Food Stamps U S Senator Robert Casey Jr Pennsylvania Barack Obama are Destroying America

Food Stamps U S Senator Robert Casey Jr Pennsylvania Barack Obama are Destroying America

“[Food stamp spending] has doubled in the last four years. It’s gone up four-fold since 2001. And we’ve not had anything like that increase in the amount of unemployment that would justify such numbers… States are given bonuses to see how many people they can sign up for the program; they don’t get any incentive for identifying the amount of fraud that’s going on.”

• When the food stamp program was first expanded nationally in the 1970s, just 1 in 50 Americans participated; today the figure is 1 in 7.
• From 2001 to 2006 the food stamp budget doubled, even as unemployment remained around five percent. It has grown at more than twice the pace of Medicaid, another program that often grows as the economy contracts.
• Food stamps are one of nearly 80 means-tested federal welfare programs, including 17 for nutritional support. Collectively, these programs cost the federal government $700 billion annually, in addition to $200 billion in state contributions and obligations to those same programs.
• Under the farm bill that recently passed the Senate, annual food stamp spending will average $77 billion over the next decade. The pre-recession average last decade was $28 billion.