101 Million Get Food Aid from Fed Gov’t; Outnumber Full-Time Private Sector Workers

101M Get Food Aid from Federal Gov’t; Outnumber Full-Time Private Sector Workers

July 8, 2013 - 11:32 AM
By Elizabeth Harrington
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(AP File Photo)

(CNSNews.com) – The number of Americans receiving subsidized food assistance from the federal government has risen to 101 million, representing roughly a third of the U.S. population.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that a total of 101,000,000 people currently participate in at least one of the 15 food programs offered by the agency, at a cost of $114 billion in fiscal year 2012.

That means the number of Americans receiving food assistance has surpassed the number of full-time private sector workers in the U.S.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 97,180,000 full-time private sector workers in 2012.

The population of the U.S. is 316.2 million people, meaning nearly a third of Americans receive food aid from the government.

Of the 101 million receiving food benefits, a record 47 million Americans participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps. The USDA describes SNAP as the “largest program in the domestic hunger safety net.”

The USDA says the number of Americans on food stamps is a “historically high figure that has risen with the economic downturn.”

SNAP has a monthly average of 46.7 million participants, or 22.5 million households. Food stamps alone had a budget of $88.6 billion in FY 2012.

The USDA also offers nutrition assistance for pregnant women, school children and seniors.

The National School Lunch program provides 32 million students with low-cost or no-cost meals daily; 10.6 million participate in the School Breakfast Program; and 8.9 million receive benefits from the Woman, Infants and Children (WIC) program each month, the latter designed for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women, as well as children younger than 5 years old.

In addition, 3.3 million children at day care centers receive snacks through the Child and Adult Care Food Program.

There’s also a Special Milk Program for schools and a Summer Food Service Program, through which 2.3 million children received aid in July 2011 during summer vacation.

At farmer’s markets, 864,000 seniors receive benefits to purchase food and 1.9 million women and children use coupons from the program.

A “potential for overlap” exists with the many food programs offered by the USDA, allowing participants to have more than their daily food needs subsidized completely by the federal government.

According to a July 3 audit by the Inspector General, the USDA’s Food Nutrition Service (FNS) “may be duplicating its efforts by providing participants total benefits in excess of 100 percent of daily nutritional needs when households and/or individuals participate in more than one FNS program simultaneously.”

Food assistance programs are designed to be a “safety net,” the IG said.

“With the growing rate of food insecurity among U.S. households and significant pressures on the Federal budget, it is important to understand how food assistance programs complement one another as a safety net, and how services from these 15 individual programs may be inefficient, due to overlap and duplication,” the audit said.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/...sector-workers

FOOD STAMP NATION IS NOW LARGER THAN THE FULL-TIME PRIVATE-SECTOR WORKFORCE

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By: John Hayward
7/9/2013 09:56 AM

The Obamanomics transformation of America is nearly complete. The most recent unemployment report, which was supposed to be mildly optimistic, was actually a fresh milestone in the evolution of Waiter and Waitress America, as full-time career and manufacturing positions vanished, to replaced by a wave of part-time service industry jobs. If the President was a Republican, the media would be having a seizure over this, but instead they prattle about how job creation was “better than expected.”

But the news gets even worse, as CNS News reports that our shriveled full-time private sector workforce is now smaller than the number of people who receive subsidized food assistance from the federal government:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that a total of 101,000,000 people currently participate in at least one of the 15 food programs offered by the agency, at a cost of $114 billion in fiscal year 2012.

That means the number of Americans receiving food assistance has surpassed the number of full-time private sector workers in the U.S.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 97,180,000 full-time private sector workers in 2012.

The population of the U.S. is 316.2 million people, meaning nearly a third of Americans receive food aid from the government.

Those programs range far beyond the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), but that program is also hitting record highs, claiming 47 million beneficiaries at a cost of $88.6 billion. Other programs include school lunches, the WIC program for low-income pregnant women, and a program to subsidize the purchase of food at farmers’ markets for seniors, women, and children. The Inspector General just released a report identifying considerable overlap between these programs, to the point where some individuals may be receiving “total benefits in excess of 100 percent of daily nutritional needs.”

It’s tempting to point at one alarming ratio and call it the tipping point, where takers outnumber makers, and the socialist death spiral becomes irreversible. The far more dangerous problem lies with takers who are also makers – the point at which dependency on government programs has spread so far through society that the fabled “middle class” is no longer independent in any meaningful sense. When a third of the country is receiving food assistance, we’ve gone far beyond emergency safety net programs designed to temporarily feed the starving poor until they can take care of themselves.

Food aid must be one of the most insidious dependencies ever conceived, because reform will be portrayed as quite literally taking food from peoples’ mouths. The beneficiaries are likely to excuse many other failures of government, as long as it keeps feeding them. And since people buy food on a frequent basis, they develop a constant level of appreciation for a tangible benefit. So does the business community, which adjusts its plans in numerous ways to take advantage of those taxpayer billions.

Meanwhile, the full-time workforce continues its perilous collapse. The number of people who carry the heavy burden of government is shrinking. The private sector is growing accustomed to making do without the full-time jobs it has eliminated, because every business was hit with a systemic incentive to wipe them out simultaneously: ObamaCare. Private industry can be compelled by government to take actions that would not make sense in the context of free-market competition and the drive for greater productivity. And these forces came into play at the same time the Baby Boom retirement demographic was rumbling through the workforce. Arguably, ObamaCare couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Now, let’s take this rickety system, make the people even more dependent upon government for subsidies to buy their overpriced health care, infuse a few million more dependents through comprehensive immigration reform, raise the cost of doing business with Obama’s deranged War On Energy, and see if we can’t get that death spiral churning at full speed.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/07/0...tor-workforce/

More People Getting Government Food than Actually Working

By Bobby Eberle July 9, 2013 7:13 am

http://www.gopusa.com/news/wp-conten...gn-300x180.jpg I guess this new fact should not be surprising: there are now more people getting food aid from the federal government than are working in the private sector. As more people become increasingly dependent on government, we will continue to see growing indications that the old America -- the one in which people worked hard to build their own futures -- is fading away.

As reported by CNSNews.com, "The number of Americans receiving subsidized food assistance from the federal government has risen to 101 million, representing roughly a third of the U.S. population."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that a total of 101,000,000 people currently participate in at least one of the 15 food programs offered by the agency, at a cost of $114 billion in fiscal year 2012.

That means the number of Americans receiving food assistance has surpassed the number of private sector workers in the U.S.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 97,180,000 full-time private sector workers in 2012.

The population of the U.S. is 316.2 million people, meaning nearly a third of Americans receive food aid from the government.

To say this is an alarming trend is the understatement of the year. Too many times, a person who gets "a little help" from the government will continue to receive aid... year after year. What started out as short term help becomes a way of life... a dependency.

This dependency is exactly what those on the left want. The more people who are dependent on government, the more power the government will have. It's as simple as that.

The Obama administration actually says that the more people who are on food stamps, the more it HELPS the economy. Here's what Sen. Jeff Sessions had to say about that:

"Amazingly, the federal government says that the more people we have on food stamps, the more it grows the economy. The Department of Agriculture proudly declares: 'Each $5 in new [food stamp] benefits generates almost twice that amount in economic activity for the community.' Our government is running food stamp promotions at foreign embassies. One worker was given an award for overcoming 'mountain pride' and getting more people to sign up. Where I grew up in Alabama, all honest work, even the hardest, was honored. And pride, self-respect, and a desire to be independent was valued, not a thing to be overcome."

Sen. Sessions is right, but as long as people continue to replace the values of self-respect and independence with a dependency on "free" food and services from the government, this country will continue to head down its current path. And with each step down that path, we lose a little bit more of the America that became the greatest country in the world.

http://www.gopusa.com/theloft/2013/0.../?subscriber=1

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One Third Of Americans Receive Food Aid

Posted on July 9, 2013 by BMartin1776


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...;v=6Cnqg2F3NMY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eANHW7eoy-E

… and that 101 million are also out of work!

We are in a stealth depression just imagine how bad things will be when they actually admit the country is in a depression, if they ever do! Personally I don’t think the powers that be will ever admit it, instead things will unfold at a faster more explosive pace than they did late 2007/ 08.

When this will happen no one knows since the Fed is constantly pumping money into the system, like a doctor giving a dying patient a show of adrenaline! Our economy is on its death bed no thanks to Obama who “has transformed America from a dynamic prosperous growth economy into a bureaucracy that redistributes wealth.”

http://savingtherepublic.com/blog/20...eive-food-aid/