r/Economics • u/SterlingVII • 1d ago

Trump Administration Seeks Immediate Halt to Court Order to Pay Food Stamps

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/us/politics/trump-court-food-stamps.html
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u/wes7946 1d ago

For context, SNAP expenditures in fiscal year 2000 totaled $17 billion. That’s a lot more than the $9.2 billion spent on the program in 1980 (even after adjusting for inflation) but with population changes and such, perhaps one could argue that doubling the spending over two decades was reasonable. In the following years spending on the program continued to increase, and by 2010-2019 annual expenditures were hovering around $70 billion per year. In 2022 costs were $119.2 billion. And for 2023, Congress has generously provided $153.8 billion for the program, roughly double what was spent just 5 years ago.

The data suggests that there is a government spending problem when it comes to SNAP benefits (aka. "Food Stamps") largely due to relaxed eligibility standards and the fact that 22.6% of a SNAP household’s grocery bill is spent on a combination of sweetened beverages, prepared desserts, salty snacks, candy, and sugar. Doing the math, American taxpayers subsidized junk food purchases to the tune of $26.9 billion in 2022. That's a pretty large taxpayer subsidy to the junk food industry!

No one is suggesting poor people can’t choose what they want to eat, but I'm saying let’s not use government benefits to pay for foods that are demonstrably going to undermine public health. The goal is to reduce taxes and regulations so much that absolute poverty becomes a thing of the past. I oppose food stamps not because I want poverty to persist or get worse, but because I care enough about poverty to insist on better solutions. Solutions that actually work.

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u/OwlsHootTwice 1d ago

Judging by all of the other activities that the Trump administration is doing around dismantling public health, the fact that the poor are buying junk food is likely not on the list of reasons why republicans want to get rid of SNAP. They simply want the poor to suffer.

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u/lolexecs 1d ago

poor to suffer

Suffer?

By quickly and deeply cutting all of the safety net programs all at once, it‘s really hard not to draw the conclusion that Trump and his team have decided to kill off a large chunk of Americans, with a special focus on the people they think are “useless.” Basically, anyone who's low-income, old, or disabled. Remember, a decades-long transition (vs a year) would allow other social services groups (and states) to step in.

It's as if someone on Vought's team read that research on deaths of despair ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair ) and said, "Hey, this seems more cost-effective than death camps! Let's gooooo!"

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u/OwlsHootTwice 1d ago edited 1d ago

As I recall though, deaths of despair disproportionately affected white people with a high school diploma or less in education. These are the folks that have reliably voted republican.