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SNAP funding—which, as mentioned, is a key part of the farm bill—reached a record high of more than $113 billion in 2021. Although this was due largely to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the funding level has exceeded $60 billion every year since 2008 and is expected to remain at this level or higher. All these factors help explain why the largest source of farm bill funding for rural areas is not financial support for farms, but SNAP. U.S. rural areas have higher participation rates in SNAP than urban areas. Also, a USDA study of the program following the Great Recession found that SNAP increased employment and economic output more than twice as much in rural areas as in metropolitan areas. Over the six years of the study (2009-2014), SNAP benefits calculated in 2014 dollars generated, on average, an annual increase in rural economic output of $49 billion. This far exceeds the impact of the rest of the farm bill on the rural economy. The contributions of SNAP to rural areas are also more significant than those of other federal programs. When USDA studied the impact of SNAP benefits on local employment during the Great Recession, it found that, per dollar spent, “SNAP had a greater effect on employment than [other] government payments combined, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and veterans’ benefits… [The effects] were also larger than the employment effects, per dollar spent, of all [other] federal government spending combined.” SNAP contributed more to reducing unemployment than any other federal poverty program. Unlike the rural development title of the farm bill, SNAP is designed to prioritize people in areas with the highest poverty rates and most depressed economies. Making areas with the greatest need a top priority, along with more resources, could improve the rural development component of the farm bill.

Despite improvements in the national economy since the 2008 recession, rural communities across the United States continue to face economic uncertainty, and grocery stores are among the small-town businesses that are finding it hard to stay afloat. The challenges faced by rural food retailers are numerous: competition from increasingly powerful “big-box” stores, the rise of online retailers, and high operating costs are but a few of the challenges threatening the economic viability of today’s grocery stores. But there’s another major driver of food sales that impacts rural retailers and residents alike, and it has to do with how much families can afford to spend.

Many households in low-wage, low-prosperity rural counties turn to SNAP to augment their food budgets—in fact, they do so at higher rates than their urban counterparts. About 16 percent of households in rural or non-metro areas participate in the program, compared to 13 percent in metro areas. And in a recent analysis of publicly available data, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that 136 of the 150 counties with the highest percentages of SNAP participation by household are located in rural areas.

SNAP is the largest program funded by the USDA, with about half of the organization’s $141 billion budget going to the program that feeds about 14 percent of the country. The Trump administration has already implied that it will begin making it harder for people to get aid for food, but this is…something else. Buried in the 2019 budget proposal is a barely-baked plan to replace half of the money that would normally go to SNAP benefits, which recipients can use at the grocery store or farmers market, with a “Blue Apron-type” box of food. Each “America’s Harvest Box,” as they’re being called, would include exclusively non-perishable items, like cereal, powdered milk, canned fruits and vegetables, and tinned meat and fish. The proposal says that these shelf-stable foods will be “100 percent US grown and produced,” and that it would save $129 billion over the next ten years. Where do we start? For one thing, there’s been no discussion of how these boxes would be distributed, nor has the USDA included any estimates of delivery costs. The USDA released a statement saying simply that “States can distribute these boxes through existing infrastructure, partnerships, and/or directly to residences through commercial and/or retail delivery services.” There are also no details on whether states would receive additional funding to cover these costs. The proposal would also completely remove the macroeconomic benefits of SNAP. SNAP is one of the most efficient economic stimulus programs in the entire government; every dollar spent via SNAP begets about $1.73 in economic value. (Put simply, giving people money to spend on food food triggers a favorable chain reaction: the spend that money at stores and farms, who hire employees, who in turn spend more money in the community.) Additionally, the SNAP program has a fraud rate of just 1.5 percent – an all-time low that can mostly be attributed to the move from physical food stamps to an electronic system. Most importantly, this is a not-even-thinly veiled attack on the poor, completely removing their ability to control even the most basic parts of their lives. Currently, SNAP benefits can be used to buy fresh produce, meat and dairy, even food-producing seeds and plants. Exactly what to buy is up to the person in question: those with allergies, religious dietary restrictions, picky kids – or just someone who wants to make their own choice about what to have for dinner – can choose their own groceries. Additionally, relying on shelf-stable products and claiming it’s a better way to ensure SNAP recipients are getting nutritious meals is insulting. There are plenty of programs that get healthy, fresh products to those in need, and this proposal instead replaces good, real, food – and the economic benefits that come from supporting small producers – with packaged, commodity foods. Farmers markets, and the small growers who sell there, have been huge beneficiaries of the SNAP program; the number of markets that accept SNAP has quadrupled over the past few years, and USDA data shows that SNAP is a highly efficient way to provide economic stimulus to small farms. All of that would go away with this plan.

Enter Double Up Food Bucks, a program that doubles Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly known as food stamps) benefits for recipients shopping at participating farmers markets or grocery stores, up to $20 per visit. Launched by the nonprofit Fair Food Network, Double Up Food Bucks began at five Detroit farmers markets in 2009. Today, 20 states have launched programs modeled after the original, including my home state of Arizona. “Double Up is a win-win-win,” says Adrienne Udarbe, executive director of Pinnacle Prevention, the nonprofit that manages Arizona’s statewide Double Up initiative. “SNAP recipients have access to more fruits and vegetables, local farmers make more money, and more dollars stay in the local economy.“ In 2016, nationwide SNAP spending dropped to its lowest point since 2010 Pinnacle Prevention operates 23 Double Up sites across Arizona under the Fair Food Network national umbrella, including a mobile market with 80 stops on its route. Each of them has seen an uptick in SNAP spending, and Udarbe says local produce vendors have indicated an increase in sales since the program started. Since Pinnacle Prevention’s Double Up program began in 2016, Udarbe says SNAP spending at participating farmers markets has increased by between 67 and 290 percent. Additionally, 84 percent of SNAP customers shopping at Pinnacle Prevention’s Double Up sites responded that they “buy and eat a greater variety of fruits and vegetables as a result of Double Up Food Bucks.” This increase in spending is significant, especially since in 2016, nationwide SNAP spending dropped to its lowest point since 2010. The handful of Double Up programs in Arizona that are not managed by Pinnacle Prevention have also reported ballooning SNAP spending after their programs began. The Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona (CFBSA), one of Arizona’s earliest adapters of the Double Up concept, reported $9,000 in SNAP spending at its Tucson farmers markets in 2015. But in 2016, after receiving federal funding to implement Double Up, program manager Audra Christophel says SNAP spending at CFBSA markets increased to $37,000. And in 2017, the total SNAP spending exceeded $43,000—nearly half of which was spent on Arizona-grown fruits and vegetables. In September 2018, the federal Farm Bill will expire. This means legislators are working now to craft a nearly $900 billion piece of legislation to steer food and agriculture programs over the next five years, including crop insurance, farmer loans, SNAP, and the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI) grants program that funds Pinnacle Prevention’s Double Up program. Udarbe says including FINI in the 2018 Farm Bill is important for the SNAP customers and farmers who count on similar produce incentive programs across the country. But the recent unveiling of the USDA America’s Harvest Box, part of a theoretical overhaul to the SNAP program that would include deep cuts, shows that the Trump administration may have a different plan in mind. America’s Harvest Box—a Blue Apron-style box for SNAP recipients—would contain pre-determined rations of U.S.-produced breads, shelf-stable milk, pastas, and canned goods. The box program was immediately met with widespread criticism from individuals and organizations working in the fields of nutrition and food security. In February, when a USDA official discussed the concept of America’s Harvest Box during a National Anti-Hunger Policy Conference, Politico reported that “boos and mocking laughter erupted” from a crowd of 1,200 anti-hunger advocates, and “at least 20 people walked out in protest.” Udarbe says, “The Harvest Box idea contradicts everything we have been doing over the past decade to move in a direction that best supports food-insecure families and farmers.” Indeed, America’s Harvest Box would remove the element of choice and would not provide fresh fruits or vegetables. It would also cut back on the economic opportunities for local produce farmers across the United States, who have come to count on the Double Up program for sales. Median farm income is projected to be negative $1,316 in 2018 The far-reaching benefits of Double Up, combined with increased pressure by the federal government for states to cough up funding for such programs, are at the foundation of SB 1245, a new bill introduced by State Sen. Kate Brophy McGee (R). If passed, SB 1245 would allocate $400,000 from the Arizona state general fund to be used as a match for Double Up Food Bucks. Udarbe and Christophel each say that federal grant applications will be more competitive if they can show a match from the state. “While match requirements aren’t new to USDA grants,” says Udarbe, it helps if applicants can show “evidence of buy-in and support from local leaders.” And though SB 1245 was introduced before the unveiling of America’s Harvest Box by the USDA, it’s hard not to contrast the two strategies—they’re literally at opposite ends of the continuum. “I passionately, passionately believe in this bill,” said McGee during public hearing for the bill. “If we are going to be spending food stamp dollars, this is where we need to be spending them.” As a former vegetable farmer and SNAP recipient, I’ve been on both sides of the table—I actually qualified for SNAP when I was growing food for my community, a cruel irony replicated among the millions of food insecure food workers in America. Farmers are often low-income (in fact, median farm income is projected to be negative $1,316 in 2018), a fact that highlights the role of programs like Double Up in providing economic benefits for direct-market farmers. “Funding for this program truly is the world to local farmers who sell directly at farmers markets in terms of being able to not only feed their families, but keep lights on and keep a roof over their heads,” says Udarbe. This sentiment is echoed by Dave Brady, a vegetable producer from Pinal County in Arizona, who testified in support of SB 1245. “I was basically at the point where farmers markets just weren’t working for me,” he says. “But the one thing that made sense to me was Double Up SNAP program. It just makes it possible for me to get my volumes up to a level that’s practical, that I can actual make a decent living at it.”

House and Senate Democrats are ready to play hardball to protect Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in this year’s farm bill as the food program becomes caught up in broader GOP efforts to cut government spending. Democrats argue that the ending of pandemic-era SNAP increases this month is already too much of a cut for the average program recipient to handle, and that any additional cuts would be inhumane. “If they screw around with SNAP, there will be no farm bill,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass) told The Hill. McGovern is a member of the House Agriculture Committee, responsible for the farm bill, and a co-chairman of the House Hunger Caucus. Food assistance programs make up about three-quarters of the must-pass farm bill’s expenditures, which must be reconsidered and approved every five years, along with subsidies for farmers and conservation programs. This year’s debate over SNAP benefits is setting the stage for a fight much like the one that accompanied the 2018 farm bill, when Republicans insisted on increasing work requirements to receive SNAP benefits. Democrats resisted, and the bill was ultimately passed without the requirements. The current farm bill expires at the end of September. The average SNAP recipient saw their benefits reduced by $83 per month after expanded benefits ended nationally in March. That sharp reduction has advocates worried about a “hunger cliff,” a large group of people who are suddenly unable to afford basic nutrition. “The reality is that we have a hunger problem in this country. And the SNAP benefit to begin with is not adequate,” McGovern said. “The idea that somehow this is this overly generous benefit and that we need to shrink it even more, is it just a wrong thing to do to people who are struggling.” Benefits went up by 22.5 percent in 2021 due to an update of the Thrifty Food Plan, the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) formula for how much food costs, largely due to inflation. Current SNAP benefits provide recipients with about $6 per day per person to help pay for groceries and other food expenses. “For those who work, there’s a strong labor market, but a lot of the people who are working have children and a lot of out of pocket expenses,” said Ellen Vollinger, director of the Food Research and Action Center. “Even though they might receive a somewhat higher SNAP allotment, the benefit is still not enough to get through the entire month.” And that can put parents in the painful position of scaling back on portions and variety, or even skipping meals, she added. “The really biggest hardship is when there’s a chance that the child is missing a meal. I think the adult caregivers of the household really do whatever they can to protect against a child going hungry, but there are a lot of children that are in food insecure households that they’re missing meals,” Vollinger said. The Thrifty Food Plan is the lowest level of the four food plans that the USDA publishes, with each level of the plan approximating the cost of a more complete diet: Thrifty, Low-cost, Moderate-cost and Liberal. The Food Research and Action Center and some Democrats have advocated for using the more expensive low-cost plan to calculate SNAP benefits, instead of the thrifty level. Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill in the 117th Congress to do just that. While many Democrats are advocating for expanding SNAP benefits, either by extending pandemic-era increases permanently — which McGovern said he supports — or changing the food plan benefits are tied to, that seems unlikely given GOP control of the House and a narrowly divided Senate. Some Republicans are even pushing in the opposite direction. In a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing last month, ranking member Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) said SNAP funding levels are “unsustainable,” and criticized the recent increase in benefits. The total SNAP program’s cost is now nearly double what it was five years ago. He said the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) “used a sloppy process with an accelerated schedule. USDA knew the outcome it wanted and then backed into it. … Because of these actions, FNS’s political appointees have made passage of the 2023 farm bill much more difficult.” Last month, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) published a letter with five other members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus advocating for increasing work requirements for SNAP recipients. None of the letter’s signatories are members of the House Agriculture Committee, and Chairman Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Ga.) has largely dismissed their demands, saying current rules are enough. Despite that, Thompson said House Republicans will still reevaluate SNAP benefits as part of the farm bill process. “I recognize the nutrition title both occupies a significant portion of the Farm Bill baseline and invokes strong emotions on both sides of the aisle,” he said in a statement. “Regardless, the policies and programs, including SNAP, should not be considered untouchable nor on autopilot.” But even if SNAP cuts or additional requirements passed through the House, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said they won’t make it through her chamber. “The Chairwoman has been very clear. We are not going to cut SNAP benefits in the 2023 Farm Bill,” a staffer said in a statement. “Imposing new, harsh, bureaucratic work requirements ignores the rigorous requirements that are already in place, and it would only strip benefits away from those who need them.”

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow has a warning for House Republicans who are looking to slash spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Cut SNAP, she says, and the rest of the farm bill will be pared back, too.

Stabenow delivered the warning in her opening statement at Thursday’s committee hearing with Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack. Stabenow said “threats we are hearing from some in the House in favor of reckless and indiscriminate mandatory budget cuts will result in cuts to all farm bill programs. We cannot go backward at a time when our farmers and families need us most.”

This week's bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt ceiling until 2025 in exchange for various spending reforms may directly impact the farm bill's chances this year. The bill, called the Fiscal Responsibility Act, made several eligibility changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Disagreement over these changes had been a major point of contention standing in the way of a farm bill reauthorization.

The agreement requires able-bodied SNAP beneficiaries without dependents up to age 54 to work or be in a work training program, an increase from the current maximum age of 49. It also added new exemptions to the work requirements for the homeless, veterans and people younger than 24 who were formerly in foster care. The changes are estimated to result in a net addition of about 78,000 new recipients.

Leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees say the debt limit agreement should remove SNAP work requirements as a potential sticking point in the upcoming farm bill debate, but also said the deal takes away some potential funding.

The agreement to increase the debt ceiling claws back some unspent pandemic assistance to reduce the deficit. Leaders of the committees disagreed on whether there would still be a significant amount of additional, unobligated funding that could be moved into the farm bill to shore up commodity programs and other provisions.

Social Security, Medicare, and public healthcare were political sacred cows spared from cuts by both parties. Republicans said “no deal” on tax hikes or cuts to military spending or veterans benefits. Likewise, the GOP rebuffed Biden’s entreaties for tax hikes as a political non-starter.

But one area of federal spending that surprisingly did not see significant impact from the debt ceiling deal was in the area of SNAP – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or the program formerly identified as food stamps.

That's because if we got a national job guarantee up and running, something else would happen too: Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs designed to help people in poverty would massively shrink. They all operate by providing benefits to people who fall below a certain income threshold. And with a job guarantee in place, far fewer people would ever drop that low (and in the case of Medicaid, they'd get their health care through their job, too). Spending on other social ills tied up with unemployment, from health problems to crime to incarceration, would shrink as well.

Eligibility for work support benefits is typically based on income, so as their earnings increase, families lose eligibility for supports. A benefit cliff occurs when just a small increase in income leads to the complete termination of a benefit. The result is that parents can work and earn more, while their families end up worse off than they were before.8

Returning to the example of a single parent living in Denver County with two children (one preschool-aged and one school-aged), Figure 3 illustrates the impact of benefit losses on the family’s efforts to get ahead. It shows how the family’s net resources—that is, resources after subtracting the cost of basic expenses—change as wages gradually increase from $6.85 to $20 an hour. In practice, workers may only experience a subset of this wage range.

Political economy concerns Lastly, there are significant political economy concerns. A first such concern is the impact of a JGP on public sector unions. The distinction between government sector employment and guaranteed employment is artefactual, and both contribute to national income at cost. Consequently, there would likely be considerable pressure to lower public sector wages and benefits to the level of the guaranteed job on grounds that the work is similar. In effect, there is a high risk that a JGP could be used to open a new front for undermining public sector unions and public sector remuneration. A second political economy concern is workfare. Not only may the JGP be used to undermine the character of public sector employment, it can also be used to undermine the right to welfare. Thus, the right to welfare can be made conditional on accepting a guaranteed employment job. In this fashion, a JGP can become a double-edged sword, cutting upward against the public sector and downward against the welfare system. That is not an outlandish speculation in the context of US political economy, where the large prison population is already being exploited to work for near-free for the benefit of politically connected labor-intensive private industry.

Yet the risk remains that a UBI and JG scheme would eventually come to replace, rather than augment, a minimum social safety net. Tcherneva notes that “while paid work in the modern world is life-defining and indispensable, it has, for many, become elusive, onerous, and punitive.”48 The attempt to recapture the language of work, while intended to celebrate the dignity of work, may emphasize the stigma of benefits receipt as “laziness.” Indeed, these programs might only replicate the worst problems of punitive workfare on an even wider scale, subjecting more individuals to sanction, hardship, and stigma for failing to fulfill the job responsibilities of a government program that offers only degrading, make-work jobs.

As mentioned above, the large-scale national job program envisioned by its leading proponents would cost $543 billion, or 3 percent of GDP, to employ 10.7 million people. This translates to a per-worker cost of $50,747 a year – or just slightly below the median household income in 2016 of $57,617. By comparison, federal spending on Social Security totaled $922 billion in 2016 while benefiting 61 million people, a relative bargain by comparison.

The $543 billion figure is also situated in the context of relatively low unemployment. At the height of the recession in 2010, the total share of workers unemployed and underemployed (“U.6”) was 17.1 percent, meaning that the cost of a federal jobs program could expect to double in a downturn, to more than $1 trillion a year.

Macroeconomic concerns A first macroeconomic concern is the putative cost of a JGP. This is a complex multifaceted concern. The immediate cost of a JGP will depend on the state of the economy and the state of the aggregate demand (AD) generation process. An economy with a deteriorated AD generation process, marked by a reduced wage share and increased inequality, will be prone to higher unemployment that raises the program’s cost. That speaks to the need to pair a JGP with other conventional structural Keynesian policies that remedy the causes of AD weakness. A second macroeconomic issue concerns financing and policy trade-offs. If government is financially constrained, policy must operate in a realm of trade-offs. Consequently, adopting a JGP may require giving up other desirable policy proposals such as increased public infrastructure investment, expanded subsidized healthcare, covering the shortfall in Social Security via general revenues, free tertiary education at public universities, elimination of student debt, or a universal basic income (UBI).

In this context, Sanders’s proposed job guarantee would act as a stabilization measure. It is designed to provide jobs at a relatively modest living wage to those who want them, when they want them, and not otherwise. In the context of a broadly strong economy with high employment (bolstered by the GND), the demand placed on the job guarantee would be small. Most people, even those released from prisons, would already be working in better jobs with higher wages and better career prospects. Only when the private economy falters – when the credit boom gives way to a credit crunch – would the alternative of a public job become attractive to more people.

In terms of the “costs,” it is important to remember that spending on the job guarantee would replace unemployment compensation, welfare, and some disability insurance as the safety net of choice for people who are able to work, because having a job is the best indicator of future employment prospects. So, in general and under normal conditions, the job guarantee’s expansionary effect on economic activity would be positive but modest. The virtue of the program is not so much in its effect on total activity, but that it creates a reserve capacity for dealing quickly with the human consequences of crises.

Forget universal health care; that universal basic income, small potatoes. The progressive wing of the Democrat Party is suddenly going all in on a federal job guarantee. Leading a parade of presidential hopefuls, Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (S-VT) are eagerly pushing a new federal entitlement program: jobs for anyone. These jobs would offer perhaps $30,000 per year in pay ($15 per hour) and come with full benefits (hello, (near) universal health care). Yet, while the idea starts from the far left, conservatives may soon back this idea because liberals haven’t thought it all the way through. A job guarantee program is really the ultimate work requirement for welfare recipients.

The idea of a job guarantee is simple. If you would like a job, the federal government will stand ready to offer you one, with reasonable pay (about double the federal minimum wage) and benefits. Details of whether the job would be near where you live, how skills would be matched between job and worker, and whether the output of these jobs would be needed or have any value at all are still to be decided. However, lack of specifics might not stop this idea, once conservatives see it in the right light.

Yameen, Senior analyst at Ernst & Young, “For a Universal Job Guarantee,” American Affairs Winter Volume I, Number 4, 2017 dmr

The Politics of a Basic Income

The capacity of a UBI to prevent poverty, reduce inequality and promote social justice depend on the question to what extent it fully meets the needs of the population. However, some UBI proposals devote little thought on to what extent cash benefits would need to be complemented by effective access to services, namely in the areas of health, education, care and other basic services, as well as to employment services and active labour market policies. Many observers are concerned that the introduction of a UBI could possibly undermine the provision of such services, in contexts where its fiscal costs were to displace the budget allocations for such services (e.g. Ruckert et al., 2017). This may lead to the privatisation of public services, or a growing divide between underfunded public services, and private services for those who can afford to pay for them (most likely those who can rely on substantial incomes on top of a UBI).

Such consequences may significantly increase inequality, and constrain the access to services for some categories of the population, particularly those who can rely only on a basic income. Recommendation No. 202 emphasises the complementarity of preventive, promotional and active measures, benefits and social services. Effective access to health care, including maternity care, is one of the four guarantees of a national social protection floor. It also highlights the essential complementary role of employment policies, including active labour market policies, which is particularly important for facilitating labour market transitions and re-skilling in the context of rapid economic and technological change. More generally, the Recommendation also stresses the importance of high-quality public services that enhance the delivery of social security systems, including in the areas of health care, education and care, and which play an essential role in promoting effective access to health, education and work, and promoting gender equality.

The health case for UBI appears to be straight-forward but a number of criticisms have been raised regarding its costs and negative externalities. From a health equity perspective, the most critical concern is that UBI could lead to a dismantling of other aspects of the welfare state infrastructure, such as universally accessible publicly provided or subsidized services (e.g. healthcare, education, transportation).19 This possibility, sometimes envisioned by Conservative supporters of UBI, would reduce welfare provision to an exchange between private providers and consumers, as first proposed by Milton Friedman.20 This outcome would be consistent with still dominant neoliberal economics and its emphasis on individual and not collective responsibility; but it would also allow private providers to raise prices commensurate with the (slightly) increased ability of individuals to pay. Transforming public welfare into income transfers alone undermines the ‘leveling up’ ability of UBI to raise the incomes of low-income households proportionately more than that of wealthier households (which also happens to be one of the targets for Goal 10 of the Sustainable Development Goals).