Austerity = More Money for Bankers, Less for You

Just who's paying into this system anyway -

The House Appropriations Committee today will review the fiscal year 2012 appropriations bill for the Department of Agriculture that includes $71 billion for the agency’s “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.” That’s $2 billion less than what President Obama requested but a 9 percent increase from 2011, which, critics say, is too large given the sizeable budget deficit.

A record number of Americans -- about 14 percent -- now rely on the federal government’s food stamps program and its rapid expansion in recent years has become a politically explosive topic.

More than 44.5 million Americans received SNAP benefits in March, an 11 percent increase from one year ago and nearly 61 percent higher than the same time four years ago.

Nearly 21 million households are reliant on food stamps.

The Real Effect
Consider this -

It cost taxpayers more than $68 billion last year, double the amount in 2007.

 Now compare that cost to just a few of the Federal Governments programs such as ZIRP, QE1 and 2, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and other such programs and you begin to see that "cutting food stamps" is not a particularly bright idea in this day and age. Further, how can we morally square paying bankers so they can afford their high class prostitutes, but we can't afford to subsidize the most basic necessity of life, food?

No, the truth becomes we can not afford either -

Even “at a time of prosperity, we have increased the amount of money we are spending for people to buy food,” said Harold Brown, an agriculture scientist and adjunct scholar at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. “The appropriation of money by Congress has never solved poverty or the resulting problems of poverty. When President Johnson declared war on poverty a half century ago nearly, we thought we saw the end of it as far as food and nutrition goes. For the Department of Agriculture, we only saw the beginning.”

However if forced to cancel one, the US would do far better to examine and slash corporate money troughs such as the Department of Education, the Dept. of Homeland Security and the Czars rather then cut pennies in food assistance. But that would just be asking the ruling class to give up too much cake. We wouldn't want the parasites to starve now would we?