The Farm Bill Isn’t About Farming, It’s About Food Stamps
Today in East Lansing, Michigan, President Obama will sign the Farm Bill into law. The newest Farm Bill, typically signed into law every four or five years, picks up where the 2008 Farm Bill left off after its expiration in 2013.
In spite of its widely-used name, nearly 80 percent of funds in the Farm Bill go to welfare. Food stamps, in the form of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), will cost taxpayers more than $756 billion over the next ten years. SNAP’s annual cost of $80 billion represents 16 percent of the 2014 federal deficit. Comparatively, less than ten percent of Farm Bill funds, $90 billion over ten years, will be spent on the new federal crop insurance program.
Many factors delayed the Farm Bill’s passage, but debates over cuts to the SNAP program were most contentious. Liberals decried cuts to the SNAP program as too large, while budget-minded Republicans found the cuts too small. In the end, the House and Senate compromised to cut just one percent from the $80 billion-a-year program.
Congress generated savings by eliminating several loopholes in the SNAP eligibility requirements. Sixteen states have been abusing a SNAP loophole called “heat and eat.” If a SNAP recipient shows they also receive federal heating assistance, they can boost their SNAP benefits. States had been abusing the loophole by granting heating assistance, even as low as $1, to people that did not have heating bills. Congress compromised by raising the threshold to trigger higher SNAP benefits to $20 of heating assistance. States had been abusing the loophole by granting heating assistance, even as low as $1, to people that did not have heating bills. The new bill also eliminates loopholes that had allowed lottery winners, college students, and undocumented immigrants to receive benefits.
SNAP enrollment and benefits have increased dramatically since President Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act in 1964. In 1969, the earliest year data is available from the Department of Agriculture, just 3 million Americans received food stamps, or one and a half percent of U.S. population at the time. Since then, food stamp enrollment has increased by 45 million. With 48 million enrollees in 2013, 15 percent of the U.S. population receives food stamps, even though real GDP per capita has more than doubled since the Food Stamp Act was passed.
The level of food stamp benefits has seen an even more striking surge. In today’s dollars, the average monthly benefit per person was $41 in 1969. The average benefit per person has tripled since then – individual recipients averaged $133 in benefits per month in 2013.
Regardless of how much the program has grown, there is no logical reason the federal government should be paying for the program. It does not make sense for a bureaucrat in the Beltway to have spending control over low-income families in Alabama. Similarly, it does not make sense to force taxpaying-families in Maine to pay benefits to people in San Diego they will never encounter.
State governments already distribute SNAP benefits. The infrastructure exists for the federal government to completely devolve SNAP to the states. Devolution of welfare programs is not unprecedented—in the 1990s the federal government developed block grants and gave states control of welfare programs. This would allow liberal California to increase SNAP benefits as much as it desires, without making conservative Texas pay the cost.
Devolving SNAP to state governments would have the added benefit of separating the Farm Bill and SNAP programs, as House Republicans attempted to do last year. A national debate over food stamps should not occur under the guise of a completely unrelated “Farm Bill.” When the Farm Bill is actually about farms, free market advocates will be able to make more progress eliminating wasteful subsidies.
Jason Russell is a research associate at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. You can follow him on Twitter here.