Food stamps

The US House of Representatives shoved food stamps off the table and passed a farm bill without a nutrition title last week. Earlier, the farm bill failed to clear the House because of the $40 billion in food stamp cuts proposed by radical right-wingers. The House action threatens to blow up the rural-urban coalition that protected feeding programs and subsidies to production agriculture. It’s a dangerous game that seeks to chase deficit reduction, even though the deficit is coming down because of economic growth.

The food fight over the farm bill is not about the deficit or the cost of the program. It is entirely about the very idea of supplemental nutrition programs. The right-wing radicals never have had a stomach for feeding the poor — the working poor, here — and their complaints about the high cost of food assistance are just so much noise that distract us from the real intent of ripping apart the social safety net in America.