New York Rep. Charlie Rangel says John Boehner has “no heart.” Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy says the House speaker is “reprehensible.” A newspaper finds him guilty of “Dickensian cruelty.”
What was this great act of fiendishness? It was Boehner’s comment Thursday that “since the passage of the farm bill, states have found ways to cheat, once again, on signing people up for food stamps.”
He’s right.
Back in January, the House passed a bipartisan $956 billion farm bill. The “draconian” food-stamp cuts amounted to $8.6 billion over 10 years. One way it was to reach this amount was to end the practice under which people in some states who receive state heating assistance are automatically enrolled for federal food stamps. The assumption behind this heating aid — not always true — was that they were paying hundreds of dollars to heat their homes.
Even the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has trouble with that one: “It’s difficult to defend the practice of giving people higher benefits for supposedly paying bills they don’t, in fact, pay.”
So the incentives for governors goes this way: Spend a few million in state dollars on heating aid to qualify all these homes — and the feds will return the favor with hundreds of millions more in food stamps.
Of the six states accused of cheating (New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Oregon and Montana), we note that only one has an unemployment rate below the national average.
Maybe if these states paid more attention to reforms that would grow their economies and create more good jobs for their people to choose from, they wouldn’t have to encourage more dependency.