Showing posts with label food stamps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food stamps. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The debt ceiling compromise freezes spending in the next fiscal year about $400 billion too high, and does nothing to pay for the $4.9 trillion added to the debt over and above "normal" deficit spending


The Washington Examiner, here:

In exchange for a two-year hike in the federal borrowing limit, the legislation roughly freezes next year's spending at fiscal 2023 levels, followed by a 1% increase in 2025. The legislation also imposes some changes to work requirements for food stamps and will speed the development of energy projects with permitting reform.

Fiscal outlays for 2023 are projected to hit $5.792 trillion. Adjusted for inflation since 2019 that should be more like $5.385 trillion.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, deficit spending since 2019 through fiscal 2023 has added, will add, $8.5 trillion to the debt, which has been the solution to, and the cause of, all our problems.

We are not governed by serious people.

We have the government we deserve.

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

As usual the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are portraying the House Republican bill which lifts the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as a bill with "big spending cuts"

This is how NPR, who else?, frames the issue from the beginning:

The House of Representatives has narrowly approved a Republican bill to raise the debt limit. However, it ties the ability to raise that debt ceiling to big spending cuts. And this House bill rolls back several of President Biden's key policies.

The House Republican bill, now languishing in the Senate, rolls back spending levels to pre-COVID levels. That's not a spending cut. That's saying, as Biden himself says, the emergency is over.

If the emergency is over, the emergency spending should end, too.

Outlays in fiscal 2020 and 2021 ballooned because of the new pandemic spending. Deficits for just those two years soared to almost $6 trillion. Republicans seek to roll that spending back. Democrats want that spending to form the new baseline. If Democrats succeed, Katy bar the door. The national debt will absolutely explode.

NPR knows this. It just chooses to hide the facts about it all, how the pandemic spending created these massive deficits, and how that spending which flooded the economy with money contributed to the new inflation:

So it raises the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or through March of 2024, whichever comes first. It also sets spending levels for federal programs to those that were in place two years ago. It limits the growth of spending going forward to 1% annually. But as you said, it also targets a list of the president's policies. It repeals the president's student loan forgiveness program, which is tied up in the courts. It claws back unspent COVID relief money and rolls back key energy provisions that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also puts in place new work requirements for adults without children who receive federal assistance like food stamps or Medicaid.

Sunday, March 5, 2023

WaPo ignores that it was Obama's war on coal which impoverished the Ohio River Valley and is now going hungry after the end of COVID-19 food assistance

A mile-long line for free food offers a warning as covid benefits end


 
In Kentucky, a state that has been hit particularly hard by the collapse of the coal industry, entrenched poverty and hunger have been generational problems that state and federal officials have struggled for decades to address. 

 
Obama's war on coal began immediately after his election.
 

 

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Tucker Carlson says there's nothing free about this market, falls short of calling it an expression of global fascism

But who knows, maybe his forthcoming book connects the dots between the multinational corporations and their revolving door governments, and the central banking system which mediates the operation.


TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: 

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is worth about $150 billion. That’s enough to make him the richest man in the world, by far, and possibly the richest person in human history. It’s certainly enough to pay his employees well. But he doesn’t. A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefits. According to data from the nonprofit group New Food Economy, nearly one in three Amazon employees in Arizona, for example, was on food stamps last year. Jeff Bezos isn’t paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference with your tax dollars. Next time you see Bezos, make sure he says thank you.

Same with the Waltons. The Walton family founded Walmart. Collectively they’re worth about $175 billion. That’s more than the entire gross domestic product of Qatar, the oil-rich Gulf state. The Waltons could certainly afford to be generous with their workers. Instead, they count on you to take up the slack. In 2013, taxpayers sent more than $6 billion to Walmart’s workers, for food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance.

And if you think that’s shocking, meet Travis Kalanick. He’s the youthful founder of Uber. His personal fortune is close to $5 billion. His drivers, by contrast, often make less than minimum wage. One recent study showed that many Uber drivers lose money working for the company. That’s not a sustainable business model. The only reason it continues is because of your generosity. Because you’re paying the welfare benefits for Uber’s impoverished drivers, child billionaires like Travis get to keep buying bigger houses and more airplanes. He’s someone else who definitely owes you a thank you note.

If you can think of a less fair system than that, send us an email. We’d love to hear it. It’s indefensible. Yet almost nobody ever complains about it. How come? Conservatives, like us, support the free market, and for good reason. Free markets work. But there’s nothing free about this market. A lot of these companies operate as monopolies. They hate markets. They use government regulation to crush competition. There’s nothing conservative about that, just as there’s nothing conservative about most big corporations. Just the opposite. They’re the backbone of the left. Pick a leftwing cause that you think is hurting the country. Check the donor list, and you’ll find the name of some corporation. Often many corporations. Corporate America enables the progressive lunacy you see every night on this show. They’re funding the revolution now in progress.

That’s why liberals say nothing as oligarchs amass billions by soaking the middle class. Because they’ve been paid off. For example, you probably assumed the people who founded Walmart were conservative. Most of their customers certainly are. Yet the bulk of the Walton family backed Hillary Clinton in the last election. They gave the Democratic Party more than $700,000 during the 2016 cycle. Almost every billionaire in Silicon Valley did the same. In return, they got immunity from criticism, and you got to keep paying their employees. Not a bad deal for them.

There is one person in Washington who’s offended by this arrangement, and we’re sorry to say he’s wrong on pretty much everything else. But this is a weird moment, so you take allies where you can find them. Bernie Sanders, of all people, is trying to get your money back from Jeff Bezos. This is especially amazing since Bezos is on Bernie’s side on most things. They’re both leftwing activists. But on this question, Bernie’s right. He’s planning legislation that would force big corporations to return the taxpayer-funded welfare benefits you’ve paid to their workers. It’s not a perfect solution, and it probably won’t pass. No matter what they claim in public, liberals in Congress would never support something like that. Their loyalty isn’t to you. It’s to Uber and Jeff Bezos. But at the very least it might awaken a sleepy population to the new reality of activist corporate America. And that’s a good thing.

America has changed enormously in the last 20 years. A lot of people you thought were your allies are in fact working against your interests. They have contempt for you and your family, your customs and your faith. Included in this group, I’m sorry to say, are a lot of big corporations. They have no use for you or the country you grew up in. Stand in their way, and they’ll crush you. It’s all shocking enough that I recently wrote a book about it. It’s called “Ship of Fools,” and it explains what happened and who did it. The book is out in a month, the first week of October, but you can preorder a copy now, and I hope you will.

Friday, August 31, 2018

At the end of 2017 we still had 14 million more on food stamps than at the pre-Great Recession average

16.5% of the U.S. population was on food stamps on average in 2017, versus 11% on average from 1973-2008.

In 2017 over 42 million received food help from the program, but only 28 million would have had the average receiving help returned to 11%.

In the first five months of 2018 the percentage receiving help has fallen to 15.4% on average, implying a smaller gap of about 11.6 million.

The trend is in the right direction, but we are hardly back to normal.




Thursday, January 11, 2018

Did you know food stamp recipients soared 3,639,173 in October 2017?

An increase of nearly 8.7% from September 2017, the month prior.

We now have 45.6 million on food stamps when a year ago October it was only 43.4 million.

The Florida data is up 2.58 million from September to October due to Hurricane Maria, and Texas is up 1.3 million due to Hurricane Harvey. 

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

If the economy is on the mend under Trump, why did the number on food stamps go up nearly 800,000 in September?

We're also witnessing a slow down in road travel, in addition to the odd up-tick in the food stamp numbers.

In October 2015 road travel was up 2.2% year over year, in October 2016 2.5%, but in October 2017 just 1.4%.

The climbdown in the rate of growth has been evident all year.

Not good.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

John Kasich's Ohio miracle is totally phony and depended entirely on federal money through Medicaid expansion under Obamacare

No wonder John Kasich took the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

John Kasich has been bad for Ohioans, is already poison for the presidential race, and will be terrible for the country if allowed anywhere near the Oval.

From the story here:

Wal-Mart is a perennial leader, and at the time had nearly 18,000 Ohio employees covered by Medicaid, followed by McDonald’s with over 14,000 jobs. Next in line, respectively, came Kroger, Wendy’s and Bob Evans with a combined 17,000 plus workers using Medicaid.

So when Gov. Kasich went around his very right-wing legislature, which didn’t want to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, he was thinking about more than the normal people “living in the shadows.” He saw $2.5 billion a year in federal money and knew he could both shed state expenses and give aid and support to a few of Ohio’s biggest corporations, which are too cheap to pay their workers a living wage, defined by enough income to pay their expenses without being “dependent” on government safety net programs like Medicaid. John Kasich loves to talk about personal responsibility for individuals, but has nothing to say about the same responsibility to the biggest, richest corporations.

This observation on what Gov. Kasich was doing came from a progressive economic think tank that gets little attention at the legislature. Zach Schiller, a spokesman for Policy Matters Ohio, said Ohio’s safety-net services, including Medicaid, food stamps and cash assistance, “shouldn’t have to be used in significant ways by multimillion-dollar companies getting tax breaks. They should be able to adequately pay their employees.”

Friday, November 6, 2015

Rush Limbaugh: 94 million not in labor force are ALL on welfare, ALL have an EBT card, ALL getting food stamps, ALL getting disability

Today, here, with the right's version of The Big Lie:

"We don't have 5% unemployment. We've got 20% unemployment.  Bob, we have 94 million Americans not working, not in the labor force.  They're all on welfare, Bob, one way or another.  You are talking about vandals basically coming in and ripping you off at the laundromat.  Half of this country is on welfare, Bob. That's another reason why people aren't talking about it.  Half the country that votes is on welfare, and they vote for Santa Claus, Bob. And to them, you're Santa Claus.  And you're...

"I can understand exactly why you want to sell the business and get out of there.  It's probably being stolen from you.  Customers in there get harassed by people that want to commit vandalism or crime in there.  I have total understanding, relatability, sympathy for what you're going through.  But we've succeeded in letting so many people... Bob, 94 million Americans not working, and they all have an EBT card. They're all getting food stamps. They're all getting some form -- many of them -- of disability."



Saturday, October 31, 2015

The New York Times criticizes Republican tax plans, pretending revenues are needed to cover spending


"All of these candidates deny fiscal reality. In the next 10 years, revenues will need to increase by 40 percent simply to keep federal spending even, per capita, with inflation and population growth. Additional revenues will be needed to pay for health care for the elderly, transportation systems and other obligations, as well as for newer challenges, including climate change. And interest on the national debt will surely rise because interest rates have nowhere to go but up."

Who is the Times trying to kid?

Revenues have never been needed to cover expenditures and they know it, and rarely have covered expenditures. Expenditures will continue to grow whether the Times or the Republicans like it or not. They are baked into the cake of the legislation that drives them. The only way to fix that is to rescind the legislation or modify it, with its built-in cost of living increases and added population coverage assumptions.

This country has run minor annual surpluses in just twelve years since 1939, doing nothing but slowing down our present arrival at $18.2 trillion in debt.

Spare us the histrionics.

The heavy hitters when it comes to spending are:

  • HHS ($1 trillion, 91% of which is Medicare and Medicaid)
  • Social Security ($.96 trillion)
  • Defense ($.59 trillion, protecting the world without reimbursement)
  • Treasury Dept. ($.57 trillion, $.4 trillion of which is interest on the debt overspending)
  • Veterans ($.16 trillion, which does such a good job veterans die waiting for appointments)
  • Agriculture ($.14 trillion, over half of which is the food stamp program).


Together those six account for 88% of federal spending, and the Times dares the Republicans even to think about reforming Social Security and Medicare, calling instead for higher taxes.

Meanwhile there's plenty else to cut just by axing all the other departments which account for the remaining $.48 trillion making up the 2015 fiscal outlay total of $3.9 trillion.

Let's start with the Education Dept., $76 billion, then International Assistance Programs, $22 billion.

Ka-ching! Ka-ching! You're 20% of the way there, just like that.

See how easy that was?




Thursday, October 15, 2015

Rush Limbaugh thinks the 46 million on food stamps are the U-3 "counted" unemployed, many of whom actually can and do work

Yesterday, here:

"Today, there are 46 million Americans unemployed, and 94 million not working. Now, these 46 million people, these are the counted unemployed. This is the U-3 number. The counted unemployed represent 14% of the population."

Limbaugh somehow gets this convoluted mess from here, which he cites but which clearly states the 46 million are those on food stamps, not the U-3 "counted" unemployed:

"The reason you don’t see huge lines of people waiting in soup lines during this Greater Depression is because the government has figured out how to disguise suffering through modern technology. During the height of the Great Depression in 1933, there were 12.8 million Americans unemployed. These were the men pictured in the soup lines. Today, there are 46 million Americans in an electronic soup kitchen line, as their food is distributed through EBT cards (with that angel of mercy JP Morgan reaping billions in profits by processing the transactions). These 46 million people represent 14% of the U.S. population." 

In the latest Employment Situation Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for September, those actually counted as unemployed are listed at 7.915 million (2.5% of the population) and the not counted as unemployed at 1.9 million:

"In September, the unemployment rate held at 5.1 percent, and the number of unemployed persons (7.9 million) changed little. Over the year, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons were down by 0.8 percentage point and 1.3 million, respectively. (See table A-1.) . . . In September, 1.9 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, down by 305,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)"

U-3 is not a number in millions as Limbaugh says but a rate, the percentage of the labor force which is unemployed (7.915 million / 156.715 million), namely 5.1%.

Limbaugh doesn't understand that lots of employed people get food stamps. Individuals grossing up to $15,312 annually can still qualify for assistance.

Almost 49 million individuals made up to but not more than $15,000 annually in 2014.

The unemployed in Sept. 2015 numbered 7.9 million

U-3 is a percentage

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

CBS News claims Trump keeps the EITC

Here.

For the current 5-year period 2012-2016 the Joint Committee on Taxation has previously estimated the annual cost of the Earned Income Tax Credit to be about $64 billion.

That's actually less costly than the food stamp program was in 2014: $74.2 billion.

Keeping the EITC means keeping what amounts to a welfare program, but one which rewards only those who work. The transfer payments to such individuals basically rebate the Social Security taxes they pay even though they generally make too little to pay much in the way of federal income taxes, if they pay any at all.

Trump's claim that his plan will be revenue neutral is already taking incoming because of things like this.

Of course we don't know what spending Trump plans to cut. He might go really big and call for shuttering some cabinet level departments entirely. The Department of Education, for example, costs $77.4 billion.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Pompous ass Steve Gruber Show doesn't fact check while imagining it possesses journalistic integrity

"49 million on food stamps."

"McCain got more votes than Romney."

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Persons taking food stamps in October 2014 are UP 0.5% from September

Persons taking food stamps in October 2014 number 46,674,364. This is up 0.5% from September.

But compared to October 2013 persons taking food stamps are down 1.6%.

If the economy is improving the number should be going down, shouldn't it?

Friday, December 19, 2014

Average food stamp participation under Obama is 43.2 million annually to date, 84% higher than under Bush

Under Bush it was 23.5 million on average, and under Clinton 23.1 million.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Food stamp recipient level declines again in September 2014

Those receiving food stamps in September 2014 declined to 46,459,998 according to Friday's report.

The decline is a statistically insignificant 17,000, but year over year the level is 1.8% lower than the 47.3 million who then received food assistance.

The peak month for food stamp recipients was December 2012 when 47,792,056 received assistance. The level has since declined from there by 2.8%.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Democrats lost last week simply because voters tired of waiting for full-time jobs to recover


























Examine the record here of full-time job losses in recessions since 1969 and you will see that full-time jobs recovered to their previous peaks in 2 years after 1969, 2 years after 1974, about 3 years after 1981, 3 years after 1990 and about 3 years after 2000.

But after 2007? Full-time jobs have yet to recover, over 7 years since peaking in July 2007 at 123.2 million.

It's true that total nonfarm employment recovered to the November 2007 high this June, after 6.5 long years, but full-time is still 3 million below the 2007 peak.

The voting public has been very patient with President Obama and the Democrats. They know this was the biggest jobs debacle in the post-war. From peak to trough between July 2007 and January 2010 14.442 million full-time jobs were lost, beating the 8.1 million lost from 1981 under Reagan by a wide margin, a 9.3% loss. The percentage lost from the peak was also highest in the post-war, down 11.7% in the recent catastrophe vs. the 9.6% loss of full-time jobs from August 1974, the previous most recent top episode for full-time job destruction in percentage terms.

So it's understandable that voters might have re-elected Obama and the Democrat Senate in 2012 on the presumption that such a serious episode would take longer to fix. But even so it was still a relatively close election.

Last Tuesday's nationwide blow-out of Democrats, however, from the US Senate on down through the US House, governorships and state legislative chambers shows that the patience of the country has run out. While full-time jobs have roared back in the last 12 months it is likely that the trend has peaked for the year and that it will be next summer before we see full-time recover fully.

That will be 8 years . . . 5 years too many for many of the millions who lost their jobs to put their lives back together and rejoin the middle class. Five years too many for those who lived in the 5+million homes lost to foreclosure. For them there remains the hope only of minimum and low wage work, food stamps, government disability assistance, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare and early death.

Obama will be remembered for attempting this hollowing out of the middle class, and some will correctly conclude it was intentional on the part of the country's first Bolshevik president.

"[T]he mass of middle class parasites which lived on the back of the old order is now, equally ready to live on the back of the proletarian State."   

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Food stamp recipient total falls only slightly in August 2014

Food stamps were taken by 46,484,828 people residing in America in August 2014, down from 46,486,888 in July.

The level is 2.5% lower than in August 2013.

The total benefit in August 2014 was $5.766 billion. The total costs in 2013 came to $79.9 billion.

The average total benefit was $124.04 per person in the program in August 2014, down from $133.07 per person monthly in 2013, and $253.69 per household on average in August 2014.