We've had some interesting discussions on X lately about SNAP benefits, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments formerly only low-income households received.

When I worked at our local family-owned grocery store in New Jersey as a teenager, we called them 'Food Stamps,' and they came in a little rip-out ticket book much like Monopoly. If there was change to be returned for any purchases, the store cashier issued little credit slips of however many cents the change was written on them.

Now, the amount any given account is allowed per month is preloaded onto a SNAP debit card, and off the recipient goes.

WIC - the Women, Infants and Children Supplemental food program - was a strict list of approved items on a pre-printed list. What the recipient was authorized, and in what quantity was marked on that list by whoever their program counselor was. It covered everything from infant formula to baby food to milk, eggs, and cheese.

I believe that has now also gone to a preloaded debit card.

 Reading about how the programs have exploded during the four years of POTATUS and his penchant for giveaways, not to mention rabidly progressive blue state governors taking advantage of the geriatric dementia patient's looseness with the rules, it makes one kind of squint and think there's room to squeeze some serious savings out of these patently abused programs.

Now, we're all pretty much aware that the Medicaid numbers have been blown out of the water by those benefits being shifted to cover the hordes of illegals traipsing into the country under Biden's befogged gaze, but the amount of...well, I won't say 'Americans. I'll use 'people' living here who have availed themselves of SNAP is unconscionably high.

For one thing, yes, illegals are clogging up the works, with some states forking over buttloads of SNAP cash supposedly for sustenance.

It pays to be an illegal alien!

NEW YORK:
— Guaranteed housing
— $1,000/mo debit card
— $1,400/mo SNAP benefit

LOS ANGELES:
— Full health insurance
— $1,000/mo guaranteed income pilot

CHICAGO:
— Food, laundry, mental health screenings
— Up to $15K/yr housing assistance pic.twitter.com/ZfdvsIiZxl

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 5, 2024

Then again, there are an awful lot of 'working' people collecting them, too, judging by numbers that don't really make any sense in a 4% national unemployment scenario for a program meant for low-income individuals and families.

...After the Great Recession, the share of the US population receiving SNAP benefits peaked at 15.2 percent in 2013 (when the unemployment rate was almost twice the 2024 level) and then declined to 11.4 percent through 2019, as the unemployment rate trended toward historic lows. In a forthcoming report, AEI’s Thomas O’Rourke and Angela Rachidi find that the current share of the US population receiving SNAP benefits is more than double what economic conditions alone would have projected over the past 20 years.

Reinforcing these caseload dynamics, benefit expansions by former President Biden’s administration have affected program spending in recent years as well. As Figure 3 displays, even with generally stable caseloads from 2021 through 2024, inflation-adjusted SNAP spending remained just shy of its fiscal year 2021 peak at $121.2 billion in fiscal year 2022—even as the US unemployment rate was bottoming out at under 4 percent that year.

Unsurprisingly, the Biden administration's expansion of benefits probably broke the law.

...The increase in expenditures stemmed from pandemic-related growth, as well as an unprecedented increase in benefit levels resulting from the Biden administration’s reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan in 2021. The Thrifty Food Plan is intended to reflect a “low-cost, practical food budget for a household to achieve a healthy diet on a limited budget” and is the basis for setting SNAP benefit levels. Historically, reevaluations had been cost neutral, meaning the types and quantities of food in the Thrifty Food Plan changed, but not the overall cost after adjusting for inflation. Although President Biden’s USDA presented the benefit increase as routine, many in Congress believed their actions were outside the intent of the law. In fact, a review by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the Biden administration violated the Congressional Review Act and “lacked key project management elements” to support the reevaluation and subsequent benefit increases.

Increased participation and benefit increases translated into total SNAP spending across the four calendar years of the Biden administration, through October 2024, of $439.7 billion, in current dollars. That compares with a total of $326.3 billion across four full years of the first Trump administration, which includes the pandemic-driven spike in 2020. Taking a longer view, inflation-adjusted SNAP spending in fiscal year 2022 was more than three times spending two decades earlier in 2003, when the US unemployment rate was roughly 50 percent higher. While less than in recent years, FY 2024 spending of $93.8 billion remains approximately $25 billion (37 percent) above the FY 2019 level, before the pandemic and President Biden’s benefit increase. Combining data from Figures 1 and 3 shows how, at similar cyclical lows in the US unemployment rate in 2007, 2019, and 2023, annual SNAP spending per recipient rose significantly in inflation-adjusted terms, growing from $1,747 in 2007 to $1,924 in 2019 and to $2,634 in 2023.

For giggles, if the US SNAP rolls are appalling, take a gander at what California has done with a 5.4% unemployment rate. They've gained a million more recipients than when the state's unemployment rate was over 16%. I mean, WHUT.

...That’s only part of the story. Figure 4 compares caseloads in California with the state’s unemployment rate since 2001. Most notably, California’s SNAP caseload has continued to grow in recent years despite dramatically improved employment conditions. The almost 5.5 million SNAP recipients in October 2024 (when the state’s unemployment rate was 5.4 percent) was over 1.0 million (23 percent) above caseloads from April 2020, when the state’s unemployment rate peaked at 16.1 percent.

That handout rate is unsustainable. Some of it can be attributed to people gaming the system, like the one fellow who told the Wall Street Journal he had to weigh all his benefits for sitting on his duff - as POTATUS had also waived work requirements - against what he'd make taking a job offer.

...Biden officials have also boosted food-stamp allotments and waived work requirements for able-bodied adults. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported the case of an unemployed worker who worried that accepting a job with a “smallish paycheck” would end his eligibility for food stamps and Medicaid. How many more are like him?

Does that man have any incentive at all to get off his ass and out the door?

Hell, no.

There are tens of thousands like him.

'In a forthcoming report, @Tqorourke & @AngelaRachidi @AEI find that the current share of the US population receiving SNAP benefits is more than double what economic conditions alone would have projected over the past 20 years.' @AEICosm https://t.co/R1kvndv2is

— Matthew Continetti (@continetti) February 25, 2025

But the second someone starts to trim around the edges and insist on work requirements, well - here come more sob-story pieces on the networks, and Republicans will have to grow a serious pair to be able to stomach the 'starving the children/forcing handicapped mothers to work' stories that will blossom like fungi after a rain.

Another avenue to cut the fat, which is where I interject in our X chats about my youthful employment experience for that princely $2.75 hr., is returning to the roots of the program. 

I heartily advocate running it like they used to and let me 'splain.

The SNAP debit card can be used anywhere - convenience stores, etc., for ANYTHING but alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and lottery tickets, basically...and I woouldn't bet the farm on the lottery ticket exclusion. 

I once saw an outraged recipient, having been caught in one of our periodic SNAP enforcement stings they do at convenience stores (the worst offenders) here, howling about 'having no right to tell her what she could do with HER money' when the law came between her and her favorite pack of cancer sticks.

Damn, if that didn't rub me the wrong way.

How the system was originally set up, Food Stamps could only be used for 'food' and 'foodstuffs.' The yardstick we checkout girls went by for determining what qualified a questionable item when checking an order out was, 'Is it taxable?'

If it was, it didn't qualify for food stamps. 

It was easy in NJ at the time because 'food' was non-taxable, where all your junk food crap - soda, candy, cookies, chips, snicky snacks, etc. were taxable. Easy peasy. It also meant that what the taxpayer was paying for in any recipient's order was, more often than not, mostly nutritious. Now, you could buy all the ingredients to make your own cakes or cookies because those go into other meals as well.

But you could not buy prepackaged snack or dessert foods. No sugar punches, either - it had to be 100% fruit juice, and the government wasn't picky. Often, families qualified for excess orange juice or apple juice (cheese as well) from farm surplus anyway, so that was all free.

I cannot imagine what reverting to those original rules would save in both money and eventual medical costs. I'll bet it would cut down on the number of these obese little seven-year-olds with rotted-out baby teeth who live on soda, Sunny Delight-type punches, and snacks.

It's heartbreaking and damn near criminal.

The WIC program was as simple as pie - infant formulas, baby foods, whole grain cereals like Cheerios or Total (no Fruit Loops), three types of approved cheeses, fresh fruits, milk (they've since added almond milk), 100% fruit juice, etc - clean as a whistle, and, again, completely nutritious.

Sometimes, we'd get a recipient who tried to argue, but we always won. #Rulez is #rulez.

Besides, even the checkout girls knew our meager salaries' tax dollars were paying for that food on the belt at the register, and nobody was cheating their way past us.

It did my heart good to see the Associated Press spazzing that the Trump administration is heading in that same direction, thought-wise.

And how could they not, with Bobby Kennedy now on board? Have the government buy sodas for kids?

Perish the thought. Cue the spazz out.

A push to ban sugary drinks, candy and more from the U.S. program that helps low-income families pay for nutritious food has been tried before — but it may soon get a boost from new Trump administration officials.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly confirmed health and human services secretary, and Brooke Rollins, the new agriculture secretary, have both signaled that they favor stripping such treats from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Kennedy has been most vocal, calling for the government to stop allowing the nearly $113 billion program that serves about 42 million Americans to use benefits to pay for “ soda or processed foods.”

“The one place that I would say that we need to really change policy is the SNAP program and food stamps and in school lunches,” Kennedy told Fox News host Laura Ingraham last week. “There, the federal government in many cases is paying for it. And we shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.”

...“When a taxpayer is putting money into SNAP, are they OK with us using their tax dollars to feed really bad food and sugary drinks to children who perhaps need something more nutritious?” Rollins said. “These are all massive questions we’re going to be asking and working on in the coming months and years.”

I love it.

Of course, they'll have to bang heads with the USDA (which runs the program) even to get going, but at least real reform has a shot in this administration. 

Tighten that ship up - you can do it!

...Republicans have floated stiffer work requirements for welfare programs and fixing the accounting gimmicks that states use to scam more federal Medicaid dollars. Good ideas. By our calculation, simply returning to pre-pandemic Medicaid spending levels, adjusted for inflation, could generate more than $1.4 trillion in savings over a decade.

These Trumpians all seem to love singing off the same sheet of music, and it's a glorious thing to behold.

I think it'd be popular when people realize what they've been paying for and who's been standing there with their hands out for it.