Don't Cut Snap

Floor Speech

Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I rise to talk about this heartless and mean-spirited attempt by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to cut $40 billion from the SNAP program--the food stamp program--that ensures that children, seniors, and poor Americans can put food on the table.

Earlier this year, I participated in a food stamp challenge. We agreed for a period of 1 week to limit our expenditure for food to $4.50 a day. That's about the average amount that a food stamp recipient receives for food. And so trying to eat on $4.50 a day was a mind expander and an eye-opener for me because it helped me see how fortunate I was to not be one of the many millions of people who rely on food stamps for their nutrition.

During that week that I was on that food stamp challenge, I went around to a number of food pantries where people were lined up, White and Black, Hispanic and Asian, awaiting the food truck or the tractor-trailer to get there loaded with food so they could get some of it. People lined up several hours before the pantry actually opened just to get some food.

So I can assure you that there are many people out there. And I spoke with many of them. I spoke with one woman who worked three part-time jobs that pay minimum wage. She was trying to take care of a family with that, and was still eligible and needed to have those food stamps.

And so people have lost their jobs and have been offered and accepted new jobs after this economic meltdown caused by Wall Street. People lost jobs. They have accepted part-time jobs--cobbling a few part-time jobs together to try to make ends meet for the entire family. And they need those food stamps.

But what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle plan on doing is cutting $40 billion for this next year, 2014. They want to cut $40 billion out of the budget.

The budget is a statement of our values. If you can give farmers crop subsidies--$15 billion, $20 billion per year--and then, by congressional legislation, hide the identity of the recipients of those crop subsidy payments that you, the taxpayer, give to the insurance companies on behalf of the farmers; then what you do, you give the insurance companies, you offset their administrative and operating cost in operating that program, we pay them billions of dollars a year. So, as it ends up, over $100 billion in a 10-year period, crop insurance for people who don't need it. And we're going to cut food stamps today $40 billion? That's not the values that America stands for. I will be voting against that legislation.

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