Freeform Forum: Santorum, Food Stamps and Obesity
If you don’t know, I can’t stand Rick Santorum. He is just too partisan and too intense for me to stomach. He is too polarizing and I find him plainly despicable.
In Iowa, he recently made the outrageous promise to reduce significantly federal funding for food stamps under the premise that the nation’s increasing obesity rates make the program unnecessary. Igor Volsky, Health Care and LGBT Editor for ThinkProgress.org, notes in his piece, "Santorum: We Don’t Need Food Stamps Because Obesity Rates Are So High" that Santorum calls the food stamp program one of the fastest growing programs in Washington. Volsky highlights that cost of the program has increased because more Americans are out of work and wages are down and disputes the connection between the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a.k.a. food stamps, and the rates of obesity in Americans.
In the column, Volsky comments that the Department of Agriculture has data that shows that around 33.5 million of the 48 million people who rely on food stamps last year had no earned income. That means over 11% of the US population benefits from SNAP because they earned no income this year. Yet, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that one-third of U.S. adults is obese, which comes out to 81.7 million American adults.
Let’s go ahead and assume that Rick becomes President and he enacts the elimination of the food stamp program and use his logic – based on his supposition that food stamps cause obesity, there will still be 33 million obese Americans adults not in SNAP. Over 10% of the population will remain obese. Nice work, Rick. You've stopped feeding the hungry and you left us with one in ten Americans seriously overweight.
If you want to go after government spending and to address American obesity, one of the more constructive ways to deal with the issue is to retool agricultural subsidies. Feed grains (mostly corn) get around 2.8 billion dollars a year in subsidies, which over a 1/3 of the farming monies from the government.
Critics of the farm subsidies note that the artificially low prices resulting from subsidies create unhealthy incentives for consumers, and this is where our obesity issue comes in. HFCS and corn syrup in general are cheaper, benefiting from the corn and feed grains subsidies and this leads to high-sugar food being less expensive and more affordable. To folks on fixed incomes or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the cheaper cheese food product which happens to have HFCS in it will win over the real organic cheese.
How about we tell Congress to use that farm subsidy to encourage the growth of organic fruits and vegetables? And I don’t mean pizza, in which the cheese food product, bread and tomato sauce at least all have added HFCS; I mean tomatoes, green beans, broccoli and more. We are still the bread basket to the world, so I’m not saying that we shouldn’t grow grains and maize (how worldly) or support our farmers. However we should encourage that our farmers are growing appropriate food for us and the world.
In perspective, food stamps do cost the government over 6 times more than the grain subsidies. (However, SNAP cost just shy of twice as much as the total amount of all farm subsidies.) Yet both are insignificant percentages of the $1.2 trillion that the congressional "super committee" was supposed to cut from the budget (grain subsidies are .23% and food stamps are 1.4%). I don’t think that we’ll cut the budget on eliminating one of the programs only. However it’s a way to use our tax money "to promote the general Welfare", which is why we have a government in the first place.
As stated above 11% of Americans were not collecting any income last year. The average rate of unemployment last year was about 9.65%. I’m sure the unemployment numbers factor into the 11% on income-less Americans. The unemployed are looking for jobs, but aren’t getting them since they don’t exist. Keeping our citizens dutifully employed and healthfully fed is promoting the general Welfare.
I find it irresponsible that Rick makes such a bold and unintelligent promise to the voters of Iowa. In summary, Volsky makes his argument against Rick’s promise acknowledging that
In Iowa, he recently made the outrageous promise to reduce significantly federal funding for food stamps under the premise that the nation’s increasing obesity rates make the program unnecessary. Igor Volsky, Health Care and LGBT Editor for ThinkProgress.org, notes in his piece, "Santorum: We Don’t Need Food Stamps Because Obesity Rates Are So High" that Santorum calls the food stamp program one of the fastest growing programs in Washington. Volsky highlights that cost of the program has increased because more Americans are out of work and wages are down and disputes the connection between the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a.k.a. food stamps, and the rates of obesity in Americans.
In the column, Volsky comments that the Department of Agriculture has data that shows that around 33.5 million of the 48 million people who rely on food stamps last year had no earned income. That means over 11% of the US population benefits from SNAP because they earned no income this year. Yet, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that one-third of U.S. adults is obese, which comes out to 81.7 million American adults.
Let’s go ahead and assume that Rick becomes President and he enacts the elimination of the food stamp program and use his logic – based on his supposition that food stamps cause obesity, there will still be 33 million obese Americans adults not in SNAP. Over 10% of the population will remain obese. Nice work, Rick. You've stopped feeding the hungry and you left us with one in ten Americans seriously overweight.
If you want to go after government spending and to address American obesity, one of the more constructive ways to deal with the issue is to retool agricultural subsidies. Feed grains (mostly corn) get around 2.8 billion dollars a year in subsidies, which over a 1/3 of the farming monies from the government.
Critics of the farm subsidies note that the artificially low prices resulting from subsidies create unhealthy incentives for consumers, and this is where our obesity issue comes in. HFCS and corn syrup in general are cheaper, benefiting from the corn and feed grains subsidies and this leads to high-sugar food being less expensive and more affordable. To folks on fixed incomes or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the cheaper cheese food product which happens to have HFCS in it will win over the real organic cheese.
How about we tell Congress to use that farm subsidy to encourage the growth of organic fruits and vegetables? And I don’t mean pizza, in which the cheese food product, bread and tomato sauce at least all have added HFCS; I mean tomatoes, green beans, broccoli and more. We are still the bread basket to the world, so I’m not saying that we shouldn’t grow grains and maize (how worldly) or support our farmers. However we should encourage that our farmers are growing appropriate food for us and the world.
In perspective, food stamps do cost the government over 6 times more than the grain subsidies. (However, SNAP cost just shy of twice as much as the total amount of all farm subsidies.) Yet both are insignificant percentages of the $1.2 trillion that the congressional "super committee" was supposed to cut from the budget (grain subsidies are .23% and food stamps are 1.4%). I don’t think that we’ll cut the budget on eliminating one of the programs only. However it’s a way to use our tax money "to promote the general Welfare", which is why we have a government in the first place.
As stated above 11% of Americans were not collecting any income last year. The average rate of unemployment last year was about 9.65%. I’m sure the unemployment numbers factor into the 11% on income-less Americans. The unemployed are looking for jobs, but aren’t getting them since they don’t exist. Keeping our citizens dutifully employed and healthfully fed is promoting the general Welfare.
I find it irresponsible that Rick makes such a bold and unintelligent promise to the voters of Iowa. In summary, Volsky makes his argument against Rick’s promise acknowledging that
"Food prices have also gone up, adding additional costs. In fact, the food stamp program has been critical for reducing poverty and pumping money into local economies during the down economy, so cutting it now would not only take food out of peoples’ mouths (regardless of whether they are obese or not) and could slow down the recovery."Yet another reason for me to tell Rick to sit the eff down, lie in a pasture and fade from the limelight. Let the actual level-headed presidential hopefuls work the political stages.
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