It is clear that a huge amount of growth in SNAP happened under Obama’s watch.
Increases in the size of SNAP were “unprecedented” since 2008, according to a report by the Manhattan Institute, the conservative, New York City-based think tank. The authors of the report, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Senior Fellow, and Claire Rogers, Research Assistant, attributed this expansion to a combination of “the difficult job market” and an “expansion of benefits” starting in October 2008.
Statistics released by USDA also showed the huge expansion of food stamps under Obama. In 2013, 20 percent of American households were enrolled in SNAP. Enrollment had increased from 32.2 million individuals in January 2009, to at least 46 million individuals during the last 35 straight months for available data. This upsurge represented a jump of more than 42 percent.
Meanwhile, spending on SNAP benefits rose by nearly 120 percent, from $34.6 billion to $76.1 billion, between 2008 and 2013. The increase in spending far outpaced enrollment, and could be attributed to greater benefits handed out per person. “SNAP began to pay more generous benefits to people who enrolled” between 2007 and 2011, according to an analysis published on The New York Times’ Economix blog Aug. 29, 2011.
Economist Peter Ferrara agreed with labeling Obama the “food stamp President,” calling out the administration’s “anti-growth, economic policies, which are precisely crippling the poor and the middle class” in a Forbes article Dec. 31, 2013.
While these increases were partly attributed to Obama’s economic policies, they could also be linked to lax enrollment policies implemented by the president. These policies included waivers for healthy individuals with no dependents and who were not actively seeking work.
“The food-stamp work waiver is part of a larger agenda. Poverty advocates have long sought to convert food stamps into a no-strings-attached entitlement,” Heather MacDonald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in a New York Post op-ed on May 15, 2014.
Two Heritage Foundation fellows said that while part of the growth in SNAP could be attributed to the country’s poor economic conditions, Obama has also increased the size of the program through his budget proposal.
“Part of that growth is due to the recession, but under Obama’s proposed budget, food stamp spending will not return to pre-recession levels when the economy recovers. Instead, it will remain well above historic norms for the foreseeable future,” Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow, and Katherine Bradley, Research Fellow, at Heritage wrote.
Of course, if you’re a Democrat, this is a feature, not a bug. They like Americans to be dependent on government, because then more of them vote for bigger government – and that means Democrats get to raise taxes and spend even more money they didn’t earn. That’s good news, but it gets even better – because then they give speeches about how generous they are! With your money.
During a speech in Rhode Island today, President Obama stressed the importance of public pre-school in America, pointing out that the cost of daycare was getting too high.
“Moms and dads deserve a great place to drop their kids off every day that doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg,” Obama stated. “We need better child care, day care, early child education policies.”
Obama explained that in many states it cost parents more money to put their kids in day care than it cost to put them in a public university.
“Too often parents have no choice but to put their kids in cheaper day care that maybe doesn’t have the kinds of programming that makes a big difference in a child’s development,” he said.
Because America lacks public pre-school, Obama said, women often earned less money than men.
“Sometimes, someone, usually Mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result,” he said. “That’s not a choice we want Americans to make.”
Creating public pre-school, Obama explained, was not only “good for families” but “good for the children.”
So I watched this video in which Obama flat out says that he favors having the government spend more money on social programs for children, despite the fact that we know that mothers are best for young children. He is not the first to push this, Nancy Pelosi did the same in 2013. This is the view championed by Democrats.
These programs are a boon to the government workers who vote for Obama, because they will be run by secular leftist social workers. This is how they earn their living – by separating mothers from their children. They want to avoid having to please customers in the private sector – that’s too risky. They prefer to take over the job of mothering from a child’s biological mother. That’s safe. You don’t get fired from the government, and you don’t have the pressure of having to care about what customers think of you. This is attractive to people on the left – they want work to be like this, even if it means a child’s misery.
How will he achieve this?
Well, he will raise taxes on the husband, so that the husband can no longer support the family on his own. This will cause the wife to have to leave the children and go to work in order to make ends meet. This way, Obama can separate the child from her parents, and from the worldview of the parents. Instead of having parents working to raise their own child, you have the government raising children to believe what the government wants them to believe. For a secular government, this will probably be that family is bad, that religion is bad, that traditional morality is bad, that the free market system is bad, and that bigger government is good. Think of examples like sex education (abortion advocacy) and global warming (anti-capitalism), if you doubt this anti-family, anti-free-market angle exists.
Does it excite me, as a single chaste man, to get married and be a husband in a world run by feminist socialist leftists like Obama? No.
I am getting up every morning and going to work so that I and my future wife can run my family our way – to promote our worldview and our values. We would be doing the work of raising a family, so we should be allowed to pass on our values. But thanks to feminism and socialism, we have these bloated parasites in government who steal our children from us and then charge us money in order to pay for imposing their disgusting, immoral values on them. The American people somewhere along the line decided that even though I earn the money, that someone else ought to be passing on their values to my children. And this would be all the people who traditionally vote Democrat. They decided that. There are many young, unmarried Christian women who vote Democrat. They decided that. They “feel” that more powerful government is more desirable than more powerful families. Nothing they hear in church teaches them not to vote for stronger government over stronger families.
I would like more Christian leaders to be telling the young, unmarried women to stop voting for bigger secular government. Someone has to get that through their heads – that men do not like sharing the duty of leadership with anyone – especially not with clowns who have degrees in the humanities and could not find private sector jobs serving customers. Unfortunately, my friends tell me that the most common books being read by young Christian women on dating sites are books by A.W. Tozer, Francis Chan, Harry Potter, Left Behind, Phillip Yancey, Beth Moore, Nancy Leigh Demoss, Joyce Meyer, Elizabeth George, Stasi Eldgredge and so on. There is a complete lack of seriousness among many Christian women about marriage and family as it relates to economics, politics and education. It’s not just apologetics that is lacking. Everything is focused on feelings, but the attraction and feasibility of the marriage/family plan is diminishing after each election right under our noses. It is diminishing for men. And there is no marriage and parenting without a man, however much Christians seem to be turning toward and celebrating single motherhood – i.e. – marriage to the secular state.
Young unmarried women, if you expect to get married, you’d better start voting for small government. Small government means bigger individuals and bigger families, and that’s exactly what men who consider marriage and families want. Wake up.
Hillary Clinton is getting deservedly attacked for her imbecilic statement at a Democratic political gathering in Massachusetts on Friday about business and jobs.
“Don’t let anybody tell you that, ah, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs,” she preached, to loud applause. “You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.”
It may not be too surprising that Hillary can’t connect the dots that it takes an employer to create an employee to create wages and salaries.
That’s how some 150 million Americans get paid every week. Ms. Clinton has made her millions in the cattle futures market, as a government employee and giving speeches for fees of $250,000 a pop. Nice work if you can get it. The rest of us mere mortals need a paycheck.
Hillary’s witless statement might be written off as campaign hyperbole, and some might think the Democratic front-runner for president simply got carried away speaking to her “progressive” base and didn’t really mean it. Sometimes Republicans get into the act, as when Mitt Romney’s GOP rivals attacked him in 2012 for being rich and a successful investor.
But the scary thing is she really DID mean it. Her sophomoric comment, alas, reflects a long-simmering ideologically driven war against business that has become a central platform of the modern-day Democratic party.
Her remarks were simply an extension of President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” statement denigrating businessmen and women who have created companies — large and small.
In the left mindset, economic output and jobs are achieved collectively and thanks to the beneficence of government, not because of the ambition, drive, vision, risk-taking and guts that it takes to start a new enterprise out of nothing.
So who creates jobs then? Well, if it’s not private sector businesses then the only thing left to create jobs is the government. She thinks government creates jobs. And the more government raises taxes, the more money government has to give people jobs.
But is that really how it has worked in the past?
Let’s see.
Consider this article by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, which discusses how the Reagan tax cuts affected the unemployment rate.
Excerpt:
In 1980, President Carter and his supporters in the Congress and news media asked, “how can we afford” presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s proposed tax cuts?
Mr. Reagan’s critics claimed the tax cuts would lead to more inflation and higher interest rates, while Mr. Reagan said tax cuts would lead to more economic growth and higher living standards. What happened? Inflation fell from 12.5 percent in 1980 to 3.9 percent in 1984, interest rates fell, and economic growth went from minus 0.2 percent in 1980 to plus 7.3 percent in 1984, and Mr. Reagan was re-elected in a landslide.
[…]Despite the fact that federal revenues have varied little (as a percentage of GDP) over the last 40 years, there has been an enormous variation in top tax rates. When Ronald Reagan took office, the top individual tax rate was 70 percent and by 1986 it was down to only 28 percent. All Americans received at least a 30 percent tax rate cut; yet federal tax revenues as a percent of GDP were almost unchanged during the Reagan presidency (from 18.9 percent in 1980 to 18.1 percent in 1988).
What did change, however, was the rate of economic growth, which was more than 50 percent higher for the seven years after the Reagan tax cuts compared with the previous seven years. This increase in economic growth, plus some reductions in tax credits and deductions, almost entirely offset the effect of the rate reductions. Rapid economic growth, unlike government spending programs, proved to be the most effective way to reduce unemployment and poverty, and create opportunity for the disadvantaged.
President Bush signed the first wave of tax cuts in 2001, cutting rates and providing tax relief for families by, for example, doubling of the child tax credit to $1,000.
At Congress’ insistence, the tax relief was initially phased in over many years, so the economy continued to lose jobs. In 2003, realizing its error, Congress made the earlier tax relief effective immediately. Congress also lowered tax rates on capital gains and dividends to encourage business investment, which had been lagging.
It was the then that the economy turned around. Within months of enactment, job growth shot up, eventually creating 8.1 million jobs through 2007. Tax revenues also increased after the Bush tax cuts, due to economic growth.
In 2003, capital gains tax rates were reduced. Rather than expand by 36% as the Congressional Budget Office projected before the tax cut, capital gains revenues more than doubled to $103 billion.
The CBO incorrectly calculated that the post-March 2003 tax cuts would lower 2006 revenues by $75 billion. Revenues for 2006 came in $47 billion above the pre-tax cut baseline.
Here’s what else happened after the 2003 tax cuts lowered the rates on income, capital gains and dividend taxes:
GDP grew at an annual rate of just 1.7% in the six quarters before the 2003 tax cuts. In the six quarters following the tax cuts, the growth rate was 4.1%.
The S&P 500 dropped 18% in the six quarters before the 2003 tax cuts but increased by 32% over the next six quarters.
The economy lost 267,000 jobs in the six quarters before the 2003 tax cuts. In the next six quarters, it added 307,000 jobs, followed by 5 million jobs in the next seven quarters.
The timing of the lower tax rates coincides almost exactly with the stark acceleration in the economy. Nor was this experience unique. The famous Clinton economic boom began when Congress passed legislation cutting spending and cutting the capital gains tax rate.
So in the past, the trickle-down supply-side tax cuts that Hillary Clinton derided in her speech created lots of jobs. We have to do what is known to work.
WINTERY KNIGHT 