These cuts, however, would not just harm households
that are struggling to put food on the table. They would also hurt many businesses’
bottom lines and would cost our economy hundreds of thousands of jobs by
reducing demand for certain goods and services.
The proposed block grant would go into effect in
2019, forcing draconian cuts to the program in just the five years from 2019 to
2024. Assuming that these cuts will be spread out evenly over the five years,
our analysis of a 2012 Center for American Progress study estimates that the
House Republican budget nutrition block grant would cost the economy 342,950
jobs in the first year alone and hit the food industry especially hard.*
Nutrition cuts reduce the purchasing power of
low-income families, who are in turn forced to spend less on basic needs such
as putting food on the table. This reduced purchasing power ripples throughout
the economy: Fewer families buying less food means less demand for grocery
stores and retail, which in turn require less support from trucking and
warehousing and need to make fewer purchases from food manufacturers and
farmers.
While these direct, indirect, and induced job losses
ripple throughout the entire economy, they have a disproportionate impact on a
few sectors of the economy. According to our analysis of the 2012 CAP study,
the 2019 SNAP cuts, for example, would result in approximately 11,300 jobs lost
in retail including grocery stores, 21,000 jobs lost in food manufacturing and
agriculture, and 8,250 jobs lost in trucking and warehousing.
The House Republican budget proposal presents a
double hit for low-income families. The cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program would hit the pocketbooks of the families struggling most in
this economy, exacerbating hunger and poverty for households mainly composed of
children, seniors, people with disabilities, and working parents. But the
proposal also cuts off pathways to opportunity by causing hundreds of thousands
of job losses, which would hit young workers especially hard since they
constitute a disproportionate share of workers in the food industry.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The $135 billion in
proposed nutrition cuts to families struggling to put food on the table could
be more than offset by eliminating the special write-offs for corporate meals
and entertainment in the tax code, which total $140 billion over 10 years.
Congress can invest in jobs and lend a hand to
struggling families, but it all comes down to choices and priorities.
*These estimates are based on a 2011 analysis showing
that every $1 billion in SNAP cuts equals approximately 13,718 jobs lost.
Because the production functions, costs of labor, and other inputs could change
over the next five years, these numbers are an approximation.
About the author: Melissa Boteach is the Director of
the Poverty to Prosperity program at the Center for American Progress.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
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