The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, expanded rapidly during the Great Recession, when millions of workers lost jobs and entered poverty, forcing them to turn to the government’s social safety net for help. But even as the economy has begun to recover, SNAP “isn’t shrinking back alongside the recovery,” the Wall Street Journal warned today.

States and the federal government both expanded SNAP access before and during the recession in an attempt to extend more aid to struggling Americans. That has led Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) aching to cut the supposedly “unsustainable” program, since its costs and enrollment are both at record levels. In the piece, the Journal admits that “the biggest factor behind the upward march of food stamps is a sluggish job market and a rising poverty rate,” but it then asks whether those expansions have made the program far more costly over the long-run and wonders why SNAP enrollment hasn’t dropped along with unemployment rates:

The food-stamp rolls have swollen since 2008 and are projected to stay that way for years. In 2008, SNAP enrollment was 28.2 million. Unemployment peaked in October 2009 at 10% and was at 7.7% as of February, but SNAP kept growing.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts unemployment will drop to 5.6% by 2017 but that SNAP enrollment will drop slightly to 43.3 million people, down 4.5 million from the current level.

That makes it very different from the other big federal support program, unemployment insurance, which shrinks as the economy improves. Continued jobless claims dropped to 3.1 million in February after peaking at 6.6 million in May 2009.

Unemployment insurance enrollment has dropped because it is based on unemployment. SNAP, however, is based on income, which is why it tracks not with the unemployment rate but with poverty levels, as this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows:

That SNAP isn’t shrinking at the same rate as unemployment insurance isn’t exactly a shocking revelation, especially since 58 percent of the jobs created since the recession are in low-wage sectors that are less likely to pull workers out of poverty and off of food stamps. The poverty rate rose sharply after the recession, and it hasn’t dropped significantly since the recovery began. But for all the concerns about SNAP’s long-term costs, the program is projected to return to its return to its historical spending levels by 2023:

The Journal actually acknowledges that the expansions make little difference in the cost of the program, but not until the second-to-last paragraph. “The Congressional Budget Office said reinstating eligibility limits would save around $4.5 billion over 10 years, a fraction of the program’s total cost over that time,” it writes there, all but admitting that the reason SNAP expanded is not because the government made it easier to enroll but because the economy contracted and plunged millions of people into poverty. That, in short, is exactly what the program is supposed to do.

One of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) favorite ways of defending the House Republicans’ budget is to claim the social safety net represents a moral threat to Americans’ character, as well as a fiscal threat to their country’s budget. He’s incessantly warned of luring “able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency” and depriving them “of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” In his latest budget, he introduced his cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and other support programs for low-income Americans with a warning that the safety net “can create a powerful disincentive to get ahead.”

Included in those cuts is a massive reduction in spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities took a look at the employment situation of Americans who rely on the program, and the reality belies Ryan’s rhetoric:

Among households with children that include an adult who isn’t elderly or disabled, 87 percent of the households receiving SNAP in a given month include an individual who worked in the prior year or will work in the following year.

Ryan actually has an ongoing problem when it comes to honestly representing the SNAP program. Last year, he claimed it was “growing at unsustainable rates” — a notion that fails to account for the effects of the recession, that fails to differentiate spending in raw dollars from spending as a share of the economy, and which utterly ignores the program’s projected path over the next decade.

Ryan’s budget would cut SNAP spending by $135 billion between now and 2023 — requiring either 12 to 13 million of the 44.7 million people currently on the program to be kicked off, or a reduction in benefits of $190 a month for the poorest of American families by 2019. Nor did the 1996 welfare reform law — on which Ryan models his current budget proposals — turn out to be the success he presents it as. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, welfare’s case load grew only 16 percent, even as the numbers of the unemployed increased by 88 percent; an utter failure to keep up with the needs of impoverished Americans.

As for the safety net as a whole, CBPP cites research from the National Bureau of Economic Research that one of every seven Americans would be poor without the safety net, but are above the poverty line because of it — a total of over 40 million people.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien tore into Sen. Jeff Sessions’ (R-AL) efforts cut food stamps on CNN’s Starting Point Tuesday morning, arguing that the lawmaker’s efforts would disadvantage thousands of lower-income constituents who rely on the program. Earlier this year, Sessions proposed an amendment to the Farm Bill that would have removed $11 billion from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over 10 years. The effort ultimately failed.

The conservative lawmaker defended his proposed cuts to a visibly skeptical O’Brien, arguing that growing enrollment in food stamps during a period of shrinking unemployment suggests that Americans are free riding on the program for free government meals. O’Brien observed that Sessions himself twice voted to grow SNAP during the Bush administration and cited a study showing minimum fraud and abuse in the program.

“Twenty percent of your constituents are on food stamps and they look at the people who are actually eligible, it’s something like under 70 percent who [are] eligible who sign up,” O’Brien said:

O’BRIEN: You voted in fact in 2002 and 2008 to grow the program yourself. I think first under President Bush in 2002, and when it comes to fraud, this Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said SNAP has ‘the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program in recent years, it’s received its lowest error rates on record.’ … Most people who are on it aren’t working the system, they are just hungry people. [...]

When you’re thinking of things to cut, people basically say, why are you trying to balance the budget on people making less than $23,000 a year, I think that range roughly, is the national average of a family on food stamps. So why not cut something else? There are other things that could be on the table before you pick a program that is feeding the nation’s poor children.

SESSIONS: I’m not picking a program. I say all programs need to be examined in this government. This government wasting money every day. There is no doubt about that. We have got to do better. And food stamps is a program that was totally exempt from any oversight and change when it has gone up four times in the last ten years in the amount we spend …

O’BRIEN: Two of those times you voted for it, sir. 2002 and 2008 you voted for it. Some people are saying, it’s growing because people are hurting.

SESSIONS: I voted for the ag bill that had that in it, probably so.

Watch it:

SNAP’s fraud rate rests at 1 percent and overall error rates have plunged in recent years, hitting an all-time low in 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

A study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture find that food stamps reduced the poverty rate by 8 percent in 2009 and “lifted the average poor person’s income up about six percent closer to the [federal poverty] line.” In 2010, the program kept more than 5 million Americans from falling below the poverty line and reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty — defined as less than $2 per day, before government aid — by half in 2011.

Children who have access to the federal food stamp program — now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — in the earliest years of their lives have better health and economic outcomes later in life depending on their gender, according to a new academic study of the government safety net by professors Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond.

Across genders, children whose mothers had access to food stamps during pregnancy and in their earliest years were less likely to have long-term health problems like diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure in adulthood. Women who had similar access, meanwhile, are more likely to become economically self-sufficient as adults, the study found:

We find that access to food stamps in utero and in early childhood leads to significant reductions in metabolic syndrome conditions (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes) in adulthood and, for women, increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, income, and decreases in welfare participation).

Because nutrition is especially important for long-term development early in life, the positive effects of food stamps are especially strong for children who benefit from the program before birth and up to the age of five. The long-term developmental effects begin to subside after that age, though there are still obvious positive nutritional effects for children who remain on the program after that.

The food stamp program is especially vital in times of economic downturn or famine, the researchers wrote, since children can be exposed to lower food levels that jeopardize future development. Food stamp enrollment in the United States grew to 15 million households in 2011, according to government figures released Wednesday. The program’s growth during and after the Great Recession has come under the scrutiny of budget-cutters in Congress, even as it helps keep millions of Americans out of poverty each year.

When local activist groups challenged Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton to live on a food stamp budget for a week to mark Hunger Awareness Month, he took them up on the offer and found out just how hard it was. Stanton kept a diary on the challenge, which allotted him roughly $29 a week, the same amount 1.1 million Arizonans receive from the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) each week.

By day four, Stanton noted that he was “tired” and “it’s hard to focus” after leaving the house for work without time to scramble eggs or eat a decent breakfast:

OK- ran out the door today with no time to scramble eggs or even make a sandwich. So I’m surviving on an apple and handful of peanuts, and the coffee I took to the office until dinner. I’m tired, and it’s hard to focus. I can’t go buy a sandwich because that would be cheating- even the dollar menu at Taco Bell is cheating. You can’t use SNAP benefits at any restaurants, fast food or otherwise. I’m facing a long, hungry day and an even longer night getting dinner on the table, which requires making EVERYTHING from scratch on this budget. It’s only for a week, so I’ve got a decent attitude. If I were doing this with no end in sight, I probably wouldn’t be so pleasant.

Watch a local news report about Stanton’s challenge, via Huffington Post’s Bonnie Kavoussi:

According to Stanton’s Facebook page, the city he governs ranks 34th-worst among America’s 100 largest metro areas in terms of hunger, and one-in-four Arizona children are food insecure. Across the nation, there are more than 46 million people receiving SNAP benefits.

Despite the challenges presented by poverty and hunger, Republicans have proposed cuts to the programs that help struggling families afford food. The House GOP budget could kick millions out of SNAP and hundreds of thousands of children out of school lunch programs, exacerbating the high rates of food insecurity America’s families are already facing.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual poverty estimates, released today, found that the poverty rate remained stable in 2011 after three consecutive years of rapid increases during and after the Great Recession. But 46.2 million Americans still live in poverty, defined as less than $23,000 in annual income for a family of four.

The data also noted that government benefits played a significant role in keeping millions of Americans — particularly women, children, and the elderly — out of poverty. Social Security alone kept roughly 21.4 million people out poverty, and unemployment benefits helped an additional 2.3 million stave off poverty last year alone.

The Census Bureau estimates it poverty rate based on cash income and assistance, but many government programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and certain tax credits aimed at combating poverty, aren’t included in its income estimates. Including SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, in the Census data would lift another 3.9 million Americans out of poverty, and including the Earned Income Tax Credit that helps low-income taxpayers would bring 5.7 million people above the poverty line. Other tax credits aimed at low-income working families, like the Child Tax Credit, would keep millions more out of poverty if they were included.

This chart from Melissa Boteach, the director of the Poverty to Prosperity program at the Center for American Progress, breaks down how many Americans avoided poverty thanks to certain government programs:

Many of these programs, however, are facing cuts as Congress attempts to reduce the federal budget deficit and national debt. The House Republican budget included massive cuts to SNAP and other food assistance programs; all told, it could have booted millions of people off of food stamps and 280,000 from the school lunch program. Under tax plans put forth by both House and Senate Republicans, meanwhile, 12 million Americans would have lost part or all of the Child Tax Credit, while six million would have lost part or all of the Earned Income Tax Credit, an effective tax hike on millions of families.