End Hunger Now

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. Speaker, I want to welcome all of my colleagues back from their Thanksgiving holiday, and I trust that, like me, everybody had a great Thanksgiving along with a wonderful meal. But I'm here today to remind my colleagues, so that they don't forget, that for millions of our fellow citizens, they were without a Thanksgiving dinner. In fact, for millions of our fellow citizens, they go without meals on a regular basis. Men, women, and children, close to 50 million Americans, go hungry in our country, the richest country in the history of the world. It is a national scandal, and it is something that we need to do something about.

Mr. Speaker, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, otherwise known as SNAP, helps struggling families put food on the table. It's a good program that, sadly, has come under attack by some--not all--but by some of my Republican friends, and for the life of me, I can't understand why.

The average SNAP benefit is about $1.40 per meal. The No Kid Hungry campaign, launched by the group Share Our Strength, recently did a chart which shows that the average cost of one Thanksgiving dinner is about $49.04. That's equal to about 35 SNAP meals.

The fact is that our food banks are at capacity. I went to a Thanksgiving dinner sponsored by my bishop that was filled with people looking for food. That same group run by the Catholic Charities delivered well over 1,000 meals to people in my community on that one Thanksgiving Day. But the notion that somehow charity can do it all, or that food banks can do it all, or that churches or synagogues or mosques can do it all, is just wrong.

I would urge my colleagues to visit a food bank, to visit a food pantry, talk to the people who run those organizations and let them inform you of who is showing up at their doorsteps. Talk to the people who go to these food banks. These are average people. Many of them are working families who earn so little that they still qualify for the SNAP benefit.

The White House released a report over the Thanksgiving holiday talking about the importance of the nutrition assistance program. The report highlights, among other things, that in 2012 SNAP kept nearly 5 million people out of poverty, including 2.2 million children. SNAP reduced child poverty by 3 percentage points in 2012, the largest child poverty impact of any safety net program other than refundable tax credits.

The program's benefits are targeted to those most in need and designed to support work. The large majority of SNAP participants are children, the elderly, or people with disabilities, and about 95 percent of Federal spending on SNAP goes directly to subsidizing the food purchases of eligible households. It is one of the most efficiently run Federal programs. I wish the Department of Defense was run as efficiently as this. Our deficit would be much lower. Among SNAP households with at least one working age non-disabled adult, more than half work--more than half work--and more than 80 percent worked in the year before or after receiving SNAP.

Now, the legislation that the House Republican leadership rammed through this Congress and is now part of a negotiation on the farm bill would cut the program by close to $40 billion. That would result in nearly 4 million Americans losing access to SNAP next year, including working families with children, seniors, and veterans. Nearly 170,000 veterans would lose their benefits. In addition, 210,000 children and these families would also lose free school meals. These cuts would come on top of the significant benefit reduction already experienced by all SNAP recipients as a result of the American Recovery Act moneys running out.

I would say to my colleagues that what that cut that went into effect on November 1 means is that the average family of four would see a reduction of about $36 per month in their SNAP benefit. We're talking about food. We're talking about making sure in the richest country in the history of the world that nobody goes hungry.

I know that these are tough budgetary times, but if you want to find ways to save money, I would suggest we listen to my colleague, Mr. Jones of North Carolina, and get the hell out of Afghanistan. Stop supporting one of the most corrupt regimes on this planet today, the Karzai regime. Take those millions and those billions and reinvest it here at home. Reinvest it in a way that we end hunger now.

Mr. Speaker, for millions of our citizens who are hungry, what they worry about and what they fear is not halfway around the world. It is halfway down the block. We ought to make sure we get a farm bill that does not make hunger worse in this country, and if we have a farm bill that cuts SNAP significantly, I would urge all my colleagues to not only vote against it but fight against it. We can do better. Let's get a farm bill, but let's not make hunger worse.

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