The Obama administration has an unfortunately deliberate penchant for talking out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to touting the slow-going economic “recovery” through which they have been leading the country for the past five years; on the one hand, they insist, the private sector is creating jobs, we’re making steady economic gains, and things are definitely improving. On the other, however, there’s “still more work to be done,” and despite the manifold economic improvements, they assert that the further expansion of entitlement programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps are an absolute necessity to keeping their “recovery” going — and on the latter especially, the Obama administration has been particularly aggressive. CNS News reports that, even in the first year of President Obama’s second term, the federal food-stamp program continued to grow, with a record 20 percent of American households and a record number of individuals participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — and that the program itself reached its record-high budget.

The USDA says that there were 23,052,388 households on food stamps in the average month of fiscal 2013, an increase of 722,675 from fiscal year 2012, when there were 22,329,713 households on food stamps in the average month. …

In 2013, the monthly average for individuals on food stamps hit an all-time-high of 47,636,084, according to the USDA, an increase of 1,027,012 over the  46,609,072 individuals who were participating in the program in 2012. …

For fiscal year 2013, the SNAP program cost $79,641,880,000, which is a 164% increase over the past decade. When adjusted for inflation, the cost of the SNAP program was $30,153,090,000 in fiscal year 2003.

Why, exactly, is it a victory of our economic “recovery” to vastly grow a program designed to temporarily help Americans in need of economic assistance, and why exactly is the program failing to add all the “economic stimulus” the administration promised it would? The version of the farm bill on which lawmakers are currently conferring has sought out a compromise-cut to the almost $80 billion annual program in the form of $9 billion over ten years, but no doubt Democrats will object to even that relatively small budgetary reduction by clobbering Republicans over the head with “draconian”-style demagoguery — rather than asking themselves why it is the continual expansion of the program seems to be so necessary in the midst of the Obama “recovery.”