Threats to SNAP Program
Floor Speech
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be leading this Special Order hour on the SNAP program and the current threats against it in the farm bill.
SNAP, of course, is America's most important antihunger program, serving more than 42 million Americans and delivering improved economic, health, and nutrition outcomes for millions of our families, reducing poverty and food insecurity.
To kick us off tonight, I yield to the gentlewoman from the great State of Washington, Pramila Jayapal, my distinguished colleague.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Jayapal for her terrific leadership on the SNAP program and for defending the ability of all of our families to not send their kids to bed at night hungry. That is really what this is all about.
People on the SNAP program receive an average of only $1.40 per meal, and in order to get assistance, of course, they have got to complete a detailed application process with meticulous documentation of their name, their legal status in the country, their identity, their income, their address, and so on. Ninety percent of participants are in households with children under the age of 18, or with elderly people, or with individuals with disabilities.
Mr. Speaker, I am going to yield next to our distinguished colleague from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison).
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison) very much. He makes an excellent point which is, more than two-thirds of SNAP participants are in families with children, and in the majority of those, you have at least one working adult in the house.
So despite efforts to portray this as some kind of welfare, we are talking about millions of Americans who are working but still can't afford to feed their families. That is what the SNAP program is about. It is about helping working families meet the basic nutritional standards of our people.
We are the richest society in the history of the world, and we can certainly support working families, through the SNAP program, to benefit from the great bounty that is the agricultural output of the United States of America, which is the breadbasket of the world.
I thank Ms. Barragan very much for joining us.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ms. Barragan very much for her leadership in defending the SNAP program. She talked about California. I just want to add to her point, a point about my home State in Maryland, where the SNAP program reaches 684,000 residents of my State, which is more than 1 in 10 people who live in the State.
Nationally, of course, it is 42 million people who participate in the SNAP program, which is 13 percent of the total population. And that is not a stagnant, permanent pool of Americans; that is a transient group because people move in and move out according to their economic circumstances.
The SNAP program is a reflection of our investment in ourselves as a people and our determination that here, in the wealthiest country on Earth, nobody should be sending their kids to bed at night hungry.
Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield to our distinguished colleague from New Jersey, Bonnie Watson Coleman.
Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. I want to thank my colleague from Maryland for yielding to me so I might speak on an issue that is very important to all of us.
I want to speak on behalf of the 43 million people who are SNAP recipients, many of whom are working each and every day. I want to talk about the fact that those are individuals whom we consider working poor. Mr. Raskin mentioned that SNAP was a reflection of something. SNAP is a reflection of the fact that we have so many jobs that don't pay adequate wages. SNAP is a reflection of the raw deal that our citizens are getting under an administration that would choose to give trillions of dollars worth of money to those people who are already rich, asking nothing in return for that horrible tax scam, and, at the same time, asking those at the lowest income spectrum in the entire United States of America to work so that they can be supplemented with meals that are $1.40 a meal.
That is hypocrisy. That is disgusting. We should not even be having a discussion about whether or not we should be eliminating, reducing, or changing a SNAP benefit. We should make sure that there is adequacy for every child and every family to not go hungry in this country; and, at the same time, we should be looking at giving our citizens who have had a really raw deal over these last couple of years a better deal, a better deal with better wages that we would like to proffer so that individuals wouldn't have to work and get supplemental food assistance as well.
Better jobs. Better skills. Better opportunities.
I am going to close very shortly on this. I was at a hearing today on the issue of SNAP and what we were planning to do with SNAP and what were the recommendations for the SNAP program. And I heard from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle some very disgusting insinuations or accusations about people who were on SNAP who were perhaps sitting on their porch drinking a cup of coffee or whatever. And the assumption was that that person was sitting on his duff as opposed to out there working, and he was a recipient of SNAP. You know nothing about that person's situation. But that person probably was a member of the minority class.
And we talk about getting a job. Well, I said to those people who came and testified today at our hearing: You have come here with some Pollyanna idea that this country is a country of equality. Well, it may have been working towards equality, but we are experiencing a period right now where we have the greatest sense of inequality we have had in decades, in hundreds of years.
We are underemployed. We are unemployed. The people who are working every day for wages to bring home are the ones who are paying for every tax break that is given to the 1 percent in this country. You can give millions and millions of dollars in the State of New Jersey even to the wealthiest 1 percent and ask nothing in return. If you are an individual, you are asked nothing in return. If you are a corporation, you are not even asked to create a job, a training opportunity, or to increase wages.
Do not talk to me about those people who are on SNAP and what they should be doing. Talk to me about what America should be doing for all of its people, because we are all members of the human race. Some of us just weren't born rich. Some of us just don't have the opportunity to go around with a silver spoon in our mouth.
This Congress should be ashamed of itself for not taking care of the needs of those who simply need government to recognize that it represents everybody, not just the very wealthy. I thank Mr. Raskin for the opportunity.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mrs. Coleman for her comments. She has made some very important points, and I wonder if I would pursue a couple with her before she goes, perhaps have a moment for colloquy.
The first is the point she was making about the growing economic inequality in the country. That is something that has been on the minds of Americans, at the very least, since the Occupy movement took place after the 2008 mortgage meltdown crisis, which cost 11 million Americans their jobs, 12 million Americans their homes, and created an economic dislocation panic across the country, which thankfully President Obama and his administration moved to address, unleashing 60 straight months of economic growth and expansion in the country.
Today we have an administration which vowed to drain the swamp when it came to Washington. It seems like they have moved into the swamp and they are just draining the treasury instead: $1.5 trillion added to our budget deficit from the tax scam giveaway, which you referenced.
I wonder if she would reflect for a moment on the relationship between a vision of government, which is that it is a money-making operation for a handful of people, and growing inequality and poverty among other parts of the population.
Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Raskin for raising that issue. I think that that is one of the most prominent issues that people of this country need to understand.
Government has a significant role. That role is to protect the opportunities, rights, and privileges of all people, to create the level playing field. What we have experienced in this administration, in this Republican-controlled Congress, is that we care not. We prioritize the value of human beings based upon how much money they are worth or how much money they can get.
So we are taking resources that should not be taken out of our treasury; we are then giving them in heaps and piles to the very, very wealthy; and then we are talking about deficits that are being created and how we need to make up those deficits. And how do we look to do that? Well, we look to do things like reduce the benefits of Medicaid, mess with Social Security, take away SNAP from people who need supplemental nutritional assistance.
We talk about this America not being one America anymore. This is an America of the haves and the have-nots. Never have we seen this tremendous diversity or disparity between the very, very, very wealthy and those who are struggling.
And those who are struggling get this. My colleagues think of poor people as lazy people who are not doing what they can do. We are poor people in this country--hungry, homeless people--because of our policies, because of our budget, which is the greatest reflection of our priorities and our values. Our values are askew right now, and we need to make sure that we are looking after that responsibility for which we were elected.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, let me ask Mrs. Coleman one final question before she goes. She made a point before which I thought was profound, which is that millions and millions of people on the SNAP program are working, but they are not making enough money to support their family in a dignified way, in a way that lives up to even the most minimal expectations for health and nutrition. That is what the SNAP program is all about. In a way, you could view the SNAP program as a subsidy to the employers of these people because we are taking care of them because their salaries don't.
Now, I could understand someone saying: Let's get rid of the SNAP program and make those employers pay a real living wage to these people, or let's make them pay a full living wage and give them all healthcare. But that is not the proposal that we are getting from our friends from across the aisle. They want to reduce the SNAP program at the same time that they don't want to increase the minimum wage and give people benefits.
I wonder if she could just explain what the theory is about how these people are going to survive.
Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, I think that it isn't so much a theory of survival as it is the possibility of not surviving at all. I think that we are finding ourselves in a situation right now where those who have less have the rawest deal they have had in a very long time. And I am proud to associate myself with my Democratic colleagues in this caucus who want a better deal for those people.
We want wages that you can live off of, that you don't have to rely upon assistance from anyone in order to be able to put food on your table, put a roof over your head or heat in your home. We want to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to learn and to have a good job. So we want to see investment in jobs, in training, in apprenticeships, in opportunities to do better.
We could do better with an infrastructure program that not only makes sense because we have a crumbling infrastructure on so many levels, but it also generates jobs. Generates jobs, which generates good incomes. Good incomes generate a desire to purchase. Desire to purchase helps to build our small businesses. We are looking in the wrong places, and we need to look at where we can grow our economy.
Our economy doesn't grow when we just simply continue to enrich the rich to be richer and richer and richest and to put that money overseas somewhere or anyplace that they want to put it but not to invest it in this country, in this economy. We need a better chance for everyone. We need a better deal for all of our citizens.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mrs. Coleman for her strong voice and for participating in tonight's Special Order hour.
Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield to our distinguished colleague from Connecticut, Rosa DeLauro, who has been one of Congress' leading champions for the security of America's working people and for building an American middle class that includes everybody.
I am thrilled that Ms. DeLauro could join us, and I yield to her now.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ms. DeLauro, and I would ask if she would be willing to stick around just for a little colloquy.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, Ms. DeLauro made some really striking points, and I wanted to explore them a little bit more.
The tax bill, as we know, created a windfall bonanza of hundreds of billions of dollars for the wealthiest corporations and the wealthiest people in the country. Eighty-six percent of the benefit from the tax cut went to 1 percent of the people.
The interesting thing to me was that because it went overwhelmingly to investors, and one-third of the investment in our companies is held by foreigners, a third of the benefit of this tax cut just left the country. It went to foreign investors in Saudi Arabia or China or Mexico or wherever it might be.
Now, does it make sense for us to confer this extraordinary bonanza on the wealthiest people in the country and wealthy people abroad, and then turn around and start cutting the major antihunger assistance program we have got, the SNAP program? I mean, what is the morality of that? What is the logic of that?
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I would say to Ms. DeLauro that that came out of the Agriculture Committee, as I understand it, on a party line vote.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, this used to be bipartisan. It used to be a bipartisan commitment, and now, suddenly, it fell apart with no participation from Democrats. It comes flying out with the idea of targeting the SNAP program. What is going on here?
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, they are both from farm States.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on something Ms. DeLauro said, which I think is very important.
She pointed out that it was Senator Robert Dole, a Republican from Kansas; and Senator George McGovern, a Democrat from South Dakota, who came together and said: We have this extraordinary agricultural bounty and surplus in America.
We could be feeding the entire world. Certainly we could be feeding the people of America. Most people are able to afford it, but not everybody, and not at every point in their life. We should make sure that, in the wealthiest society that has ever existed, everybody has the opportunity to eat three meals a day for $1.40.
Ms. DeLauro said that we don't have the giants that we had then. I don't know if that is true. I consider the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro) a giant.
But I think what has changed is the public philosophy that is governing in Washington. I think there is a public philosophy that survives in town, which says that government is a moneymaking opportunity for the President and a handful of people: the President's friends and the people who surround the President. People are actually making money coming into government.
Whereas, the traditional ideal--the one I think Ms. DeLauro invoked with Senators Dole and McGovern and the new deal and Franklin Roosevelt--was government is an instrument of the common good to benefit everybody to advance the general will.
What has happened to our concept of government in America?
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro) for her leadership, for her vision, and for her writing. It is incisive and useful for us all.
Adams).
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ms. Adams so much for her insightful remarks. Before Ms. Adams leaves, I would like to ask her a question.
Working in Washington and coming here several days a week, as Members of Congress do, we are often treated to the spectacle of lifestyles of the rich and famous and political corruption. We see Scott Pruitt, the EPA chief, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on first-class air travel with a security detail of a dozen people, something nobody has ever seen before for an EPA chief. He built, I think it was, a $40,000 soundproof booth in his office in order to make secret phone calls.
Last night, we saw on TV, or pick up the paper this morning to read about, millions of dollars flowing into an up-till-now secret bank account that Michael Cohen had. Part of it was used as a slush fund to pay off a porn star, who had a relationship, allegedly, with President Trump. But then hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing in from one of the oligarchs in Russia with U.S. corporations involved.
There is a lot of money in this town. The power elite seems to have a lot of money, and gave hundreds of billions of dollars back to the wealthiest corporations and people in the country in the most recent tax legislation. Yet they get through with that, and then they turn and they want to pound the SNAP program, which is used to give a modicum of dignity and security to the poorest people in the country so that they can feed their families.
What is going on here?
How is it possible that we can see one kind of America operating in the Halls of power with the wealthiest people in the country, and another for the working people of the country who are trying to get by?
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, three-quarters of SNAP benefits go to families: households with children in them. That should be what people think of when they think of the SNAP program.
We heard a lot today in the Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing that was referenced earlier, basically about lazy people sitting around. I tried to alter the image a little bit. I said: You can have lazy people who get a paycheck in public housing and they spend all day watching TV, tweeting, and filing for bankruptcy. You have lazy people in the middle class. You have rich lazy people and you have poor lazy people.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, we are not going to be able to eliminate laziness, but maybe we can take care of hunger in America so that kids don't go to sleep without food.
Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Ms. Adams for her leadership and her strong voice on these issues. It is very impressive to see how hard she has been fighting.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, in my district, I have urban, suburban, and rural. I have urban places like Rockville, Maryland; I have suburban places like Bethesda and Silver Spring; I have rural places in Frederick County like Middletown and Carroll County. I have sort of the full gamut of America in my district, and there is poverty in all of them. There are people struggling in all of them, just like there are people who have become very prosperous in all of them.
But our job, I think, as Representatives in Congress, is to keep the country unified and see what that beautiful, magical phrase in the beginning of the Constitution ``We the people'' means. For us to stand together in all of our magnificent diversity of ways of life and different kinds of communities that we have across the country, what is it that binds us together?
I think the goodness of the American people is that we are invested in the success of everybody, not just this or that group, not just our business buddies, not just our partners, not just people in our political party, but we are invested in the success of everyone, and that is our job.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ms. Adams for participating.
Jackson Lee), my distinguished colleague.
Ms. JACKSON LEE. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted, if I might say, to be with Professor Raskin today, and I would like to use that terminology, or Congressman Raskin, but it means that he gets into both the theory, the practice, and the passion of an idea. That is what teachers do. They try to instruct their students to look at the holistic concept of a theory.
Mr. Speaker, the loss of food stamps is not a theory, but it has passion in the loss of such. It has a broad landscape of impact. It certainly has a theory of which I don't adhere to, and that is that Americans who have asked for a hand up are the ones deserving of the brunt of an enormous tax cut that has created an enormous deficit that was not asked for by the top 1 percent, who are getting the major aspect, or major benefit, of this tax cut.
As a member of the Budget Committee, we took pains, the Democrats, to parse through the ultimate negative impact of the $1.4 trillion-plus tax cut.
During the Obama administration, we discussed a corporate rate reduction. Many of us would have considered that on the idea of job creation, coming from the early thirties, if you will, down to about the mid-twenties. We did more than--when I say ``we,'' this bill did 21, unasked for by any corporate entity, which added, again, insult to injury as it relates to those families, disabled, and seniors, children who are dependent upon these programs.
We have many Americans who are dependent upon means-tested programs, 70 percent. The supplemental nutrition program, unlike the 21 percent corporate rate reduction for taxes, is $1.40 per person.
One of our colleagues in the other body, Senator Booker, as we all know who are familiar with him, and I think maybe we should join in that effort, spend that much per meal, all of the Members of the House of Representatives, because what we are dealing with today is the farm bill.
The farm bill takes to shutting down the SNAP program and to cutting it drastically, and to ignore and underfund important programs because we find ourselves in a predicament of the deficit, the tax cut, and what choices do we make.
The decision to limit SNAP is not limited to red States or blue States. Eighty-five of the top 100 counties of individuals receiving SNAP benefits are rural communities, and many of them are, in fact, Republican represented.
The disastrous changes to SNAP would jeopardize the food security of 42 million people, including 30 million children, 4.8 million low- income seniors, and 1.5 million low-income military veterans.
So in conclusion, I came to the floor today to ask the question: Why in the farm bill?
There is something about having a little seniority in this House. I can remember that of all the bills in this Nation that came out of this House and Senate--and I might say, joyfully, because I have been supported by the Farm Bureau. I come from a State of ranchers and farmers. We used to take pride in having that nexus between farmers and the SNAP program and the continuity of such.
So here we are. We have breached it. We have blown it up for no reason other than to pocket the money for the tax cut.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for bringing us together. I ask my colleagues to vote against the farm bill, because that would be standing up for maybe a better pathway of that bipartisan farm bill that we have had over the decades to make a difference in the lives of all Americans.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ms. Jackson Lee for her really profound and important remarks tonight.
Mr. Speaker, I would close out our session here by just making an observation about the importance of this SNAP question.
It is important legislatively because our friends across the aisle have broken from a bipartisan tradition going back a very long time now in the passage of the farm bill just to make it a partisan power grab and a push over everybody else in the body, but it also goes to the question: What kind of government are we going to have? Will this be government for the few or will it be a government for everyone?
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