As the farm bill approved by the Agriculture Committee last week reaches the Senate floor Monday afternoon, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) will be a few hours into an experiment: eating for a week on the meager food budget afford by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Murphy announced on Twitter that he would take the SNAP Challenge, which is the brainchild of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).

That means Murphy will be eating on a few dollars per day, as his colleagues debate a measure that would cut $4 billion from the SNAP budget over the next decade. Murphy is using the $3 per day allowance FRAC and allies recommended in 2007 guidelines for lawmakers interested in the challenge, although government data shows the program averaged about $4.40/day nationwide in fiscal year 2012.

But if anything, the SNAP Challenge understates the hardships actual SNAP recipients face, both today and in the near future.

Those Americans must make it a full month on SNAP, and statistics show that about 80 percent of a given recipient’s monthly allotment gets spent in the first two weeks of the month:

Additionally, there is already a major cut scheduled for fall of 2013:

It’s harder to quantify another facet of life on SNAP that Murphy’s attempt to raise awareness of the program won’t require him to face: social stigma. The senator won’t have to worry about a cashier loudly asking him to run his Electronic Benefits Transfer card again while other customers wait behind him. He probably won’t experience the judgment of peers described here by Tiffani Stacy of Columbus, TX.

Murphy’s experience of life on SNAP, however muted, ought to help draw attention to the program’s inability to absorb the further cuts Congress has proposed.

While many public schools will be able to stave off some of the harshest impacts of sequestration with other sources of revenue, those that serve military families and Native American communities are in a much more difficult situation. That’s because they rely heavily on federal Impact Aid. That money goes to schools on or near military bases and Native American reservations that don’t collect as much in tax revenues as other public schools to help fill the gap.

Sequestration will reduce the $1.2 billion these schools normally receive by more than $60 million. According to analysis by the Center for American Progress, there are nearly 150 schools in the country relying on more than $1 million in aid. Some could see cuts in the millions of dollars.

The National Association of Federally Impacted Schools, which works closely with these communities, is conducting a survey of school districts grappling with this reduction in funding. While the full results won’t be ready for another month, the preliminary report, shared with ThinkProgress, shows that many are already facing drastic choices. One school warned that “we may have to close schools” and another cautioned that “closure is always a possibility.” Six of the nine schools it talked to will have to consider closing schools if sequestration continues past next year.

• The Window Rock Unified School District in Arizona gets just under 60 percent of its funding from federal aid. This year it eliminated about 65 staff positions through attrition and cut down its buildings from seven to four. If sequestration continues, it will have to close schools, many of which are in areas of high unemployment and poverty.
• The Harlem Elementary School District didn’t rehire for some positions and asked 100 employees to cut $100 from their operational budgets to deal with a 47 percent cut to the budget this year. It also canceled Kindergarten for a day, but one five-year-old still came to school because he was hungry and needed his state-subsidized breakfast. Next year it will have to dip into reserves or hold fundraisers. After that it will have to cut staff, go over the state class size limit, and look at closing schools.
• Heart Butte in Montana, which gets over half of its funding from the federal government, cuts have forced the district to hold off on all repairs this school year. That means that there are leaks, no hot water, roofs that need patching, buses in neglect, and a playground that doesn’t comply with regulations. The school needs to install new doors and safety gates, but that is also on hold. If things don’t improve it may have to lay off teachers.
• The Hays/Lodge Pole school district in Montana, which is losing more than half of its budget, is unable to fill a counseling spot even as youth suicides are on the rise. It also had to cut paraprofessionals, all secretaries but one, and cooks’ helpers. After next year, school officials say there will be nothing left to cut.
• The McLaughlin Independent School District in South Dakota, which gets two-thirds of its budget from federal funding, has already implemented changes for the current school year: reducing staff to one teacher per classroom for grades three through five and cuts to the music program, P.E., and administrative positions. If Congress doesn’t end sequestration, it will have to close schools.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) is pushing a report from his administration’s Department of Workforce Development that puts the state’s net private-sector job gains at 32,000 for 2012. Federally tallied figures for all states won’t be available until June, as CBS affiliate WSAW explains, which renders comparisons impossible:

Walker’s Department of Workforce Development released the new figures on Thursday, but they can’t be compared to other states until next month. Walker has been releasing the figures before they are published officially by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Critics say the state’s performance can’t be adequately measured until the numbers can be compared with other states. The most current ranking, comparing jobs created between September 2011 and September 2012, showed Wisconsin was 44th in the nation.

Walker is claiming a two-year total gain of 62,000 private-sector jobs, and a table on page 3 of the state’s report acknowledges the public sector is employing about 8,500 fewer people than it did the month before he took office. That puts the governor less than one quarter of the way to his campaign pledge of 250,000 total jobs created in four years.

If any independent organization would be likely to defend Walker’s record, it would be the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But the Chamber’s most recent annual scorecard of state economies has the state near the bottom in job creation, as the Madison Capital Times noted shortly after the report was released:

Its annual scorecard on state economies ranked Wisconsin 44th for overall economic performance and 50th — as in dead last — for short-term job growth as measured between September 2010 and November 2012. It also has Wisconsin 39th in “business climate” — on par with the state’s ranking under Gov. Jim Doyle.

Walker’s early-term agenda focused on busting public worker unions in the state and slashing state spending. His successes in pursuing those legislative goals amount to a localized version of the austerity approach to economic growth which Republicans have pressed with less success on the national level. Following the billions in budget cuts he pushed upon taking office, Walker has proposed both further cuts to school budgets and a tax cut that’s heavily slanted towards the state’s wealthiest residents.

Those policies have pulled demand out of the state’s economy, undermining Wisconsin’s growth prospects. Beyond the paltry jobs progress Walker is touting, U.S. Commerce Department figures show the state ranked near the bottom in terms of personal income growth over the 2011-12 period.

The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. A Democratic amendment to strip $20.5 billion in Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts was defeated by a 27-17 vote, after more than an hour of debate.

In introducing the amendment to protect SNAP funding, Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern (MA) noted that cutting food stamps comes with many expensive unintended consequences – hunger undermines worker productivity, and malnutrition increases medical costs – and that every dollar of spending returns much more than a dollar of economic output. In response, Republican Rep. Steve King (IA) alleged that the White House is seeking to swell the SNAP rolls in order to make Americans more dependent on government:

REP. KING: Handing out benefits is not an economic stimulator. But we wanna take care of the people that are needy, the people that’re hungry, and we’ve watched this program grow from a number that I think I first memorized when I arrived here in Congress, about 19 million people, now about 49 million people. And it appears to me that the goal of this administration is to expand the rolls of people that’re on SNAP benefits. And their purpose for doing so in part is because of what the gentleman has said from Massachusetts. Another purpose for that though is just to simply expand the dependency class.

Watch:

But the reality for SNAP recipients is far from King’s image of a “dependency class.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains that “only 4 percent that worked in the year before starting to receive SNAP did not work in the following year,” and adds that the raw total of recipients who work while enrolled in the program has tripled since 2000.

The think tank also notes that SNAP’s role as an unusually efficient stimulative multiplier is backed by Moody’s Analytics and the Congressional Budget Office.

Furthermore, the program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows:

Two of the Democrats on the Agriculture Committee — Ranking Member Collin Peterson (MN) and Rep. Mike McIntyre (NC) — joined Republicans in supporting the cuts, which will cause two million people to lose their benefits.

Joining other Republicans who trumpet automatic, across-the-board cuts to preschool, education, unemployment benefits, and health services, House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) said sequestration is “a legitimate effort” to implement budget cuts in a Wednesday address to the Ripon Society:

[There are] a whole array of other issues including the profligate waste in all sectors of the government as the administration attempts to vilify sequestration, a legitimate effort to cut 2.5 percent of the entire federal budget or about 7-8 percent of domestic and defense discretionary spending. At a time when the Department as purchased a new prison at a cost of $170 million when we have four new prisons all standing empty, and at a time when they are having $12 cups of coffee and $10,000 dollars pizza parties. So there will be questions there about why it is necessary to put deportable aliens, many of them criminal aliens, out on the street to save money where they can commit crimes against citizens of the U.S.

Goodlatte has expressed selective outrage over the budget cuts affecting immigration enforcement and airports. However, his home state Virginia will lose millions for primary and secondary education, affecting hundreds of teachers and 14,000 students, nearly $3 million for clean air and water services, child care for 400 children, vaccine services for more than 3,500 children, and much more. The Huffington Post also outlined 100 ways the sequester is hurting local communities across the country. But Goodlatte has zeroed in on the release of non-violent immigrants, who can be tracked through cheaper methods than detention at the cost of $164 a day.

This represents a marked change in the GOP’s tone on the sequester and a shift to blame the White House after forcing the sequester agreement in the first place. Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Raul Labrador (R-ID), and Blake Farenthold (R-TX) have downplayed how budget cuts have hurt everyday Americans to instead claim it is “working.”

Photo credit: The Memphis Flyer

A report out today from the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee shows costly new flaws in Congress’ approach to fiscal policy. Beyond providing updated information on the anticipated impacts to specific programs from the across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration, the report shows Congress’s piecemeal approach to “fixing” sequestration is more than just unfair – it’s costing the U.S. more money.

Since the threat of sequestration failed to spark a spending compromise and the haphazard slashing began, lawmakers have faced uneven amounts of pressure to replace chunks of sequestration cuts from varying groups. The success of that pressure seems to hinge on the political influence wielded by the group affected by a given cut. Unemployment beneficiaries, Head Start students and parents, 140,000 families on housing assistance, and seniors who rely on Meals on Wheels, among many other politically marginalized groups, have received no relief from sequestration.

Business travelers, on the other hand, have seen their outcry over airport delays due to sequestration yield a “fix” for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Today’s report goes beyond that unfairness to explain how the piecemeal “fix” to avert flight delays is actually raising the economic costs of aviation delays, by tens of billions of dollars:

The [Reducing Flight Delays] Act [of 2013] allowed the FAA to apply sequestration to the Airport Improvement Program (AIP), which had been exempt in the original sequestration order. […]

Cutting the AIP program slows FAA’s ability to meet construction needs. FAA estimates that development needs at eligible airports will exceed $42.5 billion over the next five years. The American Society of Civil Engineers 2013 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” rated our aviation system a “D,” estimating that the cost of congestion and delays to the economy will rise to $34 billion in 2020 (up from $22 billion in 2012), and that “D” grade assumes we continue to spend at current funding levels — before sequestration.

Even before Congress gave the FAA permission to halt all airport construction funding, America faced a $12 billion increase in the economic drag caused by aviation congestion. Now that cost is going to swell.

These can-kicking costs come on top of the more immediate damage sequestration will do to the economy: 700,000 fewer jobs and a 0.6 percentage-point reduction in GDP growth for the year. The Huffington Post reported several of the mechanical details of individual agency responses to the cuts contained in today’s House report, including 500 fewer firefighters at the Forest Service and a shrunken stockpile of vaccines at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.