Fox News host Stuart Varney expressed outrage at state governments that are attempting to mitigate federal food stamp cuts, equating expanding eligibility for food benefits to “buying votes.”
On January 29, Congress passed a version of the farm bill that cut about $800 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps. In an effort to alleviate some of the effects of the cuts, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania modified a program that ties food stamp eligibility to home-heating assistance, known as the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), to make more low-income households eligible for benefits.
On the March 11 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co- host Brian Kilmeade called the effort a “scam,” and asked “if anything can be done to stop it.” Varney claimed “what's really going on here is the government is buying votes. They keep [sic] churning out food stamps in return for votes. That's what's happening”:
While Varney has frequently accused Democrats of buying votes through the food stamp program, this is the first time he has extended that accusation to a Republican. One of the states expanding benefits, Pennsylvania, has a Republican governor: Tom Corbett. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that Corbett's move would preserve benefits for about 400,000 Pennsylvania households:
In a move that surprised even his most cynical critics, Gov. Corbett on Wednesday night forestalled an estimated $3 billion in cuts to food stamps in the state over the next 10 years.
By doing so, Corbett became the first Republican governor in the country to prevent the cuts ordered by Congress, which is looking to slash $8.6 billion over the next decade to the food-stamp program, now called SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
The governor's decision will preserve benefits for 400,000 Pennsylvania households slated to lose a monthly average of $60 to $65 each in benefits, amounting to $300 million a year, said Kait Gillis, spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Welfare.
“In these challenging and trying times,” Gillis said, “our most vulnerable families may not have been able to absorb another hit.”
In a statement to Think Progress, the National Energy Assistance Director's Association's Mark Wolfe predicted that other states would follow the three that have already expanded benefits:
More states could follow, according to Mark Wolfe of the National Energy Assistance Director's Association (NEADA). “Other states around the country will look at this and say, this makes a lot of sense. It's not a red-blue thing, it's a money thing,” Wolfe told ThinkProgress. While preserving heat-and-eat benefits takes money away from LIHEAP programs, Wolfe said the directors understand that anti-poverty programs are a cooperative patchwork that serves the many of the same people.
“It's not so much a war between programs, it's more an issue of how to help families and how to use the scarce resource you have,” Wolfe said. “Many of the people that run these programs work very closely with the people that run food stamps and Head Start, they know what those programs go through, they're trying to help the same families.”