- House approves farm bill, without food stamp program, By Jonathan Weisman and Ron Nixon, July 11, 2013, New York Times: “Republicans muscled a pared-back agriculture bill through the House on Thursday, stripping out the food stamp program to satisfy recalcitrant conservatives but losing what little Democratic support the bill had when it failed last month. It was the first time food stamps had not been a part of the farm bill since 1973. The 216-to-208 vote saved House Republican leaders from an embarrassing reprisal of the unexpected defeat of a broader version of the bill in June, but the future of agriculture policy remains uncertain. The food stamp program, formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, was 80 percent of the original bill’s cost, and it remains the centerpiece of the Senate’s bipartisan farm bill…”
- As numbers increase, a battle over food stamps, By Sharyn Jackson, July 11, 2013, Des Moines Register: “After long days as a Wal-Mart employee, a nursing student at DMACC and single mother of five, Susanna Harrison spends her nights juggling numbers. After using most of her minimum-wage salary to cover rent and medicine for her kids, she’s left stretching food stamps to feed her children. She looks for sales and chooses items that she knows will last longest. ‘It’s a lot of late nights,’ said Harrison, 31. ‘Between the kids and schoolwork and work and trying to fit in setting down a budget, this is what I have to play with at the grocery store.’ Harrison is one of the more than 400,000 Iowans on food stamps, today known as food assistance, delivered via a debit-card-like system. The federal program distributes close to $75 billion to more than 46 million Americans, half of whom are children…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty