1.5 Million People off Food Stamps Since Trump Took Office

One of the many criticisms against former President Barack Obama was the astonishing number of Americans enrolled on food stamps or other forms of welfare assistance while his “non-recovery” economy sputtered along for eight years.

But Breitbart just reported that, within five months of President Donald Trump taking office, food stamp enrollment had dropped significantly, by nearly 1.5 million people or about 3.5 percent.

That revelation came from numbers recently released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as the food stamp program is officially known.

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As of July 2017 — the latest numbers released — the number of Americans enrolled in the program was 41,203,721. That’s down from January 2017, when enrollment was at 42,689,768. In July 2016, the number was reported as 43,334,443, meaning food stamp rolls had dropped by more than 2 million enrollees in one year.

It is worth noting that, while the overall downward trend in enrollment is expected to continue, it is nevertheless thought that there will be a spike in reported enrollment numbers over the course of August and September, owing to a temporary increase in the need for government assistance for some residents of Texas and Florida in the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

To be sure, some of the drop in SNAP enrollment could be attributed to a swiftly improving economy and falling unemployment rate, but it is suspected that Trump’s proposed policies to get Americans off of food stamps may already be having an effect as well.

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Politico reported in May that Trump’s proposed budget called for cutting SNAP funding by roughly 25 percent, along with a strengthening of work requirements for able-bodied recipients and a strong encouragement for states to match their portion of food stamp funding by 20 percent.

Of course, liberals decried the proposal as a heartless gutting of the “social safety net” that millions of Americans rely upon, but that simply isn’t the case.

“We believe in the social safety net,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, explained to reporters at the time. “It helps us get to 3 percent (economic) growth, because having a social safety net gives people the confidence to take a gamble and fail and know they won’t be completely wiped out.

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“What we’ve done is not to try and remove the social safety net from folks who need it, but to try to figure out if there are people who don’t need it and get them back into the workforce,” he added.

Many states had already implemented tougher work requirements for food stamp recipients, as well as limits to how long they could continue receiving benefits, and Breitbart reported that some 42 of 50 states had seen a drop in enrollment thus far this year.

The number of enrollees should only continue to drop as Trump’s policies are further implemented and the economy continues to pick up the pace, sparking job and wage growth that will allow many Americans to enter or improve their position in the job market and no longer need government assistance.

H/T Newsmax

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