More than four years into an economic recovery, poverty and unemployment remain elevated, while the income gains from economic growth have flowed almost exclusively to the top 1 percent of earners. Those are not the hallmarks of a healthy economy, let alone a just society or a stable democracy.
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Yet the pressure for reductions to programs for low-income groups has not subsided, with possible cuts to food stamps and federal unemployment benefits moving to the top of Congress's agenda. The danger, as always, is that Republicans will pull Democrats in their slipstream, winning their agreement to cuts that are deemed acceptable simply because they are not as harsh as Republicans demanded. Lost in the debate is that big cuts already have occurred in both food stamps and federal jobless benefits. Further cuts will only make things worse.
Case in point: House Republicans have proposed $40 billion in food stamp cuts over 10 years in the pending farm bill; the Senate has proposed a tamer $4 billion reduction. The cuts, whatever they turn out to be, will come on top of significant cuts to food stamps that kicked in on Friday, when increases enacted in the 2009 stimulus law expired. That expiration affects all of the nearly 48 million food stamp recipients and, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, works out to about 16 fewer meals a month for a family of three.
Meanwhile, the program for federal unemployment benefits will expire at the end of 2013, unless Congress renews it. Designed to address long-term unemployment, federal benefits begin when state benefits end, usually after 26 weeks, and typically provide an additional 14 to 37 weeks of aid. The current program, begun in 2008, has been renewed many times, though in recent renewals benefits have been cut far more deeply than is warranted by continued high unemployment.
As a result, the program is doing less and less to combat poverty. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently reported that one million jobless workers who fell into poverty in 2012 would have escaped that fate if benefits simply had kept pace with the need.
Even more harm will be done if those benefits, which average $260 a week, are cut again or stopped outright at year-end. Nearly 37 percent of the nation's 11.3 million jobless workers have been out of work for more than six months, still higher by far than at any time before the Great Recession, in records going back to 1948.
It is useful to recall that premature cuts to food stamps and federal unemployment benefits hurt everyone because they reduce consumer spending and, with it, economic growth. There are, in fact, no good reasons at this time for cutting either program, but there are plenty of bad ones.
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