During Wednesday’s debate on the Farm Bill, the Senate unanimously agreed to ban certain ex-convicts from receiving food assistance for life. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) claimed his amendment would prevent “murderers, rapists, and pedophiles” from ever receiving food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Under this amendment, anyone convicted for a violent crime or sexual assault will be shut out of the program for life, even if they served their time or committed the crime long ago. Their families will also suffer, as their share of SNAP benefits will exclude the convicted family member.

As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, these sentences have historically been handed down to more minorities than white offenders:

Given incarceration patterns in the United States, the amendment would have a skewed racial impact. Poor elderly African Americans convicted of a single crime decades ago by segregated Southern juries would be among those hit. The amendment essentially says that rehabilitation doesn’t matter and violates basic norms of criminal justice.

Ex-offenders already struggle to reintegrate into a society that saddles them with debt in prison and then severely restricts their job opportunities. All but nine states do not have legislation to prohibit employers from asking about criminal records before reviewing their resume, leading to rampant employment discrimination. Ex-convicts are also shut out of housing aid and TANF cash assistance, leaving them with few options to turn their lives around.

While Vitter’s amendment targets specific violent crimes, people convicted of drug felonies have been permanently barred from SNAP since 1996 unless their states expressly opted out of the ban. A recent study found that the food stamp ban has actually pushed young mothers into prostitution in order to feed their families, increasing the risk of HIV infection. More than 90 percent of the people in the study had been worried at one point or another how they were going to feed themselves and their families. Unsurprisingly, recidivism rates are sky-high in many states that withhold food aid from ex-offenders.

Besides the concrete implications for ex-convicts, Vitter’s amendment furthers Republican efforts to criminalize low-income people who need food and welfare assistance. Many GOP-dominated legislatures have passed laws requiring mandatory drug tests for welfare recipients, even as those tests indicate recipients are actually less likely to do drugs than the general public. Even the Obama administration has played into this myth with an aggressive initiative to crack down on SNAP fraud, despite the fact that such fraud has dramatically dropped to historic lows.

Vitter’s amendment won’t be the last effort to criminalize SNAP recipients packed into the Farm Bill. On Thursday, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) reintroduced his amendment to require every member of households receiving SNAP show a birth certificate or passport. If one member cannot produce the required documents, the whole family would be disqualified.

As the House Agriculture Committee convened earlier this week to discuss whether or not to cut as much as $4.1 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), the conversation between lawmakers devolved into an exchange that was equal parts bad policy and bad theology.

As House members discussed slashing the budget for the Farm Bill, which funds SNAP, Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) took issue with some Democrats who cited Jesus Christ’s call to care for “the least of these” when describing the government’s need to assist the hungry. Instead, Fincher explained that his support for the proposed cuts by quoting a very different Bible verse – 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”

But while the use of 2 Thessalonians is a convenient tool for those who want to justify ignoring the poor, Fincher’s lukewarm Biblical argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. As many religious bloggers have already pointed out, the author of 2 Thessalonians was actually referring to ancient Christians who had stopped working in anticipation of Jesus’ Second Coming. The verse is concerned with correcting a theological misunderstanding (i.e., don’t just wait around for Jesus, live an active faith), not passing judgement on the poor.

Worse still, Fincher’s use of the Bible to defend the slashing of food stamps isn’t just bad theology, it’s also bad policy.

Undergirding Fincher’s sloppy exegesis is an old conservative fiction that people who rely on food stamps are lazy parasites who mooch off the government and refuse to work. In reality, most of the country’s 47 million food stamp recipients are children or the elderly, and many are employed. A 2012 report from the USDA found that 45 percent of SNAP recipients were under 18 years of age, nearly 9 percent were age 60 or older, and more than 40 percent lived in households with earnings.

Fincher’s misguided Bible-thumping ignores the plight of America’s 8.9 million “working poor.” This massive group includes the thousands of participants from the recent fast food and retail workers strikes, people who, despite working full-time 40 hours a week for booming industries, often only make around $7.25 an hour, or $15,000 a year. That’s far below the federal poverty threshold of $23,550 for a family of four and leaves many working families with no choice but to apply for food stamps just to feed their loved ones. The strikers, who are consistently backed by droves of religious leaders, are clearly willing to work, yet lawmakers like Fincher (who made his millions with the help of government farm subsidies) stand poised to deny them access to the food they need by decimating funding for SNAP.

Fincher’s misuse of scripture is also a slight to disabled Americans who rely on SNAP to stay afloat. Americans with disabilities, many of whom are elderly or military veterans, are burdened with any number of maladies that make full-time work difficult, if not impossible. Far from encouraging freeloading behavior, food stamps and programs like Meals on Wheels help us honor our national commitment — and, for many Americans, a religious duty — to assist our fellow citizens when they need us most.

Fincher is free to draw his own conclusions about the Bible and its teachings. But using scripture to accuse millions of Americans of being lazy freeloaders is not only spiritually bankrupt, it’s also politically stupid. SNAP and other programs that help the poor still face the potential for massive cuts as versions of the Farm Bill move through Congress in the coming weeks, but millions of struggling Americans are hoping that elected officials will spend less time concocting dehumanizing theology and more time creating policies that grant much-needed assistance to our country’s most vulnerable.

Our guest blogger is Jack Jenkins, a Senior Writer and Researcher with the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative.

Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) agitated against food aid for poor Americans included in the Farm Bill during last week’s House Agricultural Committee debate, accusing the government of stealing “other people’s money.” Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has already been decimated in both the House and Senate versions of the Farm Bill, cutting off nearly 2 million working families, children, and seniors from food assistance.

Fincher invoked the Bible in his defense of the devastating cuts, quoting, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

At a Holiday Inn in Memphis over the weekend, Fincher expanded on his version of the Christian social gospel: “The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity is to take care of each other, but not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.”

While Fincher interprets food assistance for the needy as “stealing,” he has not similarly condemned the Farm Bill’s massive agricultural subsidies. In fact, he supported a proposal to expand crop insurance by $9 billion over the next 10 years. Fincher has a great personal stake in maintaining these particular government handouts, as the second most heavily subsidized farmer in Congress and one of the largest subsidy recipients in Tennessee history:

USDA data collected in EWG’s 2013 farm subsidy database update — going live tomorrow –shows that Fincher collected a staggering $3.48 million in “our” money from 1999 to 2012. In 2012 alone, the congressman was cut a government check for a $70,000 direct payment. Direct payments are issued automatically, regardless of need, and go predominantly to the largest, most profitable farm operations in the country.

Fincher’s $70,000 farm subsidy haul in 2012 dwarfs the average 2012 SNAP benefit in Tennessee of $1,586.40, and it is nearly double of Tennessee’s median household income. After voting to cut SNAP by more than $20 billion, Fincher joined his colleagues to support a proposal to expand crop insurance subsidies by $9 billion over the next 10 years.

As the Environmental Working Group notes, crop insurance subsidies have no limits on their recipients’ income levels. Therefore, the bulk of the crop insurance is paid out in million-dollar installments to a small group of large farm businesses, while the bottom 80 percent of farmers receive roughly $5,000 a year. SNAP, on the other hand, limits aid to income below 130 percent of the federal poverty line, or $30,000 per year for a family of four.

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.

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.

The average value of federal food aid will fall to $1.40 per person per meal in November, as a Recovery Act provision expires, but Republicans are already working to impose a further $21 billion in cuts to the program. That’s the upshot of two recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports on the future of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP).

SNAP is authorized through the farm bill, the Senate version of which was passed by the Agriculture Committee Tuesday afternoon. With their counterparts in the GOP-controlled House set to mark up their own farm bill tomorrow – complete with those nearly $21 billion in cuts to SNAP – the Ag Committee senators agreed to $4.1 billion in SNAP cuts on a 15-5 vote.

But while the Senate bill’s cuts to SNAP and increases to crop insurance subsidies represent misplaced priorities, the forthcoming bill from House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) makes the Senate’s food aid cuts look piddling. As CBPP explained this week, Lucas’s bill would boot nearly 2 million Americans off SNAP – and it targets the food aid program for more than half of its total cuts:

The proposed legislation would cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) by almost $21 billion over the next decade, eliminating food assistance to nearly 2 million low-income people, mostly working families with children and senior citizens. The proposal reduces total farm bill spending by an estimated $39.7 billion over ten years, so more than half of its cuts come from SNAP.

Lucas’ bill achieves these cuts primarily by repealing a provision of SNAP that allows states to include citizens whose disposable income (after child care expenses, for example) falls below the poverty line, even if their gross incomes are slightly above the SNAP cutoff, or 130 percent of the poverty line. In other words, it targets millions of working poor and elderly who rely on federal food aid and returns them to an actuarial trap of ineligibility.

This year’s proposed bill cuts SNAP even more heavily than the one Lucas’s committee approved in 2012. While Rep. Steve King (R-IA) recently said the proposed cuts would go unnoticed spread over a decade, the struggling Rhode Islanders profiled in March by The Washington Post would likely disagree.

Regardless of the magnitude, the rationale behind cutting food aid has never made good sense. The program’s expenditures ebb and flow along with the overall poverty rate itself and remain elevated because economic growth remains too slow nearly four years after the official end of the Great Recession. If Republicans want to greatly reduce SNAP expenditures in a way recipients won’t notice, the answer is economic growth.

Few will even notice major cuts in our nation’s food stamp program, according to Rep. Steve King (R-IA).

Speaking on the floor Tuesday, King argued that a $20 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “spread out over ten years is not something that is going to be noticeable.”

KING: We do calculate our budget and spending in a 10-year window, so that means $800 billion is the universe of money we’re talking about. … Over the time period of 10 years, there would be $20 billion trimmed off of $800 billion. What comes to about a 2.5 percent decrease in the overall projected expenditures of the food stamp program known as SNAP. After all of that technical gibberish, the bottom line is a $20 billion cut is a $2.5 billion cut in the increase. $20 billion spread out over ten years is not something that is going to be noticeable.

Watch it:

Last year, the House Agriculture Committee passed a bill that included $16.5 billion in cuts to food stamps. As a result, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated, 2 to 3 million low-income people would no longer receive food assistance. The legislation touted by King would go even further.

Food stamps are an essential part of the American safety net and keep millions out of poverty. In 2011, SNAP lifted 4.7 million people out of poverty, nearly half of whom were children, despite the fact that most recipients receive less than $1.50 per meal on average.

The House is about to begin debating this year’s farm bill, as House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) has scheduled a mark up on May 15. Ahead of the negotiations, Lucas has already indicated that he is planning steep cuts in spending, mostly focused on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, reports Capital Press:

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., told Capital Press on April 26 that he is planning a farm bill that will cut $38 billion in spending over 10 years, with $20 billion coming from the food stamps account and $18 billion from the rest of the bill.

Those cuts would be $3 billion more than those included in a farm bill passed by the committee last year.

In fact, the bill passed last year by the committee included $16.5 billion in cuts to SNAP, which was predicted to end benefits for 2 to 3 million people. Lucas’s proposal would cut SNAP even more severely.

Unlike many other social safety net programs, SNAP easily expands and contracts in response to increased need, and therefore has been very responsive to the economic downturn. It is also a crucial tool in fighting poverty: In 2011, the program kept roughly 4.7 million people out of poverty, including 2.1 million children, and cut the number of children living in extreme poverty in half. Food stamps also lead to better health and economic outcomes for beneficiaries. They can reduce food insecurity among high-risk children by 20 percent and improve their health by 35 percent.

Yet the benefits are already meager. The average recipient receives about $133 a month, or about $1.48 a meal. Rather than looking for cuts in the food stamp program, perhaps lawmakers could instead focus on crop subsidies that fuel the junk food industry.

As conservative lawmakers in states across the country move to require photo identification in order to vote — despite the fact that 1 in 10 voters lack such an ID — legislators in Rhode Island are looking to expand the same requirement in another area: food stamps.

Next week, the Rhode Island House of Representatives will consider HB 5646, a bill introduced by five Republican State Representatives, including Deputy Minority Leader Joseph A. Trillo. If enacted, the legislation would force retailers to require people using food stamps to first present photo identification. From Section 1(e) of the bill:

Each recipient of food stamp benefits shall present photo identification when using an EBT card, and each retailer shall request and inspect such photo identification at each transaction to insure that the individual presenting the EBT card is the person identified by the photo identification. Failure to request such photo identification and perform such verification of identity shall result in the suspension of the retailer’s privilege of accepting EBT cards for payment of any transactions for a period of one month for each offense.

There are many reasons why HB 5646 is highly problematic.

First, poor people are far less likely to have a photo identification than middle class and wealthy individuals. As a result, this bill could prevent people who already have food stamps from being able to turn them into food.

Second, unlike similar bills presented in other states like Tennessee in Missouri, HB 5646 has no provision that the state shall affirmatively provide such individuals with photo identification.

Third, under the current food stamp program, when one family member is enrolled, any member of his or her household is permitted to use the EBT (food stamps) card, even though only the individual may be listed on the card. HB 5646 would undermine this. For example, If Roger Jones is signed up but his son Michael is at the grocery store, Michael wouldn’t be able to use food stamps.

Fourth, federal rules prohibit retailers from treating customers with food stamps any differently from those paying with cash or credit. Unless every single customer at a retailer is similarly being asked to show photo ID when they buy groceries, HB 5646 violates federal regulations.

Fifth, the purported rationale behind the bill — fraudulent use of food stamps — is virtually nonexistent. Despite being one of the largest government programs in the country with 46 million recipients, the rate of food stamp fraud is one percent and trending downward, particularly after food stamps switched from a paper voucher to a plastic card. The USDA continues to prosecute individual cases of fraud and is already taking new steps to prevent it, including closer monitoring of replacement EBT cards.

Much like voter ID laws, food stamp photo ID requirements are a solution in search of a problem. With a miniscule fraud rate, HB 5646 is fighting a tiny problem with a huge cudgel, one that would likely take away food from already-needed Rhode Islanders.

The House Republican budget unveiled last month converts the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, into a federal block grant to the states, costing the program $125 billion in funding over the next decade. It also cuts an additional $10 billion from the program after the transition is completed.

Such reform would result in more than 12 million Americans losing access to food assistance, but it would also have dire effects on the American labor market, according to a study from the Center for American Progress. A 2012 CAP study found that the House GOP budget’s SNAP cuts would cost the economy roughly 174,000 jobs. Using the same data, which estimates that every $1 billion in cuts would cost the economy 13,700 jobs, an analysis found that the most recent iteration would lead to the loss of more than 342,000 jobs in the first year of cuts alone, Half In Ten’s Melissa Boateach writes:

The proposed block grant would go into effect in 2019, forcing draconian cuts to the program in just the five years from 2019 to 2024. Assuming that these cuts will be spread out evenly over the five years, our analysis of a 2012 Center for American Progress study estimates that the House Republican budget nutrition block grant would cost the economy 342,950 jobs in the first year alone and hit the food industry especially hard. [...]

According to our analysis of the 2012 CAP study, the 2019 SNAP cuts, for example, would result in approximately 11,300 jobs lost in retail including grocery stores, 21,000 jobs lost in food manufacturing and agriculture, and 8,250 jobs lost in trucking and warehousing.

The desire to block grant SNAP comes from two false beliefs among Republicans: first, that the block granting of welfare in 1996 was successful and second, that SNAP’s growth during the Great Recession has made it unsustainable. But the 1996 welfare reform law has been a massive failure, as it hasn’t gotten benefits to many of America’s neediest families and children. It especially failed during the recession, when it didn’t keep up with increases in unemployment and poverty.

SNAP, on the other hand, grew as the economy contracted, both automatically and because states and the federal government made it more generous. Its enrollment is still larger than it was before the recession, but that isn’t shocking: poverty rates and income levels are both worse than they were before the recession too. Still, as the economy improves, SNAP is projected to shrink back to its normal size. In short, the program that is shielded from state budget whims worked as it was supposed to during the recession; the program that is under state control wasn’t working before the recession and got even worse as the economy slumped. And as the CAP study makes clear, block granting SNAP to states wouldn’t just leave millions more without a vital piece of the social safety net. It would also cost the country hundreds of thousands of jobs.