On the recordJune 19, 2013
I thank Chairman Lucas for yielding. SNAP is an incredibly important program in the United States. I don't think there's anybody that I've met on my side of the aisle or on theirs--and I particularly appreciate Mr. McGovern's position on the fact that we need to make sure that hungry children in this country get food to eat. We want them to have good, healthy meals. On behalf of the taxpayer, however, the data doesn't support that we continue to increase funding for SNAP. In fact, if you follow the red line here, that's unemployment in America. You see during the recession unemployment went up, as did SNAP spending. It was almost exactly at the same ratio. And as the economy began to recover and unemployment went down, as did poverty go down, SNAP funding continued to go up. In fact, from 2008 to 2011, SNAP funding went up 119 percent while poverty went up only 16 percent. Between 2010 and 2011, poverty actually went down while SNAP spending went up. It's not just an either/or, Mr. Chairman, that we can either provide food for the poor or charge the taxpayer money. We need to do both. But as fiduciaries of the taxpayers' dollars, we must do it reasonably. We don't want any child to go without food, but we recognize that the economy has begun to recover since 2009, where we were spending only $53 billion on SNAP. ``Only'' is the appropriate word. Today we're going to be spending $82 billion on SNAP.…
