With unemployment rates at record lows and the federal budget deficit up 17 percent year-over-year, the Trump administration will turn back to a familiar target in Republican cost-cutting maneuvers: entitlement programs.
In the final days of 2018, the Department of Agriculture announced that it would take steps to institute a series of rule changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—still known colloquially as food stamps—designed to "restore the [nutrition assistance] system to what it was meant to be: assistance through difficult times, not lifelong dependency." If enacted, the new restrictions would do away with a waiver program that grants exceptions to non-disabled SNAP beneficiaries between the ages of 18 and 49 with no dependents, who would otherwise be obligated to participate in a work program for at least 20 hours each week.
The writing has been on the wall for months now. In September, President Donald Trump's economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, signaled that reforms to the "burdens and inefficiencies of entitlements" were imminent in order to rein in federal spending. Then, shortly before the announcement of the rule changes, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue openly bemoaned the fact that more stringent work requirements for certain SNAP beneficiaries didn't make it into the farm bill passed by Congress.
[For more on this story by BRIANNA PROVENZANO, go to https://psmag.com/economics/th...o-the-lgbt-community]
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