Food stamp enrollment numbers have been
dropping from post-recession highs, as they were supposed to do all along. But
it's official now, because the
Wall Street Journal has noticed:
And experts expect enrollment and costs to keep falling: As more Americans find jobs and collect paychecks, fewer will be eligible, lowering program costs. The Congressional Budget Office sees food-stamp costs—now running at $80 billion, or 0.5% of gross domestic product—returning to 1995 levels around 0.35% as a share of GDP in five years.
This is exactly how the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is designed, of course. It gets bigger when the economy is bad and people need more help, and smaller when the economy improves and more people have jobs. All the Republican attempts to slash the program to the bone ignored this, because it was more convenient for them to use food stamps as a tactic to stigmatize people struggling in a terrible economy and distract from the ways Republican policies made the economy and the struggle worse. And we can expect Republicans to continue to pretend policies like SNAP don't work, despite all the evidence. Because that's what they do: they break the government so they can say "see, government doesn't work." They make people poor, then blame them for being poor. They divide and conquer. But for now, food stamps present a smaller target.