Republicans Have Bill To Terminate Food Stamps!

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas
(R-Okla.) presided over the committee's passing a
farm bill how headed to the House floor.

Posted: 07/12/2012 10:09 am Updated: 07/12/2012 11:24 am

WASHINGTON -- As many as three million Americans would be cut off from food assistance in the next year under a Republican proposal that cleared a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives early on Thursday.

The cuts, which are part of a broader farm bill, would reduce spending in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, by $16 billion over 10 years. The reduction is deeper than proposed SNAP cuts in a version of the farm bill that passed the Senate last month with bipartisan support.

Watching politicians fight over SNAP can be aggravating for people who rely on the program. Tanya Wells, 32, said her family of four receives the maximum monthly allotment of $668.
"We would love to not have to rely on the government for something as important as food, but we simply can not," she said. "We do hope to be off of the system soon, because it causes a lot of extra stress to see your only food source constantly on the line because of political battles."

Wells said she and her husband both lost their jobs near the end of 2007. She had worked as a logistics coordinator for an oil company while he had been a sheet metal mechanic -- and they made a decent living.

"We were comfortable middle class and all of the sudden the rug got pulled out from under us," Wells said.

Seeing few decent job prospects -- aside from a string of retail and temp office jobs -- they started pursuing bachelor's degrees in biology and neuroscience. Wells said her husband's college awarded him a grant that covers their rent and transportation.

Because of their low income, it's not likely Wells' food assistance would be threatened by the House farm bill.  READ MORE

Will Ties to Pentagon Contractors Push 'Supercommittee' Democrats to Cut Entitlements?

Photo Credit: Department of Defense

AlterNet teams up with Salon and Brave New Foundation to document how Dems on the Congressional "supercommittee" get far more military campaign money and contracts than the GOP.

September 21, 2011

Arizona’s Republican Senator Jon Kyl wasted little time. A member of the bipartisan Congressional “supercommittee” charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions, he did his best to forestall even discussion of cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. “When we had our first meeting the chairman asked, ‘Well what do we think about defense spending?’ and I said, ‘I’m off of the committee if we’re gonna talk about further defense spending,’” he told the audience at a recent forum sponsored by several conservative think tanks.

The Senate Minority Whip may be the most outspoken member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction when it comes to the military budget, but the Democrats currently considering whether to cut the deficit via reductions in defense spending or programs like Medicare and Medicaid have received far more money from Pentagon contractors than Kyl or any of their Republican colleagues on the panel, according to an investigation by AlterNet, with assistance from the Brave New Foundation and Salon.com.

Since 2007, Democrats on the supercommittee have received more than $1 million in defense industry donations, while contributions to the Republicans added up to only $321,000. Panel co-chair Senator Patty Murray, for example, has received more defense industry dollars over that period than the combined total of the top four Republican recipients on the super committee. Even so, her haul from the Pentagon’s weapons-makers isn’t the largest by a panel Democrat, a distinction held by her colleague from South Carolina, John Clyburn. An analysis of official government data paints a disturbing picture of big money, cozy relationships and potential influence that, alongside a concerted lobbying effort by the Pentagon and its powerful defense contractors, makes substantial reductions to the Department of Defense’s budget improbable and steeper cuts to entitlement programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, more likely.
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