps? If Obama’s “recovery” has been so incredible, why are food stamp rolls growing so quickly? In the USDA report for July, there were 800,000 new enrollments in just one month.
The graph for participation is similar to the one for the program budgeting:

Even with the budget cut, participation in the program will have grown 71% from 2008 until 2013.
The media will keep pounding the $5 billion cut figure because it sounds so enormous – but put into context, it’s hardly a deep cut, and barely starts us on the path towards fiscal sanity.
Related: IJReview’s Emily Hulsey on Obama’s Welfare Nation
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