Food Stamp Increases Can Give California's Economy A Boost

The rollout of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act continues with this very good piece of public policy.

California food stamp recipients will receive 13.6% more benefits thanks to the federal economic stimulus package, the state Department of Social Services announced Wednesday.

The increase, effective immediately, was included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, approved by Congress and signed by President Obama in February.

John Wagner, the state social services director, said in a statement that the increase "will dramatically help families, while also boosting California's economy in ways that benefit grocers, food manufacturers and growers."

The average monthly food stamp benefit received by about 2.5 million Californians will increase from $300 to $341 per household. State food stamp rolls are expected to increase by 300,000 this year, officials said.

The federal stimulus package also provided $22 million in administrative funding for the state food stamp program, and 10 million pounds of food for food banks and pantries that serve low-income Californians through the federal Emergency Food Assistance Program.

Food stamp money is almost immediately spent. It's among the most effective forms of stimulus there is, with each dollar generating $1.73 in economic activity. Combined with the one-time $250 payment to anyone in the Social Security system, which is also very likely to get spent, these actions will provide a short-term boost to the economy, especially in California, which has an older population than other states.

Gloria Molina is trying to extend the benefit to those who have lost their jobs:

Earlier this week, in an effort to help unemployed middle-class workers who do not qualify for government aid, L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina proposed that the county pursue temporary state and federal waivers of eligibility requirements for cash aid, food stamps and housing benefits.

"As more and more people lose their jobs and search in vain for new ones in a shrinking job market, many families are finding themselves, often for the first time, with inadequate funds to pay their rent or mortgage, keep their utilities and provide food for their children," Molina said Tuesday, citing an article in The Times last week.

Molina noted that each month, food stamp applications are denied for more than 19,000 county residents, and 7,000 applicants are denied benefits under CalWorks, a welfare program for families.

The middle-class needs for aid have gone up dramatically in the state over the past six months. Particularly in our areas in Depression, the crisis is very wide and broad. Until the economy recovers, and as a means for it to recover, these actions at the federal level can at least cushion the blow.

Big Bipartisan On Campus

A couple years ago at what was then Yearly Kos, I was quoted in the Washington Post saying that Joe Lieberman was more harmful to progressive policies than, say, Ben Nelson, because Nelson didn't undermine Democrats in the media or borrow Republican talking points.

Let me say that I was wrong, and that Nelson is trying his best to become the new Village darling with a package of cuts to the recovery bill that would negate all of the positive benefits it could possibly offer.

Total Reductions: $80 billion

Eliminations:

Head Start, Education for the Disadvantaged, School improvement, Child Nutrition, Firefighters, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Prisons, COPS Hiring, Violence Against Women, NASA, NSF, Western Area Power Administration, CDC, Food Stamps

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Reductions:

Public Transit $3.4 billion, School Construction $60 billion

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Increases:

Defense operations and procurement, STAG Grants, Brownfields, Additional transportation funding

The Axis of Centrism, in addition to all that, wants to cut aid to the states.

By Thursday evening, aides said the group had drafted a list of nearly $90 billion in cuts, including $40 billion in aid for states, more than $14 billion for various education programs, $4.1 billion to make federal buildings energy efficient and $1.5 billion for broadband Internet service in rural areas. But they remained short of a deal.

I'm sorry, but anyone who proposes cutting funding to state and local governments at this point is a complete moron. The fastest stimulus is government purchasing. The jobs most in need of saving are at the state level. With slashed aid to states, millions of teachers, firefighters, and cops will be out of work. And cutting food stamps is just as dumb, considering that poor people are most likely to spend just on their own basic necessities, increasing demand. The money they don't have to spend on food will go elsewhere in the economy.

Good to see as well that funding for the military, which we spend more on that every other country on Earth combined, is getting increases in the plan. That seems fair and balanced.

Harry Reid is trying to hold the line on this nonsense, but I'm sure Nelson and his axis will go lovingly into the arms of their media cohorts and decry all the "wasteful spending" on poor people that just has to go. Sen. Jeff Merkley, who can't get on the teevee because of all that patchouli oil and tie-dye, makes the obvious point: there's nothing wasteful about creating a job. That would be a unique perspective!

One project they're attacking hit close to home. They're calling funding to restore forest health and prevent wildfires in National Forests wasteful. Coming from Southern Oregon, I can tell you firsthand they are dead wrong.

I grew up in Southern Oregon. My father was a sawmill worker and a logger and his job put food on the table. Right now Douglas County, where I was born, has an unemployment rate of 12.8 percent. That's the highest it's been in decades and well above the current national average. Douglas County is home to many of Oregon's timber workers and they need the stability of a good paying job. The money that would be allocated to counties like Douglas to restore forest health and prevent forest fires would put these folks back to work.

Let me explain. Due to federal mismanagement, there are millions of acres of choked and overgrown second-growth forests. These forests are a complete menace. They are diseased and are very little use for strong ecosystems. Moreover, they are a huge fire hazard. Thinning these neglected forests is essential for restoring forest health and generating thousands of rural jobs.

Let me emphasize this: this provision will create thousands of rural jobs. This is a win-win for our rural economies and our ecosystems.

Preventing wildfires is something that desperately needs to be done in any economic condition and now has the added benefit of providing jobs in areas that need them most. How Republicans can call job creation for hardworking millworkers like my dad "wasteful spending" is a mystery to me.

If Nelson and his centrists are choking on the price tag of the bill, they can get rid of the tax cuts they all inserted that will do nothing for anyone.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (ME), one of the four Republicans considered genuinely open to cooperation with Democrats on a workable economic recovery bill, just released a statement saying she was approached by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to come up with a list of trims from the $275 billion-plus tax section of the stimulus.

Pruning the tax section of the stimulus is an idea that could hold promise for liberals, many of whom are concerned about the hits that education and transit would take in the centrist senators' package of cuts. The portion Snowe is looking at contains plenty of cuts, for both businesses and individuals -- some of them added in the hopes of winning GOP support -- but also a number of tax credits that could take money out of government coffers in the short term while increasing economic growth in the long term.

If it suits you to make a bunch of phone calls, if there's anything to go to the mats over, it's this: defeating the Nelson-Collins amendment and preserving at least the good parts of the bill. Not to mention making David Broder cry. At least the bulk of the Republicans are honest neo-Hooverists; I respect them more. Ben Nelson and his "very serious" friends deserve to go down.

...by the way, Krugman is absolutely right about this:

Which raises the obvious question: shouldn’t Obama have made a much bigger plan, say $1.3 trillion, his opening gambit? If he had, he could have conceded to the centrists by cutting it to $1.2 trillion, and still have had a plan with a good chance of really controlling this slump. Instead he made preemptive concessions, only to find the centrists demanding another pound of flesh as proof of their centrist power.

Obama negotiated with himself, and this is the result. We can only speculate on what might have been if he didn't pre-compromise the bill.

...Ben Nelson, by the way: for state aid before he was against it.

Several Unrelated Items About Food

I like the blogosphere around this time of year because you can easily figure out who the Jewish bloggers are (the ones posting). Anyway, since all Jewish holidays are devoted to food (and pretty much only food), here are a few musings about that which we eat.

• There's some kind of mini-uproar about Barack Obama ordering spam musubi on the golf course in Hawaii this week. Not only is there a very good Hawaiian restaurant on the Westside of LA that serves spam musubi, but they sell T-shirts which read "What the hell is spam musubi?" that will hopefully start flying off the shelves now that the delicacy has a Presidential imprimatur. For the unenlightened, it's basically sushi with Spam instead of fish.

• I am breaking with all known Jewish traditions this Christmas and not going to a Chinese restaurant, but instead a potluck for wayward members of the tribe. My contribution will be butternut squash soup, perfect on this unusually cold California day.

• It's not too late to give to your local food bank. Demand is up significantly over the past several months as the recession deepens. Second Harvest is a good place to connect with the food bank that needs the most help in your area. I did a little work at the Westside Food Bank in Santa Monica over the weekend, and it was a good feelings.

• Speaking of food assistance, and turning to a food-related story that has actual policy implications, the Obama transition is considering using food assistance programs to encourage better nutrition.

For decades, the government has treated hunger and obesity as unrelated phenomena. But at a news conference last week in Chicago, Tom Vilsack, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for agriculture secretary, said he would put "nutrition at the center of all food assistance programs," a signal that he will get involved next year when Congress moves to reauthorize nutrition programs that support school breakfasts and lunches as well as summer food for children.

"For a long time, we've looked at hunger and obesity separately," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the committee that will draft the legislation. "It's not a zero-sum game."

This is a great idea. The tragedy of being poor is that your food options are typically cheap, high-fat products that end up leading to obesity. By offering major discounts to the purchase of produce with food stamps, for example, we help to solve both a hunger problem and a public health problem. There is a reasonable concern that the government becomes too paternalistic over this, but the very real concern about obesity among the poor outweighs it. I would also encourage farmer's markets in low-income communities that accept food stamps; much of this is a problem of access, as only fast food restaurants and convenience stores seem to proliferate in depressed communities instead of full-service groceries.

How Dare You Make Money

Here we go again. Apparently the news network that pays Bill O'Reilly millions of dollars to act like he's just one of the regular guys is crying hypocrisy on John Edwards again.

John Edwards has an example to teach University of California at Davis students how to avoid poverty — charge $55,000 for a speech.

That's how much the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate negotiated for his fee to speak to 1,787 people at the taxpayer-funded school in January 2006, according to financial disclosures.

According to Joe Martin, the public relations officer for UC Davis' Mondavi Center, the fee for a speech entitled, "Poverty, the Great Moral issue Facing America," was worth it to school officials.

Martin told The San Francisco Chronicle that the center paid Edwards because at the time "he wasn't a (presidential) candidate and from our point of view, he was a speaker of interest that people in the community were clearly interested in ... we feel it's our mission to present those speakers."

Seriously, screw you guys. Just because you talk about people who are poor, it doesn't mean you have to take a vow of poverty. This is the classic move by people who don't want anyone to think about the poor; they try and disqualify anyone who has the means and the access to power to do so. Edwards came from nothing, worked hard and used his intellect and his talent to be successful, and because he hasn't forgotten where he's come from, somehow he's greedy? Back during the haircut story, Edwards had a good response to this:

Presidential candidate John Edwards said Monday it's silly to suggest that his wealth and expensive tastes have hurt his credibility as an advocate for the poor.

"Would it have been better if I had done well and didn't care?" Edwards asked.

The answer, of course, is "yes," to people who don't want you to care at all. And for media to broadcast these GOP slurs as if they have any resonance to the issue is just deceptive. It's just as stupid to critique Edwards for not having any new ideas on poverty, when the old ideas haven't been implemented. Edwards has demonstrated a commitment to poverty here and around the world. Instead of arguing why poor people shouldn't get any attention, his critics attack the messenger.

Several Democrats in the House lived on $21 a week for food to show the difficulties of actually surviving under the federal food stamp program. The stories at the Food Stamp Challenge blog are interesting. Rep. Tim Ryan couldn't finish the program because a bunch of his food was confiscated at the airport:

Last Friday night, in New Hampshire to deliver a commencement speech, Ryan succumbed to a pork chop in the hotel restaurant because he feared he would otherwise be too weak to give the address.

Afterward, as he rushed to catch a flight back to Washington, airport security officials confiscated jars of peanut butter and jelly from his carry-on luggage, leaving him with nothing but a small bag of cornmeal to eat in the final days of the "Food Stamp Challenge," which ends today.

"It just showed me that when you're living on food stamps, you're really one event away from disaster," he said. "If you drop a jar of sauce or jam, you can lose an opportunity to eat. Some people are constantly living on that edge."

So yesterday, in the Cleveland airport on his way back to Washington from a funeral, Ryan bought a bag of peanuts. "I feel bad I couldn't do it the whole time, but I certainly got the point," said the lawmaker, who lost four pounds during the week and ended his test early, with dinner at a Washington restaurant last night.

He said he came away with two lessons: He made some poor choices when he shopped for the $21 worth of food, and the country's food stamp program is not sufficient for the 26 million Americans who rely on it.

Does this mean Rep. Ryan "doesn't care" about the poor, because he ended up going to dinner last night?

The whole language abut poverty needs to be rewritten by those who suffer these rhetorical attacks. Global poverty matters, to our national security as much as anything, and the messenger is completely irrelevant. Edwards should keep striking back hard in the face of these stupid criticisms. He's done a decent job so far, but since this is a defining issue for him that separates him from his rivals, he has to be clear.