The Sinking of the USDA

As is typical with ballooning government programs, irrational thinking has polluted the USDA’s sustenance giveaway called Food Stamps. For example last spring the USDA Inspector General revealed that many food-stamp payees use their welfare “benefits” to buy drugs, weapons and other contraband from corrupt vendors.

Some trade food stamps for reduced sums of cash. Such scams cost taxpayers almost $200 million, according to the USDA monitor which provided assorted stats during testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

So how can the Obama Administration rationalize boosting this program? The recent USDA report, authored by agency sociologists, asserts that the proportion of U.S. households that were “food insecure” stayed basically unmoved (as in, no improvement!) from 2011 to 2012 despite the previous budget year subsidy expansion, further stating that the percentage of homes with food insecurity in the acute range—also was unaffected.
 
According to the report, the government must commit more money to the now colossal food stamp budget! “Food insecurity remains a very real challenge for millions of Americans,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement propagandizing the report. He goes on to hype the study’s results, highlighting the use of food stamps to aid in repressing “food insecurity from rising.”

Currently, the food programs include Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Food Stamp Program, National School Lunch Program, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); to the tune of $71.4 million.

Surely the absolute absurdity of this reasoning must be clear to, well, everyone. According to the experts; the problem isn’t getting worse so the "solution" must be working! What happened to eliminating the problem, or at least curtailing it? Now the standard for a progressive society is to keep a problem from getting worse! So much for a Utopia where big government solves more problems than it creates.

According to the report:

• In 2013, 85.7 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the year. The remaining 14.3 percent (17.5 million households) were food insecure. Food-insecure households (those with low and very low food security) had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources. The change from 2012 (14.5 percent) was not statistically significant; however, the cumulative decline from 2011 (14.9 percent) was statistically significant.

• In 2013, 5.6 percent of U.S. households (6.8 million households) had very low food security, essentially unchanged from 5.7 percent in 2011 and 2012. In this more severe range of food insecurity, the food intake of some household members was reduced and normal eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year due to limited resources.

President Obama’s first occupation was helping people in a poor African-American community. Subsequently, he joined a church founded on “black liberation theology.” This combination resulted in a Presidency that embodies something new in American history – politics based on a highly personal ideology, namely; that through the State, its citizens will learn moral lessons, such as "economic ethics."

Since this reasoning became the standard during and after the Depression of the 30’s it has led us down a path from which there is no easy return. Re-distributing monetary assets from the hands of the rich to the poor is not merely a moral idea anymore; it is now official U.S. economic policy.

Michael Tanner, of the Cato Institute, said in his April 2012 report:


As of this writing the debt per citizen is $56,619 -- which means every man, woman and child who is a citizen of the United States would need to pay that much to retire our existing national debt.

There has got to be a better way to display benevolence toward the poor than to saddle their children with an ever increasing national debt. We need real solutions; we cannot continue to throw money at the hole in a sinking ship in hopes of plugging it up by the sheer volume of paper.

What could the answer be? Could it be that we call upon the One Who created all, and knows all, and Whose treasuries will never be exhausted?

Internet Sources:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/1565410/err173_summary.pdf