Obama Added 11 Million to Food Stamps – Trump Has Already Removed 1.5 Million

It wasn’t even two weeks ago that CNN’s Anderson Cooper observed the following: “Never though have we seen a president so seemingly bent on reversing, negating, even obliterating his predecessor’s signature accomplishments.”

Yeah, and thank goodness for that! Most people are glad that Trump is intent on unraveling the Obama legacy. After all, look what that legacy did for Democrats: During the Obama years, Democrats suffered a net loss of 1,042 seats at the federal and state level.

And boy are there plenty of aspects of Obama’s legacy to undo:

Among the most striking of Obama’s legacies are the declines in median family income, home ownership rates, and labor force participation rates, coinciding with an increase in food stamp participation.

Yes – there were a net 9.9 million jobs created during Obama’s presidency. It’s also true that 14.9 million people left the labor force.

And the increase in food stamp usage is the most significant factor, because it indicates that, despite any uptick in employment that occurred under Obama’s watch, poverty rose at a faster rate. In 2009, 33,490,000 people received food stamp benefits. As of October 2016, 44,219,123 people received food stamp benefits, an increase of about 10,729,000. That’s an increase far out of proportion from what we’d normally expect with natural population increase. The cost of the program to taxpayers rose from $50.3 billion to $66.6 billion.

But there’s good news. The number of people on foot stamps is among the many disastrous aspects of Obama’s legacy that’s already being undone.

According to the Daily Wire, “new statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show nearly 1.5 million Americans have gotten off the food stamp rolls since President Trump took office in January 2017. That’s a 3.5% drop in less than a year.”

Here are the numbers of people dropping from rolls, month-by-month:

• January to February – 408,956
• February to March – 95,152
• March to April – 521,295
• April to May- 176,527
• May to June – 178,648
• June to July – 236,417

A major policy shift from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration has been in the re-implementation of “workfare” requirements for welfare. During the Clinton Administration, the federal government implemented welfare reform that required able-bodied adults to be employed or looking for work to receive certain welfare programs, food stamps being among them. During the financial crisis, Obama’s Department of Agriculture suspended the work requirements for welfare, leaving it up to the states to re-implement the “workfare” requirements.

States that have done so have already seen an improvement in their budgets. Welfare recipients have also benefited. For states that have re-implemented work requirements to receive food stamps, their corresponding decreases in the percentage of their able-bodied residents on the dole are as follows:  -85% in Alabama, -58% in Georgia, -75% in Maine, among others.

The Trump Administration is looking to make the workfare requirement federal policy once again, and has added it to the 2018 budget.

Once that law take effect, expect the number of people receiving food stamps to fall further, and faster.

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