The Patriot Post® · Bidenomics: More Food Stamps, Higher Prices

A trip to the grocery store these days is enough to bring on the vapors. While overall inflation has surged 17% in the 30 months since the Biden administration was installed, the price of some common food staples is up much more than that.

While these prices can be cyclical based on the time of year and other factors, such as crop failure, a recent study pointed the finger at another inflationary factor. Despite what some scolds may say, newly minted cultural sensation Oliver Anthony wasn’t so far out of bounds when he sang, “Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds.” They’re paying for a bumper crop of them now.

It turns out food stamp spending has rocketed upward thanks to the Biden administration’s end-run around Congress. As the Foundation for Government Accountability’s Jonathan Ingram puts it: “USDA cooked their books to hike food stamp benefits by 27% — the largest permanent increase in program history. And they bypassed Congress to do it.”

The FGA study, which relies heavily on the government’s own statistics, contends that families were getting nearly $150 more per month than they should have during fiscal year 2022. Furthermore, the FGA study contends that changes to the government’s Thrifty Food Plan were enacted outside the bounds of proper procedure. As the study points out:

USDA leadership abandoned the department’s 45-year cost neutrality requirement, violated internal control standards, canceled formal peer-review processes, ignored the department’s chief economist, and forced the reevaluation team to cut corners and ignore best practices to meet (an) accelerated timeline.

Although federal law requires agencies to submit reports on proposed rule changes to Congress and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) before they become effective, USDA withheld this information and unlawfully implemented the change before Congress could review and vote on it. By the time GAO was able to review the matter in July 2022, USDA had already paid out billions of dollars in benefit increases.

Not surprisingly, the official in charge of the food stamp program — the one who rushed through the changes — is a former Clinton administration staffer named Stacy Dean, who spent her time between Democrat administrations cooling her heels at the far-left Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Her “reevaluation” of the Thrifty Food Plan turned out to be that of turning on the financial spigots, and the philosophy she operated under seems to be the age-old one that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

In this case, though, the damage has already been done to the millions and millions of working- and middle-class Americans who either make too much for food stamps or are too proud to accept them. That “extra” $150 families receive also creates an artificially high budget baseline that, if left unchecked, will ensure billions more dollars are wastefully spent, since few politicians have the stones to make the necessary revisions to the program. (Why do you think these things are left to bureaucrats in the first place?)

Still, the Biden administration and its Democrat allies could easily take care of this. As one of the scribes at Not the Bee put it in his own homespun manner, “Seems like Democrats could do a lot to solve the problem by, I dunno, rolling back government welfare, bolstering self-sufficiency, bringing inflation prices down, and saving a ton of money in the government budget.”

Who can argue with that?

Leftists will always caterwaul about “draconian cuts” to the food stamp program if even the rate of growth is slowed, but slowing down the gravy train Fudge Rounds Express sure seems like a good start to us.