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GOP Food Stamp Cuts Would Kick 170,000 Vets Out of the Program

by IolaHopkins Posted on November 11, 2013

Mother Jones

Republicans will salute America’s veterans Monday, while simultaneously trying to deny them benefits. In addition to reducing housing aid, and denying health care to vets, the GOP is also trying to remove thousands of vets from the food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

At least 900,000 veterans rely on SNAP. The House Republican version of the farm bill, the five-year piece of legislation that funds nutrition and agriculture provisions, would slash funding for the food stamps program by nearly $40 billion and boot 2.8 million people off the program next year. That includes 170,000 veterans, who would be removed through a provision in the bill that would eliminate food stamps eligibility for non-elderly jobless adults who can’t find work or an opening in a job training program.

CHARTS: The Hidden Benefits of Food Stamps.

Veterans returning home from service have more trouble finding work than other folks, and rely more heavily on the food stamp program. The unemployment rate for recent veterans—those who have served in the past decade—is about 10 percent, almost 3 points above the national unemployment rate. War-related disabilities are one reason why. About a quarter of recent veterans reported service-related disabilities in 2011. Households that have a disabled veteran who is unable to work are twice as likely to lack access to sufficient food than households without a disabled service member, according to the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

This month, SNAP funding was reduced by $5 billion as extra stimulus money for the program expired. While the Senate will never approve the $40 billion in further cuts to the food stamps program that House Republicans want, deeper cuts are pretty much inevitable. The two chambers are in the middle of negotiating a final version of the farm bill, which will contain food stamp reductions somewhere in between the $4 billion level the Senate wants and the level the Republicans want.

Whatever the final number, veterans will likely feel the pinch.

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GOP Food Stamp Cuts Would Kick 170,000 Vets Out of the Program

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CHARTS: How Environmentally-Friendly Are Your City’s Commuters?

by AnnaBest Posted on October 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Atlantic Cities website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Institute for Quality Communities at the University of Oklahoma recently dug through the latest Census metrics on how Americans commute to work, a dataset locally notable for the fact that Tulsa and Oklahoma City don’t compare all that well. Relative to the 60 largest cities in America, Oklahoma City ranks last in the share of commuters – 2.2 percent of them – who get to work by biking, walking or transit. That’s as much a reflection of the design of the city as the preferences of its commuters: Simply put, Oklahoma City was built for cars.

In the process of unearthing this ignoble distinction, IQC fellow Shane Hampton also posted some nice visualizations of how major cities stack up against each other by commuter mode share. The data comes from the 2012 American Community Survey, which records how people primarily get to and from their jobs (not necessarily how they make all of their daily trips, to destinations like the grocery store or church). The original charts are interactive, with individual data points. But we’ve pulled out a few here as well.

New York, not surprisingly, has the highest share of non-car commuters (67 percent):

Cities listed in order from largest to smallest percentage of commutes by biking, walking or transit.

Breaking that down by region and individual mode share, here is the Northwest, the Midwest, and the Southeast. Beware, each scale is different:

Northeast

Midwest

Southeast

And here is a range of cities – from notably different climates, Hampton points out – where biking mode share has significantly increased in the last decade:

All charts courtesy of the University of Oklahoma Institute for Quality Communities.

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CHARTS: How Environmentally-Friendly Are Your City’s Commuters?

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CHARTS: Remember Sandy? Storms Like That Could Become the New Normal

by Stephany6265 Posted on October 26, 2013

Mother Jones

One year ago, when the largest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history swept up the East Coast and collided with a Nor’easter, the two massive weather events morphed into a superstorm. Sandy made landfall in New York harbor during a full moon—when the tides are highest—and caused a massive storm swell that flooded much of the region. It was dubbed a Frankenstorm, a Snor’eastercane, the Katrina of New Jersey.


Flood, Rebuild, Repeat: Are We Ready for a Superstorm Sandy Every Other Year?


Charts: How Likely Is Another Superstorm Sandy?


“The Sea Was Swallowing It Up”


Watch This House Being Raised Out of the Floodplain

See more MoJo coverage of climate change.

By the time Sandy ran its course, it had created a disaster scenario better than anything Hollywood could dream up. But Sandy wasn’t fiction—and climate models show that within the next hundred years Sandy-sized storms could even become the new norm.

For a recent issue of Mother Jones, we set out to determine how soon we can expect storms like Sandy and 2003’s Hurricane Isabel—which devastated coastal Virginia—to become regular events. Using data provided by Climate Central and the National Climate Assessment, we found that the chance of another 9 foot storm surge in lower Manhattan reaches 50 percent in a given year by the end of the century. In some low-lying regions of Gloucester County, Virginia, residents can expect four foot storm surges to become a yearly event by 2060.

We also looked at the toll that weather-related natural disasters have taken on the troubled National Flood Insurance Program. Though it has recently undergone reform—raising the rates for many property owners whose homes have been deemed the most vulnerable to flooding (but also dampening the real estate market)—the federal program remains deep in the hole that Katrina created and Sandy deepened.

NOAA, FEMA, Congressional Research Service, White House Federal Budget

To find out how soon you can expect regular major flooding events in your area, type in your city, state, or zip code into Climate Central’s Surging Seas database below and move the water level line.

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CHARTS: Remember Sandy? Storms Like That Could Become the New Normal

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How Much Does Your State Fine For Texting and Driving?

by bmsv59yp Posted on October 25, 2013

Mother Jones

The good news: fatal car crashes are on the decline. The bad news: fatal car crashes involving cell phone use—anything from texting to talking to reaching for a ringing phone—are on the rise. In fact, the leading cause of death for teenage drivers is now texting, not drinking, with nearly a dozen teens dying each day in a texting-related car crash. Stark figures like this have driven 46 states to pass legislation banning texting and driving. But texting fines vary wildly across the country, and you’ll end up paying a little or a lot depending on where you got caught. In California, the maximum penalty for a first-time offender is just $20, the lowest in the country, while Alaska will slap you with a whopping $10,000 fine and a year in prison. Meanwhile, some states don’t allow cops to pull drivers over for texting, but can impose a texting fine on top of another penalty, like speeding. Confused yet? Keep your eyes on the road: we’ve rounded up maximum first-offense fines for fully licensed drivers in each state (jump down to see the full table), along with a few more sobering stats on using your phone while behind the wheel. Remember: local laws may apply even if there’s no statewide ban where you’re driving, but to be safe—literally—just don’t text and drive, period.

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How Much Does Your State Fine For Texting and Driving?

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CHARTS: The Hidden Benefits of Food Stamps

by porvluef Posted on October 25, 2013

Mother Jones

In September, just two days after a Census Bureau report showed that food stamps helped keep 4 million Americans out of poverty last year, the US House of Representatives approved a $39 billion cut to the program (known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) over the next decade.

The House proposal, now being negotiated along with smaller, yet still significant, Senate cuts of $4 billion, would result in 3.8 million people being removed from food stamps in 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The haggling comes at a time when more than 15 percent of Americans remain mired in poverty, and more than half are at or near the poverty line when stagnant middle-class wages are matched against rising costs of living, US Census data show.

Although the Republican-controlled House cuts are unlikely, given a promised veto from President Obama, food stamps will still be slashed by $5 billion on Nov. 1, when the 2009 Recovery Act that increased the aid along with other stimulus spending expires. The 13.6 percent temporary boost in food stamp dollars helped more than half a million Americans escape food insecurity, and millions more to climb out of poverty—4.7 million in 2011 alone, according the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

Eighty-three percent of food stamps go to households with children, seniors, and nonelderly people with disabilities. The Nov. 1 reduction means $46 less per month for a family of four and $11 less for a single person. In 2012, the average recipient got $133.41 in food stamps per month—that works out to $1.48 per meal. “Without the Recovery Act’s boost, SNAP benefits will average less than $1.40 per person per meal in 2014,” reports the CBPP.

“The Republican attack on food stamps is “totally counter-factual,” says Peter Edelman, a professor of law at Georgetown University and a former Clinton administration official who resigned in protest of the 1996 welfare overhaul. “Millions of people are unemployed and millions more don’t earn enough to pay all their bills. The idea that food stamps, which provide support at one-third of the poverty line, is incentivizing people not to seek jobs that don’t exist anyway is beyond bizarre.”

Extensive research shows food stamps are a highly effective investment delivering big returns for all Americans, not just the poor. SNAP not only provides an economic and nutritional lifeline for low-income Americans, it also creates a significant boon to the wider economy.

The Economic Benefits of Food Stamps

When food stamps get spent, we all benefit. Despite critics’ focus on the costs of SNAP, research has shown that these dollars are among the best forms of government stimulus. Food stamp spending generates local economic activity, jobs in the farm and retail sectors and beyond.

Food Stamps Lift Millions Out of Poverty

In addition to boosting the economy and job creation, food stamps have helped millions of Americans climb out of poverty and away from hunger. The dollars put food on the table, and by covering much of poor people’s food expenses, free up vitally needed cash to cover rent and other necessities. That can help people stabilize their lives and get back on their feet. Since SNAP expanded in 2009, according to the USDA, “food insecurity among likely SNAP-eligible households declined by 2.2 percent, and very low food security declined by 2 percent; food spending rose by 4.8 percent.”

Food Stamps Improve Kids’ Health

Children are especially vulnerable to the lifelong ripple effects of poverty—exposed to hunger, under-nourishment, and a greater likelihood of chronic illnesses and disease. But studies show that when poor families get food stamps, kids’ nutrition and health improve. This can be particularly critical during infancy and early childhood, when brain development and metabolic health get their start. The added food and nutrition from food stamps has been shown to create marked health improvements both in childhood and later years.

Who Gets Food Stamps?

An extraordinary number of Americans have benefited or will benefit directly from food stamps. Half of all adults (pdf) will receive SNAP benefits at some point between the ages of 20 and 65, while half of all children will receive them at some point during their childhood. In 2012, nearly 1 in 7 adults received food stamps.

Graphics by Jaeah Lee

This article was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, non-profit news organization producing investigative reporting on food, agriculture and environmental health.

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CHARTS: The Hidden Benefits of Food Stamps

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6 Ways the GOP Congress Is Out of Step With the American People

by pitery Posted on October 25, 2013

Mother Jones

If this week’s revelation that 58 percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana is surprising, it’s mainly because legalization remains so taboo within the GOP. Republicans account for only 6 of the 20 cosponsors of the Respect State Marijuana Laws Act of 2013, the live-and-let live pot bill authored by their conservative California colleague, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (who admittedly marches to his own drummer). Yet drug policy isn’t the only area where the GOP orthodoxy is out of step with prevailing views. Here are five other things that most Americans want but Congressional Republicans consider crazy talk:

1) Same-sex marriage: Remember the name of that GOP presidential contender who equated legalizing gay marriage to sanctioning bestiality or pedophilia? Don’t worry, in a few years nobody will. More than half of Americans already think that same-sex marriage ought to be legal.

Gallup

2) Higher taxes on the rich: Republicans threw a fit earlier this year when President Obama proposed raising taxes on people who earn more than $250,000. But 6 in 10 Americans think the country’s wealth should be more evenly distributed, and a majority wants to accomplish that by taxing the rich.

Gallup

3) Reducing emissions: The GOP has painted Obama’s new standards for power plants as an ominous “war on coal.” Call it whatever you want, but nearly two-thirds of Americans—including a majority of everyday Republicans—support tighter limits on carbon emissions from power plants.

Pew Research Center

4) Keeping the federal government open: Americans may not love Obamacare, but a good majority thinks that protesting the law by shutting down the federal government was a terrible idea.

Politico

5) Immigration reform: The GOP’s immigration hard-liners constantly decry “amnesty,” which they define as pretty much any plan other than immediately deporting America’s 11.7 million undocumented immigrants. “Conservatives will not support a wrapped-up present with amnesty inside,” Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), vice chair of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Issues, told Breitbart News this week. Never mind that a huge majority of Americans wants to give illegal immigrants a path to legal citizenship.

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6 Ways the GOP Congress Is Out of Step With the American People

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CHART: Welfare Reform Is Leaving More In Deep Poverty

by IslaMitchell Posted on October 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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The economy is picking up in some parts of the country, but that hasn’t translated into any new serious efforts to help those suffering the most hardship. In fact, for those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, life may be getting even harder. A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) looks at cash benefits provided under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, commonly known as “welfare.” It finds that the value of monthly cash benefits that make up the fragile safety net for the poorest families with children has continued to decline steadily since the program was “reformed” in 1996.

Back then, benefits weren’t exactly generous, but they did manage to keep a whole lot of kids out of really deep poverty. Today, those benefits are almost nonexistent. The lucky few who are able to get cash assistance aren’t getting enough to pay rent or keep the lights on in most states, and the value of the benefits has declined precipitously since 1996—even more so since the recession started. According to CBPP, there is not a state in the country whose welfare benefits are enough to lift a poor single mother with two kids above 50 percent of the poverty line, or about $9700 a year. In many southern states, TANF doesn’t provide enough money to get a poor family much above 10 percent of the poverty line. What’s especially troubling about these figures is that, as CBPP reports, TANF benefits are often the only form of cash assistance poor families receive. They may be getting food stamps, which definitely help their situations, but you can’t buy diapers or pay the rent with food stamps.

People like President Bill Clinton and then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich claimed they’d be doing welfare recipients a favor in the 1990s when they reformed the welfare program to impose work requirements and make it more difficult for people to get benefits. The idea was that welfare recipients were just lazy and that their government checks were keeping them from working, making them dependent on the government. When the reform legislation passed, with Clinton’s signature, some people in the administration quit in protest, arguing that cutting off cash assistance for poor families would push millions of children into poverty. That didn’t happen, at least not right away. But funding for the TANF block grant hasn’t increased since 1996, meaning that in real terms, what the country spends to help poor families in the program has fallen 30 percent overall since welfare was “reformed,” and benefit levels have fallen even more in some states that cut benefits after the financial crisis started in 2007. Not surprisingly, since 1996, the number of families with children living in extreme poverty—that is, on $2 a day or less—has gone up nearly 130 percent.

The US Census Bureau reports that the number of Americans suffering significant hardships, such as having utilities cut off, getting evicted, or suffering food shortages, has escalated sharply during the recession. Between 2005 and 2011, nearly 7 million additional people were unable to make a mortgage or rent payment, suggesting that as the nation’s last-ditch safety net for people in really dire straits, TANF, is not working. Given that science is now showing just how damaging the stress of poverty is to children and their health and intellectual development, maybe it’s finally time for welfare reform to be reformed in a way that gives poor kids a fair shot at a decent future.

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CHART: Welfare Reform Is Leaving More In Deep Poverty

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CHARTS: US Carbon Emissions Are Dropping

by Jatiancecab Posted on October 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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One of the next big items on President Obama’s green agenda is a new set of caps on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Set to roll out over the next few years, the rules aim to slash the climate impact of the nation’s biggest polluters. But statistics released yesterday from the federal Energy Information Administration show that even without these new caps, energy-related carbon emissions—those that come from powering factories, homes, cars, and businesses—dropped almost four percent between 2011 and 2012, marking the fifth out of the last seven years for these emissions to decline:

EIA

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CHARTS: US Carbon Emissions Are Dropping

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The September Jobs Report Is Glum, But October’s Might be Worse

by Aigneis Gaskill Posted on October 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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The US economy added 148,000 jobs in September, fewer than expected, according to new numbers from the Labor Department, which were released Tuesday—more than two weeks late due to the government shutdown. The jobless rate fell from 7.2 to 7.3 percent, but as in previous months, the drop in unemployment is mostly due to the fact that fewer people were seeking work last month, and thus were not officially counted as unemployed.

The percentage of Americans who are working remained unchanged, at only 58.6 percent, the lowest labor force participation rate since 1986. As economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research said Tuesday, “This continues the pattern that we have seen throughout the recovery as the unemployment rate falls mainly because workers leave the labor market. The unemployment rate is now down by 2.8 percentage points from its 10.0 peak in October of 2009. However, the employment rate is up just 0.4 percentage points from its low point hit in June of 2011.”

The unemployment rate for blacks and Hispanics remained disproportionately high. The jobless rate for African-Americans fell one percentage point in September to 12.9 percent; for Hispanics, the number dropped three percentage points to 9 percent.

The leisure and hospitality industry lost the most jobs since December 2009, a stark change from recent months which have seen gains in low-wage service sector jobs. Retail employment increased 20,800. Here’s a chart showing September gains and losses by sector, via Quartz:

There was some mildly positive data in the jobs report. Part-time employment dropped 594,000, suggesting that the surge in part-time employment earlier this year was an aberration. That’s good news for the Obama administration, which has been trying to convince Americans that Obamacare’s requirement that employers offer insurance to people who work more than 30 hours has not caused employers to cut hours.

In other lukewarm news, average hourly earnings increased three cents in September. And construction payrolls increased 20,000, which could ease some economists’ fears that home building was leveling off.

As the Times reports, the dual battles over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling likely worsened the employment situation, “because hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors were furloughed and also because anxiety and uncertainty over the budget battle caused consumer confidence to plummet.” But we won’t see those effects until next month’s jobs report. Economists estimate the shutdown cut about 0.6 of a percentage point off fourth-quarter GDP.

More shenanigans over the budget and debt ceiling this winter, not to mention a possible extension of the deep budget cuts known as sequestration, could dampen the economy further. “It’s clear that the conservatives’ long march to austerity spending cuts has sapped aggregate demand from the recovery,” says Adam Hersch, an economist at the liberal think thank, the Center for American Progress. The stagnant economy and Congressional spats have led economists to predict that the Federal Reserve will likely delay scaling back it’s stimulus program.

Hersch says the report is “a stark reminder that it’s time for Congress to focus on the real economic challenges facing ordinary Americans: jobs, incomes, and the public institutions critical to our economy.”

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The September Jobs Report Is Glum, But October’s Might be Worse

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Hey, Ted Cruz! These Texans Say Obamacare Is Helping Them

by PennyChilton Posted on October 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has compared his fight to defund the Affordable Care Act to the fight against Nazi Germany. He sees it as his duty to provide “relief to the millions of people who are hurting because of Obamacare.” The uninsured in his own state will tell you a different story.

Stacy Anderson, from Fort Worth, runs her own business selling sweaters online. She says she has not had health insurance for the past seven years because the sweater business is not too lucrative. “It cost more than I made some months,” she says. Anderson says she was just diagnosed with skin cancer, though it is not life-threatening. “I’ve had it, apparently, for the entire seven years I’ve been uninsured,” she says. “It will be nice if I can buy health insurance and get it treated.”

Jeffrey Coffey is a 49-year-old from Austin who earns a living as a musician. He says has insurance, but notes that the $361 monthly premium is “way expensive” on his $22,000 salary; he says he pays more because he has asthma. Coffey says he applied for cheaper plans numerous times this year, but was turned down. “Getting rejection letters is depressing,” he says. When Coffey buys insurance on the exchange, he estimates he will able to get coverage for $160 a month, a $200 savings. “But so far I haven’t been able to log on to the website,” he adds.

Andrew (who prefers his last name not be used) is a BFA student at Texas State University in San Marcos. He’s in his mid-30s and has gone without insurance for years because it’s too expensive. He has also avoided doctors for fear that he’d be diagnosed with a chronic condition, and insurance companies would “blacklist” him when he finally applied for coverage. Andrew says he no longer has to worry about that when he signs up for insurance through the exchanges this month. Andrew and his wife, a pre-K teacher, want to have a baby soon, and he says that Obamacare makes it “much more affordable for us to plan when and where we will start a family. I no longer need to worry that, god forbid, if one of us gets sick, we will be dropped from our insurance.”

3.5 million uninsured Texans will finally get coverage under Obamacare. (One million more could have been covered if Gov. Rick Perry had agreed to the law’s expansion of Medicaid.) Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured citizens in the country; of the 25 million people in Texas, one in four don’t have health insurance coverage.

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Hey, Ted Cruz! These Texans Say Obamacare Is Helping Them

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