For Gingrich, none of this is new - neither the attacks on food stamps, the suggestion that they mainly benefit African-Americans, nor the pious dismissal of his critics as craven elites reluctant to face hard truths. Back when he was still serving in Congress, Republicans routinely disparaged food stamp recipients as unscrupulous welfare queens in Cadillacs who were engaged, as Senator Jesse Helms put it, in “a multibillion-dollar shakedown of the American taxpayers.’’
In 1994, Gingrich sought to eliminate the federal food stamp entitlement as part of his Contract With America, using the same reasoning he employed on Monday night.
But while Gingrich’s attacks on food stamps and those who use them are essentially the same ones he and his colleagues were making two decades ago, the profile of the recipients has changed a great deal since then - and in a direction that Gingrich should applaud were his true motivation, as he claims, to encourage blacks to “demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.’’
First, some facts: The number of food stamp recipients has indeed risen sharply, but this rise began under President George W. Bush and is largely attributable to the recession. Food stamps are an anti-poverty measure, so it’s no surprise that enrollment should rise when large numbers of people are out of work (the number of recipients dropped last month as the economy improved). But recession isn’t the only cause. A Bush administration initiative begun in 2002 dramatically increased participation rates among eligible households, from 48 percent to 72 percent in 2009. And a law signed by Ronald Reagan allows the federal government to provide food stamps to disaster victims (including those who are not poor), as it did last year after Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee.
