WASHINGTON – A food stamp cut that took effect this month will negate cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits for some retirees and disabled Americans.
Budget cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, will leave 47 million Americans to survive off of an average of $4.20 for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Judy Beals of Belleville, Wisconsin, was getting ready to pay for her groceries at the store earlier this year when she found out that her monthly food stamp benefits had been slashed from $120 to $16.
“I was never even notified,” Beals, 65, said. Calling around to various state offices, she said she was told her benefits would not have gone down if she had been able to document her heating costs by providing the state with a utility bill.
via Huffington Post.
Asked about the improving economy, McConnell scoffed: Business leaders tell him they have “a hard time finding people to do the work because they’re doing too good with food stamps, Social Security and all the rest.” Rather than cut deals like centrist Democrats of the past, he said, Obama wants to “Europeanize America” with a diet of “massive debt, high taxes on the most successful people, over-regulation.”
via Politico.
Food insecurity is a household-level socioeconomic condition in which access to food can be limited or uncertain.
An estimated one in seven Americans faced inadequate or inconsistent access to food at some point in 2014.
Meals cooked at home keep getting cheaper, and Thanksgiving dinner will be a real bargain this year.
That’s what two separate measures of food prices showed on Thursday.
One gauge, the Consumer Price Index done in October by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed that the cost of food at the supermarket — known as “food-at-home” prices — fell for the sixth straight month. Such prices are now down 2.3 percent from the same time last year.
And in its annual survey of Thanksgiving dinner prices, the American Farm Bureau Federation reports that the cost of a Thanksgiving Day meal for 10 has fallen from last year, reflecting lower turkey and milk prices.
Photo: Love_Life/Getty Images
WASHINGTON – A food stamp cut that took effect this month will negate cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits for some retirees and disabled Americans.
The Chained CPI would cut seniors, veterans, and the disabled COLAs even more.
President Trump proposed a budget Monday that hits the poorest Americans the hardest, slashing billions of dollars in food stamps, health insurance and federal housing subsidies while pushing legislation to institute broad work requirements for families receiving housing vouchers, expanding on moves by some states to require recipients of Medicaid and food stamps to work.
The Trump budget proposal would gut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, by $17.2 billion in 2019 — equivalent to 22 percent of the program’s total cost last year. It calls for cuts of more than $213.5 billion over the next decade, a reduction of nearly 30 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
via Washington Post.
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