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Journalist Nathan Stone and Producer Josh Carmody invite you to sit down for deep dives on the rapid changes happening in Trump’s new America.
00:00
The United States is a nation of haves and have-nots. Inequality has always been part of the American experience, and nowhere is it more noticeable than when discussing hunger. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is in jeopardy due to the government shutdown. Over 40 million Americans rely on this program to help them feed their families, and as of now, that funding is set to be paused. Welcome.
00:28
to the politics of New America. On the show today, we look at the history of food stamps in America, the current state of American hunger, and the dire impacts of paused SNAP funding. We have a special guest today. Joining myself and producer Josh is Gabrielle Hill Desjardins, who has studied international development and is also the host of the podcast BoopTube.
00:55
which I would say is a very similar program to ours, but that would be quite a lie. uh Gabby, tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your program. So, I like that you pulled up my full first name. It's the name that's on my uh bachelor degree, which I'm staring right at right now. ah But yeah, so I think a little thing about myself. uh I have a Bachelor of Arts in International Development Studies.
01:25
uh And yeah, I'm also the co-host of uh BoopTube, which is our uh reality TV show uh podcast, which, you know... Yeah. I mean... It's on Haunted Bounce. Everyone loves it. It's getting all kinds of views. uh
01:52
It's lovely and everyone loves it. Yeah, you can watch it now in our brand new ballroom. oh Yeah, they demolished the East Wing specifically for boob tube. So you've got a lot to answer for, Oh, yeah. The People's Wing is what they called it. They will call it the boob wing. The boob ballroom, I suppose. Yeah. Also known as the Bill Clinton ballroom.
02:25
So thanks so much for joining us today and uh thank you for returning the favor of coming on my show after I was on your show. I feel like I was kind of a, I know kind of about one thing in terms of, you know, pop culture and reality TV shows. that one thing was Bar Rescue, but you've got, I think, more to bring to the table for PNA here today. Yeah.
02:53
I mean, people think a lot of international development, they think of, that's what it is, international development. Development typically in the, what we would call the developing world, which I don't think is a real word for it because we're, you know, depending on what we are, I could get into like the whole reason why like some regions are more developed than, quote unquote, developed than others, but.
03:22
We're talking about Snap today. We are, we are. And uh I wanted to do a little bit of the history of uh kind of food assistance in America, because Snap is the most modern incarnation of this, but this actually goes back to the nation's founding and even before that. But you brought up something really interesting when we were preparing for the show, and that was that food assistance and a lot
03:50
in international development and even domestic developments have to do with the guiding morals of the day and the governments that set these programs up. Yeah, could you kind of talk about that a little bit because I think that's a really good place to start because what we'll look at later on is kind of this current Republican government's, uh you know, morals in
04:18
in regards to these types of programs. So like, I think the food stamps uh were kind of created from what I Googled in the 1930s. uh And so when we think of the 1930s, we think of the Depression era. And during that whole economic collapse, of course, uh not only the
04:47
poorer people, a lot of the richer people are being affected. So what more than to help the majority of people is to create a program that would benefit all. Now, I feel like the gap between us, the richer and the poorer has definitely gotten a lot wider to the point that uh those who are rich, I feel like won't benefit from those said programs versus that of the poor, which
05:17
typically who it is sort of made for. But I feel like with food stamps, it kind of got that overall every like push to be created because everybody was affected by the crash, not just the poor, poorer people. So. That was my spiel. But. And I think we we see a lot of that, especially in terms of this sort of the morals of.
05:45
the day or of the party affecting the policies and how these programs are implemented. What we're seeing with the big beautiful bill, for example, it changed SNAP benefits to have more onus on people working, To say that to get these benefits you have to have worked so much. Now, most SNAP recipients work either full or
06:14
close to full time. It's actually up close to around 75 percent. And the ones that can't are usually on, you know, disability benefits of some sort. So working age people that are receiving SNAP overwhelmingly do work. It's just they're not being paid enough, which is another issue when your society is not providing jobs that pay enough for people to eat. uh But
06:42
So yeah, we are kind of seeing that and and I think I wanted to start there because when we go back in history, we kind of see how these these programs grew out of the the morals of the times and and how they adapted to changes usually slowly but sometimes like in the Great Depression they had to do it quite quickly because a society that doesn't
07:11
or isn't able to uh feed its citizens, isn't a society that is sustained for very long. So I actually wanted to start even before the United States, so back in England before, of course, the colonies. so their system of public assistance was kind of one of the first proto-forms of kind of
07:42
this aid to evolve. Hey, some bread? want a little... Here's a snifter of wine? know, there you go. Yeah. these things were, they were done, and they were actually mainly done by the church. And the government in England actually told the church that this was going to be something that was, they expected the church to do, was to feed the poor.
08:11
And a lot of this was done through alms, through charitable giving. It started with the churches and it started as kind of an uncoordinated network of uh charities through these churches and through private donors uh supported by the Christian church. so this system kind of grew out of that. It eventually became more uh centralized and more administered uh in an organized way.
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and with state involvement. Some of the things that you would have seen in those early years are things like the poor houses, for example. So the classic Oliver Twist, please sir, can I have some more? You know, these things were run by the churches. Which is a terrible example. Yeah. Clearly he wasn't allowed to have any more. They were like, no, you can't. Yeah. So that they were uh
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really only kind of around the poor houses kind of came in around the Victorian era, Those kind of mid 1800s time period. ah But the system itself, this kind of codified uh responsibility of the churches to help the poor and the hungry, uh actually dates back as far as 1601. uh So I start with England because
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When America was founded, before it was its own independent state, the pilgrims and the first settlers that came over took their cues from this English law around what should be done about people who were poor and destitute. America, though, in its proto-stage had a real
10:08
issue with this um because England uh was far more, well, firstly, was far smaller and more condensed. was more people, but there was more industry. There was more of everything going on, right? So there was more economic activity to uh support charity, to support the churches, right? The alms were higher. And so
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they ran into a little bit uh of struggle in those kind of early years.
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There was just not a lot of productivity uh in the early colonies.
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Now, think a lot. Sorry, I don't want me to interrupt. Feel free to cut this, I think like a lot of it, too, is I think what also like what a lot of people fail to realize is a lot of industry has been sort of built upon, like various like labor and stuff like that, like especially when it comes to like colonialism and like a lot of the I guess the way that our world works.
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now when it comes to like the economy and stuff like that really comes from like a the Industrial Revolution and be like colonialism, like getting resources like that doesn't really belong to us, but sort of taking it and the concept of new neoliberalism. So yeah, no worries. So yeah, that's a good point. The the other
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difference that the United States had um was the dominant kind of religious and societal views at the time was Puritanism. And Puritanism is pretty hardcore in terms of work ethic and was generally quite- No shit. Because I think the Puritans left like-
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the UK because it was quote unquote too loose. Yeah, they wanted somewhere where they could really repress themselves. Yeah. These these fucking whores. Oh, I'm going to go over where I'm to make a new state. I'm to call it Massachusetts. I'm to make a place called Boston. Yeah. All those fucking whores back there. They don't have any idea what we're going to come here and do. But yeah, that's that's what happened.
12:49
I love to think that all of the Puritans already had the Boston accent way before Boston was founded. I wish that they did. Clearly, based on my interpretation of things, I wish that they did. I mean, the audience may not know this, but Josh actually a master historian and reenactor. So you're pretty much set with him. yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, early American poverty laws.
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continued kind of that Elizabethan tradition of the English kind poor laws and
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The poverty laws that kind of grew organically in the United States after it started kind of becoming a separate culture were very harsh. didn't see it as their responsibility unless the poor and the hungry had no immediate family.
13:55
Otherwise it was supposed to be your family that supported you if if you were out of work or you know hurt yourself or whatever for whatever reason you weren't living that Puritan lifestyle uh Do you think that the Puritans kind of births will well sometime like kind of birth and emerge the hustler culture? Where it's like You know you work for yourself you work you work you work you hustle you hustle you get that bread you
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I mean, back in those days, it was literally, get that bread. I think it's a mix of that Puritan, yeah, that Puritan kind of undercurrent that still is prevalent in American society. But I also think that it's other Christian sects as well. I think it's really big amongst uh Mormons, quite frankly. And I think a lot of what we see today was kind of started
14:53
uh, by that, because they, tend to have a lot of side hustles, you know? Um, yeah, don't know that's a cultural thing or if that's- It takes a Puritan to ignore thy neighbor, but it takes a Mormon to really like put the screws to him. Yeah. I mean, for those who don't know, like with Mormon, like Mormonisms, they, they often do pay a tithe to their church. Um, I think it's like 10%.
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of your income. It's big. Yeah, it is pretty big. Yeah, it is. like Mormonism is, I think, a creation from American capitalism. is a uniquely American branch of Christianity. Yeah. And I think it shows in the way that it has evolved, uh because it definitely is. No shit. uh So.
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Yeah, so we see as things develop in America, at first it is very harsh. even had laws against, or sorry, they had rules against not helping people who weren't from their community. So there was, they were called settlement laws to keep outsiders and strangers from moving into their communities and qualifying for any sort of relief from the church.
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right? So if you were, say, you know, traveling vagabond, you got your little hobo bindle, you're not riding the rails, because those won't be around for a couple hundred years, but you're making it from town to town. uh They were um very, very strict against you trying to settle down in their town and trying to get any of their bread. thank God I've got my bindle.
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And some of the punishments could be very harsh and very kind of corporal in kind of sending people on their way. um Of course, America has always loved its three strike program. So one of the examples that I read was a, if the first time you were caught, basically caught uh being in a community you weren't supposed to be in as someone who was unemployed and, you know, looking for handouts or what have you, uh you would be
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flogged or whipped the second time, they would cut off your ears and the third time they would hang you. So don't be poor, I guess. Or hungry. Three strikes! Three strikes, Whoa, okay, whoa. I thought like three strikes like, okay, you know, might get like tamed on the ass. no. So like, so second strike is getting your ears cut off? Yeah.
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So like, yeah, if we're at the third strike, you might as well like give up. Like, that's wild. Yeah. Wow. So, um, so this, this system persisted quite a long time, honestly, where it where it fell to communities to families into the church. There wasn't really a great push to have governments, either state or federal involved until
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the first great shock of American capitalism, which was, of course, the Great Depression. And so this was a dual problem, actually. And the way that food stamps were born was in the Great Depression, as Gabby mentioned. But there was... Yeah, there was a dual problem. Firstly, you had uh suddenly just a tremendous unemployment rate overnight, right?
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businesses closed, banks failed, there was runs on banks, everyone was out of money. uh So there was this widespread uh economic disaster.
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There was an ins... the depression caused an instability in commodities markets. What that led to was a crash in food prices. And a crash that was so devastating that farmers weren't selling their crops because they couldn't... they had very few people to sell them to, very few businesses to sell them to.
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but also the prices were so low that there was almost no point to doing it. So the federal farm board in 1930 purchased just huge swaths of wheat to prop up the price of grain. And while this was going on, public demand for food assistance reached an all time high in America. so politicians started
20:00
trying to be like, okay, we need to marry these two, this is ridiculous. We have too much food and we have widespread hunger. um And because of the intricacies of capitalism being that if you can't do something for a profit, it makes it not worth your while to do it, as well as if you have too much of something in capitalism,
20:27
too much of a supply, that is a bad thing, right? So despite the fact that you have millions of people who are starving in the streets, if you use those vast quantities of wheat and other produce that you had to feed them, there is no market. And without market, there isn't a capitalist system. So during this time, uh farmers and stuff were actually burying huge crops.
20:56
while there was massive hunger on the streets. So something had to be done about this. There was also a huge amount of political unrest at the time because if people can't get food, they quickly look to other options that might help them get food. One of these big options at the time, of course, was communism. The Bolsheviks in Russia, of course, became the big boogeyman uh after World War I.
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uh both in Europe and in the United States. But the United States had a large uh kind of communist movement that was starting in the cities like it had started in Europe. And their whole motto was fight, don't starve. Right? Because the communists, as soon as the Great Depression happened, they were like, well, we told you so. We told you this capitalism was all going to end in tears. And so they were mobilizing. And uh
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FDR, because he was the president for 90 % of important American events in the 20th century, saw this and uh he and Congress kind of came to, you know, this is how the New Deal was born, but this was also how food stamps were born. So they had a lot of kind of plates to juggle, right, with this.
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Um, but they, sorry, sorry. I think you spin plates. You plates. Yeah. I am mixing my metaphors. Don't want it. Don't want it. Don't want to be the stickler here, but just want to make sure everyone knows you do not juggle plates. You spin them. uh So Congress did eventually pass legislation that sent the surplus of wheat to hungry Americans.
22:50
And similar kind of distributions occurred after that in the early 30s. In 1933, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, the FSRC, was created by Congress and it began operations to relieve the twin problems of hunger and oversupply of food.
23:19
And it started buying up. um They basically went full state intervention. They started buying up the food from the farmers at a market price and distributing it to the unemployed. And I know it's a really novel idea and it did take them like four years to come up with it, but you know, it's fine. um So there was in this
23:48
In this kind proto-food era, um they basically had state welfare agencies that this federal organization gave the food to. And there weren't really much in the way of reporting requirements or monitoring for these, right? They just kind of, they handed them out. You need food? Come get food kind of thing, right? um
24:17
There was lot of worry about abuse and fraud and some people getting more than they needed and some people getting less.
24:29
there was some selling going on, a secondary black market of food, of people who got more and then would sell the excess type of thing. they wanted- It sounds like you're describing a scalper's market. I am. My god. Yeah. it's Ticketmaster. Back in the day, it was cabbages. It's the same system. I could-
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I could go on and on about ticket master. Oh my God. I have a question though. Yeah. I don't know if you could answer this for me, but when it comes to like the whole like American agriculture, did they just like, did they just have like, like just a couple specific crops, like for example, wheat was their main, and then they would have like, say X amount of like, vegetables or anything like that. And
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I guess the second part to that is, um depending on how big that crop, how much of it is just, for example, wheat, so that comes to flour, and does that become almost like a sort of food desert where people aren't getting all of their nutritional needs? That's a really good question. it is a limited supply of crops. was, I think, uh originally somewhere around a dozen that they were having a problem with.
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throughout the the years the early food stamp era years, what they would do is they would actually take kind of a census of what crops they had in oversupply. And those were the things that you could purchase with the food stamps when they came in. So it was always just a, what do we have extra of? Okay, give it to the poor. Right? there wasn't really a thought towards balanced nutrition. There wasn't really a thought.
26:21
towards sustainability of the program. It was more of a, have two problems, let's use one to solve the other. especially in those early years, was a very kind of helter skelter, just juggling. You also see that a lot in countries and continents like in Africa or any places that they like say grow a lot of, say, crops for.
26:51
Like you see a lot of it just like it's mainly grown for production of XYZ and then the rest is sort of, you know, given to like the people. I think a lot of it, it also comes to the fact of like stripping down like these fields that were like traditionally grown for like ah the whole community, not just for creating a product. And I feel like it's sort of
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going to the fact of um it creates what is called like food deserts, where people don't have access to say, nutritional items like vegetables, fruits, like healthy grains or anything like that. So this is why this also why you see a lot of uh
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like rise in obesity, say like in um the rust belt or anything like that. Is this the kind of thing that would... So you mentioned kind of replacing community farmland or gardens and that kind of thing with kind of like the, okay, we're incorporating you into a supply chain. You're going to grow this one thing. is that, do we see that like, is that both domestic?
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and international? is that kind of an effect that you would see in a developing nation as well where it would cause harm? It's also like not just saying for farming, like agriculture, you could see it a lot with like, for example, like a cobalt vein is maybe found in like this region of Africa, like everything's kind of dug up and the resources are extracted and
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Not only like you have natural resources, you also have human resources, like people mining and mining and then everything in that community just becomes mining. Okay, yeah. Because everything else has been sort of stripped away or kind of plowed down to create like the mine or the people who work the mine or people who sort of are in charge of the mine. uh
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I think you could also take into the fact of uh the Appalachians, like in Virginia and stuff like that, where you have these mining towns have, I guess, now become ghost towns. Because I think during the whole mining age of the Appalachians, you see this in this beautiful documentary, Harlan County, USA, where a mining community is fighting for the right for a union.
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or also to have better pay, but you see it a lot where mining towns will have specific payments. Like say they'll have a specific currency just for that store or just for that laundry mat or something. Yeah, the company store. Yeah. And so that also how you create communities that would
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rely heavily on SNAP because, you know, it's a land that's been sort of plagued with poverty because they didn't have access to actual real money that would work outside of their town, outside of the company town. Yeah. If I can add something on to just what Gaby has said, yeah, I've encountered so many people who
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say, like, if you want to see true poverty, look at Appalachia. Like, it is absolutely true poverty. People who are, like, actually living in, like, know, mud houses and, like, weird shit, like, absolutely, like, true poverty. Yeah. And, like, this...
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coming from the whole Puritan thing. These people are working themselves to death because they worked their whole lives in the mine and yet, you know. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you definitely see it to a lesser extent in the Rust Belt. And you see, I think that's really interesting because I never thought about it as kind of organic communities that sprung up in places where communities
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traditionally have, so near water sources, with farmland or whatever, then you get uh a company that's either agricultural or resource extraction or what have you comes in, alters the makeup of that town. And then when they leave, either because, you know, we've moved on to a different energy source or, you know, the jobs are all outsourced, then there is no organic community left to fall back on, right? There is only the one thing.
32:01
That's really interesting, yeah. And the different, sort of like, one more thing, the different kinds of farming is kind of like different because I feel like the more, for example, like corn or wheat or anything like that, have such like a, like these are huge fields versus like, for example, crops that are used for like, in a community sense, for example, looking back to
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the indigenous populations in America, uh or North America and Turtle Island as a whole. Like they had their own sort of, I think it's like the Three Sisters growing where they would have corn, squash, and I forget the other one, but it's sort of used in sort of to help.
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grow and to benefit each other, sort of help not only the plants grow, but the people grow because it's good food. um when you go- Climbing beans are the last one. beans, yes. And these are sort of the way it's grown is made specifically to help nurture the soil, to help grow the plants well with-
33:22
say corn, it's just corn, corn, corn, corn, corn. They're using a lot of water, like for irrigation and stuff like that. And they're also using like chemicals and sort of everything because I feel like uh on that large mass scale, corn is not supposed to grow like that. yeah. Oh, that's really interesting. uh So the the original food stamps
33:52
The way it worked was that you got, you would spend X amount of dollars, right? So the money you would normally spend on food, you would spend that on food stamps instead. And those were red stamps. And it was a one for one, right? Every dollar you spent, you got a dollar in food stamps. But by taking the extra step of turning your dollars into food stamps before you turned them, you you spent the money on food, you also got...
34:22
half again, so 50 % of that value as blue food stamps. So red food stamps could be spent on anything, any type of food you wanted. The blue food stamps could be spent on that kind of overabundance that we were talking about, right? Whatever crops were in season and they had too much of. And so that changed ah as the seasons changed, as the years went on and different crops came and went off of that list.
34:49
But basically it gave you a little bit of a boost in terms of what your money would buy you. So that was the first program. And that program um lasted for a while. uh It basically um went through the Great Depression and into the first years of the Second World War.
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In 1943, the program was ended. And it was kind of a good news, bad news situation. The good news was uh everyone, know, employment was skyrocketed uh during World War II. The bad news was, of course, it was World War II. So, you know, you were either a soldier or you were in a munitions plant or you were building aircraft or something. uh But because of that, there was a lot of
35:46
employment, there was a lot of jobs, it wasn't the same economy that it had been for the previous uh decade. So fast forward to after the war, there was still food surpluses. because of that, prices were depressed. And so the federal government reintroduced a slightly revised version of the food stamp program.
36:15
And by 1959, the program was in 1300 counties across the nation and basically would provide a family of four with set quantities of food from these oversupplied foodstuffs. I would also assume it's because
36:43
A lot of these people didn't have a breadwinner. Like they lost their men in the war. it's not like, oh, it just is for everybody. They are kind of addressing the fact that they killed most of their men in World War II. Yeah. And this...
37:08
revamped program was quite limited in the type of food it supplied so like you couldn't get meat for example with it um and so foods like I like that we were all like like yeah Tommy I can't even get a fucking dry steak in this whatever the fuck yeah all right okay cool whatever okay like I guess also like sort of the fact of like
37:37
I don't know, lot more, of course, because lot of our women are affected because, of course, the husbands are dead. But also, once the war was over, these women who were working in the munitions factory are like, well, war's over. You dames better get back in the kitchen. I mean, yeah, that's that's there's there was there was a lot of that. Yeah. And then, yeah. And then again, a lot of them had no husband. I was like.
38:05
Yeah, get back to our regular rule. Also, the person that you were like helping support is dead. Yeah. So I don't know. Good luck. I like to think like, I mean, there's also like, I guess the VA Veterans Affairs, but I like how much money would they help out all those poor widows with? Like, I would feel like they would have a limited source of money to dish out. That's 100 percent correct. And
38:34
And it was the same with the churches, because the churches would still run food banks and that kind of thing, right? But they're all so limited in scope compared to what the federal government can do. spoiler alert for our current times, we're about to find that out again. uh So the important thing to know about the 1959 kind of reintroduction of this food assistance program, it wasn't actually food stamps.
39:04
It was just kind of a, it was a separate program. uh President Kennedy in 61 revived the idea of a food stamp program and wanted to make a permanent food stamp program. And so by 64, Congress passed the first Food Stamp Act, which brought food stamps back. And honestly, I'm going to tell you this, I have so much history on food stamps, but we have to talk about current stuff.
39:34
So I'm gonna say this food stamps have gone through more changes the policies around food stamps than anything I have encountered for this show it is insane uh there is basically every administration does something to food stamps and so usually it's that push-pull of Democrats expanding the program Republicans constricting the program or trying to constrict the
40:03
how you the eligibility for it. Yeah, sort of to like go back on like the sort of how the beliefs of the party reflect the policies. So I think, you know, I'm not saying all Democrats, but like, like, there's a majority of Democrats who have that. I don't want to say left leaning, I feel like a lot of them are sort of centrist, but uh
40:32
have that sort of deal of, um know, the government is for the people in the sort of sense of uh the people is a community. We are part of this community. We need to work together as a community. Now, that's not like saying that's the whole like a whole Democratic Party because, you know, there I think there is a couple of Democrats or a few Democrats that sort of voted. uh
41:02
in favor of what Trump is sort of enlisting with the snap rollbacks, versus that of like, I feel like it's like the Republican side, which is like mainly in that Puritan sense of everybody's working for their money. is, it's me, my job. I'm a red-blooded American. This is what I want. And why is my money going towards, say, Joe across the street who is
41:32
quote, unquote, not working. But in reality, Joe has a disability or Joe has is incapable of working or for whatever Joe is going through. uh And maybe Joe just needs a little bit of help. Maybe he's like living. He's living in today time where he has the job. He's working like 70 hours a week, but it's not enough money to cover rent and food. So. Yeah, you're you're spot on, absolutely. And
42:03
Just to illustrate uh kind of that classic Republican feeling on it. uh So one thing I'll say is that participation in the program grew and grew over the decades. part of that was just the fact that uh America grew. The population grew, especially after the baby boom. But...
42:27
it declined somewhat. Especially as an understatement. But in the 90s there was a bit of a decline and that was because there was a bit of a boom starting in the mid 90s. uh Republicans took that opportunity and a very Republican Democrat president uh at the time signed it into law to uh introduce what was called
42:54
the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. And... Wait, who signed this in? Oh, Clinton. Oh, It's Clinton. You knew it was going to be Clinton. Yeah. Yeah. Because I kind of heard what you said. think... Yeah. Okay. Just go on. So this...
43:23
Act basically uh constricted the eligibility and created those stringent work requirements to get food stamps and to access the program. m And it's funny because it was in the one time really where there's been a decrease in the use of the program. um
43:53
After the dot com bust, after things got crazy in the 2000s of course, the program ballooned again. Eventually they changed the name so it was called the Food Stamp Program for the longest time. uh Now it's called SNAP. uh so SNAP, for anyone who doesn't know, is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It's a friendlier name, it's a bit of a mouthful.
44:19
But it was changed from the food stamp program because food stamps started to get a negative connotation around them, mostly because uh Republicans, by and large, uh this was to them, this was a welfare handout and there was, know, people were using food stamps and they would get, you know, harassed at grocery stores or wherever. uh that all comes off of the Reagan era. Yes. Reagan.
44:48
Famously is the one who coined the term welfare Queen and It's from him that we get this idea that uh People who are using these programs are abusing them Immediately soon as they as soon as they come into fruition. They are being abused Yeah, and and it is it is from the the kind of the the mouth of Ronald Reagan
45:17
that we have this that they are being abused and that it should be stopped. We have to stop it. Otherwise, we're going to lose five hundred thousand dollars and we can't give that five hundred thousand dollars to a billionaire. My God. Who could possibly look at a future where we can't give five hundred thousand dollars to a billionaire instead of to a poor woman trying to feed her children? My God.
45:47
Jesus fucking Christ. know. What a world. The food stamp program was honestly one of Reagan's favorite targets in the early part of his presidency. in 1982 placed a temporary freeze on adjustments to the program, increased disqualifications and added a
46:14
Additional kind of eligibility tests. So just made it harder for everyone and worse And I also wanted to just be clear to everybody like Ronald Reagan's life was about handouts That's like all he ever did. That's all he ever got he was an actor who was like kind of the head of a lot of unions like he kind of like became like kind of a union man, but then
46:43
quickly abandoned that because he was given like a house that was I believe supplied by GE and you can look up interviews with his youngest, one of his youngest sons because he's got other children who are absolutely bananas. the throat goat didn't sire all of his children?
47:09
No, no, no, like, from the same woman. Don't worry, don't worry. The throat goat presented all of them. But Ronald Reagan Jr. has has talked about this and there are like other things you you can look into. But they were given like a house that had kind of like, like automatic blinds, like things that like, like went and stuff and like they had like kind of like an experimental house.
47:39
And this was like coming off of him being the like head of, uh, you know, uh, a union for like actors and he immediately abandoned all of the kind of union stuff. So he was like, kind of given this house by like GE. had, yeah. Automatic blinds, like general electric. Yeah. General electric. So they had like kind of the newest stuff, but
48:06
Uh, you know, and he became this kind of spokesperson for that and, and it quickly the house fell into disrepair, but that kind of started the version of Reagan that was as soon as another rich person showed up, like it was whatever this person said goes. And so that was kind of the Reagan thing was like, Oh, uh, I'm just the spokesperson for the next thing.
48:35
Yes. If you want to know how Reagan's views on unions changed, ask an air traffic controller. They'll tell you. Those poor, poor guys and gals working for no pay at one of the most uh necessary jobs that is incredibly high stress. Yeah, it's wild that there's any left at all, I think. uh
49:06
But yeah, just to kind of bring us up to speed here. uh So around 1988, they started trying out electronic uh delivery systems for food stamps, so cards that way, ah because they were generally more secure and easier to track than the old style. so nowadays you won't see food stamps at all, which is a shame because they actually are quite
49:36
If you go back and look at the 1930s version, they're quite intricately done. think Lady Liberty's on the, or I think Columbia. It was just physically just like a kind of something you bust out of a piece of paper, Yep. And they were literally color-coded red and blue. yeah, they're quite nice. So some of the more recent changes.
50:05
to food now SNAP came in 2008 where it was expanded uh because of, of course, the great recession and yeah. The 2014 Agricultural Act as well. uh Now this was an Obama one. um Changed kind of some of the rules around where and how you could use them, but
50:34
Again, this is all just administration's kind of...
50:39
pushing and pulling at each other, right? Making it easier, making it harder. um The latest one, of course, was the big, beautiful bill. And that has uh increased eligibility requirements. It has increased the uh amount of kind of proof of work that you need to be doing if you are considered able-bodied. There's uh several things that make it harder to access.
51:09
Uh, but- absolutely. mean, who's the current speaker of the house? Oh, Mike Johnson. So, yeah, Mike Johnson just recently very eloquently put it to us that uh he's like, no, uh we've removed all the people who don't actually need it. He was talking about how like, oh no, there was able-bodied men.
51:38
who are now like, they should have been working, they aren't, and now they're off of it. Like, oh, thank God, like Mike Johnson, a very trustworthy man is telling us that it's all right now. I wonder, because the idea, it's ever shifting, uh especially when it comes to like disability activists and stuff like that, like helping sort of.
52:07
not really pave the way, sort of get more recognition, I think, for people of like changing the idea of what an able-bodied person is. I have a feeling like it's versus like what I feel like specifically like a lot of people in the Senate and a lot of people even today are so.
52:33
under the notion of if you have two working legs, you can work. But in reality, that's just not true. um There isn't a lot of nuance that is welcome as far as the Republican Party is concerned on this issue and a lot of other ones. yeah, SNAP and food assistance in general seems to be
53:02
It's always been a real sticking point, but no administration has been quite as aggressive at attacking it, mostly because a lot of Republican voters are on snap, right? A lot of, like you say, in the Rust Belt, for example, right? That's deep red country. But it's also impoverished in a lot of ways. yeah, this is feel it's probably.
53:32
It's, I didn't mean to cut you off, it's, I feel like it's because even though it's like such a hard, such an impoverished area, feel like probably because it's like the whole belief system and mentality of like, you know, back like, like, think probably during the war, even then, like, it's like, the we are uh rednecks, we work for our money. uh We
54:00
We work for our families. We don't get handouts because we are quote unquote real, you know, real Americans. This is what we do. And it's playing, I think, on like that whole American centrism. I think it's like the word I kind of want to go for. It's it's an all American exceptionalism. Yeah, I think it is. Yeah. Like they they kind of see themselves as you know, even though like they might have to give something up.
54:29
and live off the land, it's still better than communism or whatever it is. But it negates the fact that they're getting absolutely fucked by their own government. And sorry, and just one more thing. It's sort of in the fact of like, it's like that whole thing. If you just work hard, you can achieve that American dream. um And it's I feel like it's also like coming from the fact of like
54:59
If I work so hard for this money, I don't want to give any of it up for this person who I don't know.
55:07
Yeah, I think a lot of it's that there's there's also been some misrepresentation of who's getting it, of course. Of course. It's always, you know, the illegal immigrants. That's not happening. It's not a thing that happens. They don't just hand these cards out. I think it also comes back to, uh Gabby, what you said about like kind of the poor people of Appalachia, that like it is such extreme poverty.
55:35
to think that any bit of that is going to somebody else when they are already suffering so much is an extreme position to take for them. Like to think that it could go away, something that could be for them. And it makes sense because they're suffering. And I think that that also comes uh with sentimentality of it because it's
56:06
I think it's like a rebranding of the Republican Party of it being like America first, you know, that make America great again. And I don't know a whole lot of the Obama administration or the administrations before that. And I don't know how the policies kind of affected places like in Appalachia or the Rust Belt or any like places that
56:35
receive the most SNAP benefits but are also red states. I will say right now just as a statistic thing, uh the South generally has the most SNAP benefits. So the old Confederacy, it's one of those when you look at a map, it's one of those ones where you see where you're just like, man, the Civil War really never healed that scar. There's so many
57:03
maps of American demographics, of societal issues and stuff, where you're just like, oh, and there's the Confederacy. Found it. uh So it is similar to that. uh But just to give us some stats to go off of here. So there's about 42 million people in the United States who get federal food assistance. That's absolutely huge number. So that's about one in eight US residents. SNAP?
57:33
provides them an average of $187 a month. Sorry, what? How much a month? $187. That's it. That's it. That's it. This is what we're, yeah. That's what I pay in for like a two week, at the least, like for groceries. Yeah. Well, because this program has been altered so many times by so many
58:02
consecutive governments that it only really works if you're working or receiving other benefits, right? It's it's a it is supplemental ah It doesn't cover everything. It's it's much like a lot of the the medical insurance in the United States We're like wait, why does it only cover 75 or 80 %? I mean, what am I paying for? The snap is is kind of like that um so to to qualify for snap uh
58:31
Firstly, you do have to be an American citizen. I'm going to repeat that because it really, you have to be an American citizen. But your income has to be less than 130 % of the federal poverty line, which is $1,632 a month for one person or $2,215 for a two-person household on average. And the states administer the program.
59:02
day to day, and so they get the money from the feds, they disperse it to the people, and those benefits are paid out monthly. So this is a program that, while being absolutely necessary, is still just at its best allowing people to kind of scrape by. You you're not buying steak with your SNAP money. uh So cost-wise, so last year...
59:30
The program has become more costly over time, has everything, but last year it cost $100.3 billion during 2024, which is about 1.5 % of all US federal spending.
59:49
And it falls under the Department of Agriculture um in federal departments. So those are kind of the primary stats here. And $100 billion is a lot of money. um It's about $200 billion less than the United States gives Lockheed Martin every year for their services. But you know. You got to keep those locks under check. I don't know. You got to.
01:00:19
You got to fund the war machine, man. Yeah, I mean, look, hellfire missiles. We were just actually know those missiles are missiles are fucking cool. What? Yeah, like absolute death machine. Yeah, pretty fucking cool. And those F-35s, know, a lot of a lot of really expensive nuts and bolts in those. Oh, yeah. It's a big thing.
01:00:43
Someone will correct me on this. Yeah, going to correct myself. Because jet warfare is like, you know, new and something we still do. Yeah. Hellfire missiles, think, are made by Raytheon and not Lockheed Martin. We just want them to make stuff that goes fast. So here's where everything gets far more depressing. yeah, I said one in eight.
01:01:12
roughly Americans, requires food assistance, is food insecure. When you look at children, the demographic of children, it's 20 % of American children. So that's one in five children that are food insecure. Now, that's not to say that one in five children are going hungry in an average day, because most parents...
01:01:40
uh will sacrifice their own food before they skimp on their children's food. uh But these are families that are uh struggling. And in some rural counties, child food insecurity rates are as high as 50%.
01:02:04
So this is, hunger in America has just been growing and it's a growing problem. Even as of course the country spends more and more of its resources on other priorities like policing and military, the 100 billion is just not enough, right? We see that it's $187 on average. It's just not covering.
01:02:32
what it needs to cover for people to feed their families. um The other thing to realize is because of changes to the program and eligibility requirements, it's estimated more than two in five people that are facing hunger in the United States are not eligible for SNAP since their incomes exceed the eligibility threshold, which has been raised and raised, of course.
01:03:00
to try and get people off of the program. So there's a national um
01:03:10
The national food budget shortfall is what it's called and it reflects the extra money that people who are food insecure report needing to cover their food needs. Right now stands at $32 billion for nationally, which translates to about $22.37 a week per person on average. And so that number has been going up as well.
01:03:40
This is kind of the shortfall that just grows and grows, right? That snowballs for people. They just can't afford it. uh This is, ah yeah, to illustrate this issue, I believe it was um a writer, oh my God, routers, uh the ah news organizing, they interviewed... uh
01:04:09
Cynthia Kirkhart, is the CEO of the Facing Hunger Food Bank in Huntington, West Virginia. And they were talking about the various things in her community, but she said something really salient that I kind of clipped and wanted to highlight here.
01:04:29
She says the reality is, and this is despite, you know, wealthy donors coming in, stepping in, and despite, you know, people, just regular Americans giving to the food banks, the reality is there's not a ton we can do on our own. For every meal we provide, SNAP provides nine. We can't make up that difference. And philanthropy cannot replace government support. And that's kind of the long and the short of it. There is about, it f—
01:04:58
If this continues, there's about to be 42 million Americans that have to start worrying where their next meals come from or where their kids next meals come from. That is not a healthy society. is not a s- these aren't people who can make good decisions and people are going to start making bad decisions because of that. Bad decisions don't happen in a vacuum. People don't wake up one day and say, hey, I'm going to, you know, start ripping people off. You know, I'm going to do some fraud because I need money. I'm going to, you know-
01:05:27
rob a convenience store, I'm going to steal from a grocery store. Bad ideas start from bad situations. And this is going to put 42 million Americans in a very bad situation. this is the type of thing where we either need a government, we need a deal from the Senate to get the government open again.
01:05:57
But there is kind of a ray of hope here. what I mean by that is a federal judge uh ruled yesterday, so October 31st, uh basically saying that the Trump administration cannot suspend food aid during this government shutdown. The problem is, and that's a win for sure.
01:06:27
But the problem is um that the government still has to find the money somewhere if they want to follow this judge's ruling. the judge did say that emergency funding can be used. The government always keeps emergency funds during a government shutdown to pay uh for necessary things. um However, that uh
01:06:55
emergency money would run out fairly quickly if they go into that. And of course the administration is fighting this and say that they just don't have any money to do this, right? The well is dry, I believe was the quote from the agricultural secretary, Brooke Rollins. So.
01:07:25
This is one of those things where we get to see.
01:07:30
much we have strayed from the rule of law, right? If the Republicans ignore this order, or if they get a shadow docket decision from the Supreme Court, which is always the Supreme Court willing to uh go to bat for the Trump administration, then that the judiciary ceases to be
01:07:58
a way for people to fight back against this. However, this ruling that came down yesterday, if it still carries weight, then at least for a while we might see some relief, even if it's not the full program that we have been seeing. So it's definitely not a thing that you should give up hope on, especially if you're someone who has, you know, uses these programs.
01:08:28
But modern history tells us that the Trump administration does not feel the need, nor is it pressured by, can it be pressured by the judiciary in ways that other administrations could? So. it can't even be pressured by its own constituents, like the people who voted for
01:08:51
So I will say, like, if you are someone who voted for the Trump administration, you still are listening to this and you do need these benefits. Again, I will try to include some links uh in the kind of text of oh this show that will hopefully give you some relief, especially now, as you said, like we're getting into this late government shutdown.
01:09:21
There are many, many people who are going without food. And I do not care if you voted for Trump or if you voted for Kamala. There is people out there who are trying to make sure that food is coming to you, coming to anybody who needs this, because it is unacceptable ah that this is happening, that they are withholding food as a
01:09:50
political device to get what they want and what they want is to give money to more billionaires. So I'm hoping that we can include some links. I'm hoping that we've at least said something that rings true to you. ah I don't know. I don't know. I'm at a loss for words. just it is.
01:10:19
very shocking to me that they are withholding food from people, especially in the month of November for Americans. November is like the month. Americans don't give a shit about Christmas. They give a shit about Thanksgiving. That's this month. They're fucking people over in the craziest way. It's unacceptable.
01:10:48
unprecedented quite frankly. um Gabby, do you have any final thoughts to uh end us off here? um
01:11:00
It's... to go off of Josh's, like it's... I'm not surprised in the sort of fact that this would kind of happen. I am a little bit flabbergasted. Like it's...
01:11:17
It's just sort of the thing of, you know, it's...
01:11:24
Changing one's sort of ideology and sort of things to like see the benefits of helping thy neighbor. I mean, it's let me let me try to reframe my thoughts.
01:11:44
it's kind of like a not surprised he's and i i have a feeling that um
01:11:56
they're cutting funding or they're rolling back aid for policies like SNAP for, of course, to give money to millionaires. But I think now for Trump's presidency, this is now just the vanity project. He's, you know, reimagining the image.
01:12:24
of being the president of the United States. He's making it into his own little Mar-a-Lago, um I guess Mar-a-Lago too, if you may, but it's, I mean, Trump is a businessman. And going back to that uh pilgrim, I guess mindset of.
01:12:51
And even now, that hustler mindset, uh he thinks like a businessman. He doesn't think like a politician. He's, he doesn't think like a community leader because that's what I mean, it's a pretty big fucking community, but you're still the leader of a community. So he doesn't think like one. And so of course his actions are not going to reflect that of the way it should be.
01:13:24
Yeah, it's the type of thing where I think Trump
01:13:32
represents to his base, right, that Puritan, that classical Puritan American entrepreneurial dream, right? Now, history, of course, bears out just the opposite. mean, he's a nepo baby. He's had everything handed to himself, to him. But again, I think the narrative that
01:14:03
the Trump administration has woven around itself, right, is a return to classical American values. Even if that narrative is entirely fictional. But because of that, they can, they do have a little bit more leeway, I think, with their base, even when they're hurting their base, to do this kind of what they would probably call like a tough love approach, right?
01:14:32
Even when it's destroying lives and families and driving people to desperation. mean, with Trump, like what I said that, like I feel like with everything like coming from this, because this all kind of stems for, you know, the idea of like the neoliberal mindset, because that's what Trump's whole idea is thinking of. Like you're working, you're working, you get everything. And, and I think
01:15:01
what I said before with that oh businessman mindset. And that applies for a lot of politicians as well. I'm not just saying it's only Trump, but he just takes it. It's like he takes it and it's like the Bain serum. It just turns it up to a fucking million. He just turns it to like this monster of neoliberal capitalist fuck shit. Pardon my language. I don't know if he could swear on this.
01:15:29
You can. Yeah, no, we we we. I think there was like an era where I was like trying to keep it to like PG 13, where there was like one fuck shit. Perhaps I think like it's just as it goes on, it's like, no, there's just too much going on. You got to say fuck shit like multiple times. This is it. This is it. Normal. And this shouldn't be normal. No, no, it's it's it's it's absurd.
01:15:59
And I am gonna pull producer privilege now because we are a thousand percent over the normal time frame of this episode. if uh you wanna wrap it up for us here. All right, that's where we're gonna leave this one tonight. Gabby, thanks so, much for joining us. I'm sure we'll have you on again in the future. And for anyone else...
01:16:27
there who is looking ah to help or for help. You know, we will post some resources in the show notes, but also, you know, look around, talk to people in your community. A lot of churches still do food and aid outreach and our fingers are squarely crossed that whatever happens, SNAP benefits return.
01:16:57
very, very quickly. So we'll see you next time, and thanks so much for listening.
01:17:10
Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe, give us a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice, and tell all your friends. The Politics of New America is hosted by Nathan Stone and produced by Josh Carmody. You can follow us on Blue Sky at Politics New America. This episode is sponsored by Leverage Assistance. Finding the right assistant can turbocharge your career, your business, and give you back precious time every day.
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