Food stamp benefits cut to funnel money into Michelle Obamas Lets Move campaig

[Red James Cash]

Food stamp benefits cut to funnel money into Michelle Obama's 'Let's Move' campaig

Food stamp benefits cut to funnel money into Michelle Obama's 'Let's Move' campaign

Sunday, November 24, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Major cuts to the federal food stamp program, now known as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), came into effect on November 1, which means millions of American families on food assistance will now receive about $29 less per month in benefits. And according to the New York Post, the roughly $5 billion per year in financial trimmings will instead go to fund Michelle Obama's controversial "Let's Move" campaign, which aims to control the types of foods children eat at public schools.

The shocking reason for these cuts might come as a surprise to those who normally assume that any reductions in federal assistance are a result of sinister Republican politics. On the contrary, it is Michelle Obama's pet project to reduce childhood obesity that is the real reason for the cuts. With the 2009 Recovery Act's stimulus funds now exhausted, Obama needed another source of cash flow with which to purge public school cafeterias of "evil" foods like butter and replace them with more "healthy" foods like genetically modified (GM) soy burgers.

"You know everybody's crying how the SNAP program has been cut and they are saying the evil Republicans," stated television and radio personality Glenn Back on his show recently. "It's not the evil Republicans. It's the First Lady. Her Let's Move program is being funded now with the cuts that came from food stamps."

Though $29 a month might not seem like much, it can be devastating for legitimate families in need who are on tight budgets. According to Food Bank for New York City CEO Margarette Purvis, the reductions will result in the loss of some 76 million meals per year, just in New York City. And a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis says that the average family of three on assistance will suffer the loss of about 16 meals per month.

"The fact that they're going to lose what's basically an entire week's worth of food (each month), it's pretty daunting," stated Purvis to Salon. "[Policymakers] are attempting to punish people for being poor."

Another broken promise: Obama swore not to cut food stamps
Chalk it up to another blatant lie from the Obama administration, which promised not to cut food stamp benefits after raiding the food stamp cookie jar, so to speak, back in 2010. Congressional Democrats had promised at the time that they would replace the money they took from the food stamp budget, but never did. Barack Obama also made promises not to cut food stamps, and later reneged on them.

"We were all told that these cuts for November 1 would not happen," added Purvis, just days before November 1 came, resulting in immediate cuts. "We were told, you know, by the president... these cuts will not happen, we won't get rid of the program. Well guess what? November 1 [came], and no one has restored that money."

Purvis and her colleagues are now "begging" Congress, according to Salon, to pass some kind of legislation by December that will provide additional funding to the food stamp program. Though the full effects of the cuts have yet to be realized, she and others are convinced that the worst is yet to come, as millions of Americans on food assistance come to realize that they are even more impoverished than before.

"[T]he mistakes of 2010 are coming home to roost -- again," writes Laura Clawson for Daily Kos. "[A]nd it's going to be people struggling to put food on the table who pay the price -- again."

Sources for this article include:

New York Post

Salon.com

Daily Kos :: News Community Action

 

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[Old Bookaroo]

Chad:

Reality has a liberal bias.

Good luck to all,

~ The Old Bookaroo

 

[Treasure_Hunter]

Keep posts on topic, off topic posts will be deleted.

 

[Old Bookaroo]

I just read that the Republicans have separated the farm subsidy bill from the SNAP funding. In the past these programs have been funded together.

Apparently Paul Ryan tried to limit the amount of money a single recipient could receive ($750,000!). But that wasn't big enough for the GNoP. So the American taxpayers will contribute $1,000,000,000,000 over the next five years - largely to multi-state corporate farms.

The estate tax was attacked because it cause families to lose the ranch. Yet there were no examples of families that actually lost a farm due to estate taxes.

Ethanol? Another corporate welfare program supported by the Republican House of Representatives.

It's obvious Republicans believe in welfare - for corporations.

Good luck to all,

~ The Old Bookaroo

 

[Old Bookaroo]

WASHINGTON — The long-sought bipartisan “grand bargain” on the nation’s fiscal future is not going to happen this year, and probably not for the rest of President Obama’s term. There is the simple, familiar reason. And then there is the dirty secret.

The simple reason is evident in the all-but-moribund budget negotiations in Congress, where Republicans and Democrats agreed that they would not even try for a long-term deal to reduce the growth of debt in an aging nation. Republicans oppose further tax increases on the rich, as Democrats demand, so Democrats will not support major changes to Medicare and Social Security, as Republicans insist.

But the dirty secret — a phrase used independently, and privately, by people in both parties — is that neither side wants to take the actions it demands of the other to achieve a breakthrough.

That is, many Republicans are no more interested in voting to reduce Medicare and Social Security benefits than Democrats are, lest they threaten their party’s big advantage among the older voters who dominate the electorate in midterm contests like those in 2014.

And Democrats are no more eager than Republicans, with control of both houses of Congress up for grabs, to vote for the large revenue increases that a grand bargain would entail. They do not want to limit popular but costly deductions, as Mr. Obama and past bipartisan panels, like his Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission, have proposed. That is especially true for Democrats from states, like California and New York, where affluent voters value deductions for mortgages on first and second homes, charitable giving, and state and local taxes.

“It’s a lot harder than you’d think to find Republicans who’d actually want to cut entitlements, or Democrats who want to raise taxes,” said Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and now a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The only person who seems to have consistently been interested in a grand bargain is the president, and frankly I’m not even sure about him.”
…
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/us/politics/the-hidden-hurdles-to-a-fiscal-grand-bargain.html?_r=0

Good luck to all,

~ The Old Bookaroo

 

[Native Floridian]

RJC, this is old news. This program has been in effect since 2010. The articles today, including the one you've quoted by anti modern medicine Natural news, are rehashes of the 2010 smear campaign.

Honestly, who could be against kids getting fresh food to eat?

Only those with an ax to grind!

That said, the story is getting trotted out for another run around the pig troth because of the anti republican backlash over letting the SNAP stimulus expire.