On July 11th, Issues & Insights posted an article about food stamps. The article is about how the media has dealt with the use of food stamps in the past few years. We heard very little about food stamp usage during the time the President Biden was in office. Now it is again important (according to the mainstream media) to bring up the subject.
The article reports:
A headline in Axios over the weekend carried this scary warning: “An increasing share of American adults are going hungry.”
The “shocking data point” comes, the story says, “at a time when the stock market is hitting record highs and President Donald Trump just signed a bill slashing food benefits.”
But take a look at the chart Axios published in that tear-jerking story, which is based on data from Morning Consult. Notice anything?
Look at what has happened since Trump has been in office. It’s back down to where it was nearly two years ago and appears to be moving sideways.
Axios is hardly the only news site to claim that the One Big Beautiful Bill “slashes” food stamps – which now goes under the euphemism Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – and will cause millions to go hungry.
The article concludes:
Instead, Biden was praised for massively expanding spending on food stamps.
In his first year, SNAP spending shot up 43%. The New York Times reported at the time that Biden engineered “the largest permanent increase to benefits in the program’s history,” which will “add billions of dollars to the cost of a program that feeds one in eight Americans.”
All the OBBB does is set food stamp spending back on its previous, pre-Biden course.
Bear in mind that all this information is easily available to any reporter covering this story.
Of course, there’s the deeper problem with all these horror stories – namely, the assumption that a decline in the number of people getting food stamps is a bad thing.
Shouldn’t the goal be that nobody is getting food stamps? That no one is dependent on government to help them afford groceries, because the economy is booming, people are earning decent wages, and inflation is under control?
We can expect more of the media’s “we’re all going to die” scenario as the Big Beautiful Bill goes into effect.