The GOP’s new tax bill isn’t just a massive giveaway to the rich—it’s an all-out assault on SNAP, one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the U.S. That’s because SNAP is more than just a program designed to end hunger. It’s also a powerful economic engine, stabilizing local economies as well as supporting retailers and farmers. Lily Roberts from the Center for American Progress joins us to break down how these proposed cuts will deepen poverty, weaken economic resilience, and hurt millions—especially in the very communities whose lawmakers are pushing them.
Lily Roberts is the managing director for Inclusive Growth at American Progress. Her work focuses on raising wages, combating economic inequality linked to race, gender, and geography, and building wealth and stability for American families.
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SNAP Cuts Are Likely To Harm More Than 27,000 Retailers Nationwide
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Paul Constant:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Speaker 2:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative? Middle-out economics is the answer because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Paul Constant:
That’s right.
Speaker 3:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:
Things are getting really tough in the economy right now, so we needed to make a little cut to this show today by cutting Nick Hanauer off of it and replacing him with a discount co-host, Paul Constant.
Paul Constant:
I have just brought the average income of this podcast way down.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Paul Constant:
Man, it’s just a collapse, economic collapse on this podcast.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, but it’s fitting for today’s topic because the house just recently passed its… what do you call it, Paul? I know you love the name of the bill.
Paul Constant:
Oh my god. Let me just, we’re recording this on a Friday, so let’s make it Freaky Friday and we’ll start with me ranting this time. I am furious at the journalistic malpractice going into the coverage of the GOP tax bill because every single time, I think three times in the New York Times recently, I have seen them refer to it as Trump’s branding of the, quote, “big, beautiful bill,” unquote, and it’s everywhere. It’s public radio, it’s newspapers, it’s TV news. They immediately use Trump’s branding, sentences, sometimes even paragraphs in print before they actually mention that will slash Medicaid and all that. They use the words big, beautiful, and it’s just, it’s unbelievable to me that they’re letting Donald Trump’s admittedly pretty great marketing acumen win over journalistic integrity by using his branding first and foremost every single time. It is infuriating to me as a former journalist watching people walk into this trap again and again or step on this rake again and again and again.
Speaker 2:
Paul, it is so outrageous reading those headlines. It has literally made my eyes bleed. If you’re listening to the podcast, you won’t get it. If we put a clip up on YouTube, you can see a little bleed in the white of my eye.
Paul Constant:
Yeah, a blood vessel burst in Goldy’s eye.
Speaker 2:
I just assume that happens to everybody who reads a New York Times headline these days. It’s just goes with the territory. Yes, it is awful because, well, this is big. This bill is big. There is nothing beautiful about it. It’s just basically tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the most vulnerable. It is an effort to destroy Medicaid and destroy SNAP, what people of my generation called food stamps and a lot of people still do, even though there’s no stamps involved, and it’s going to be devastating, obviously devastating for families, families with children, for seniors, for people on disability. It’s not a very generous program, but it does provide a basic level of support for, what, forty-some million families?
Paul Constant:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:
Is that right?
Paul Constant:
That’s right.
Speaker 2:
And to be clear, these are mostly, predominantly the working poor and the working poor with children. It’s not like everybody’s getting a free lunch, so it’s going to have a devastating impact on families. But I think what’s often underlooked about this program is that historically it’s also been a support program for the agriculture and food industries. In fact, it has always been administered through the Department of Agriculture.
Paul Constant:
That’s right. And so in an effort to try to offset some of the credulous hackery that we’re seeing in newspapers and media these days, we decided to talk to an expert in SNAP about her analysis of what this large and ugly bill would do to the SNAP program.
Speaker 2:
So Paul, let’s talk with Lily Roberts. She’s the managing director for Inclusive Growth at the Center for American Progress.
Lily Roberts:
My name is Lily Roberts. I’m the managing director of the Inclusive Growth Department at the Center for American Progress. That means I work on a wide range of economic policy issues, mostly around folks who are using basic assistance like food as well as low-wage workers. So I’ve worked for a long time on minimum wage policy and employment insurance, and right now I’m working on defending against big cuts to SNAP and Medicaid in particular. CAP is a progressive center-left think tank in Washington D.C. We work on a really wide range of public policy issues. So we’ve got folks who spend their day researching and writing papers and folks who work on communications and getting those papers into the hands of people who make policy.
Paul Constant:
Could you maybe do a quick rundown on what SNAP is, just as a refresher for our listeners, like who gets it and how many people rely on it, that kind of thing?
Lily Roberts:
Yeah. So in 2024, SNAP helped about 41 million low-income people afford an adequate diet. Nearly 80% of SNAP participants are in households with a kid or somebody who’s over 60 or somebody who’s disabled. SNAP is really one of our strongest anti-poverty programs. So before the pandemic, it single-handedly kept about 7 million people out of poverty. 3 million of those were kids. SNAP is a program that’s targeted towards people who are really sort of living life in poverty. Almost all SNAP participants live below the poverty line, and half of them are in households that are below half of the poverty line. So again, it’s really targeted to the people who need it the most.
Lily Roberts:
There are two things that I always try to keep in mind when we’re talking about SNAP. They seem to contradict each other, but it’s going to be a theme throughout. So SNAP is a really small dollar amount of support to families’ budgets. At the same time, it’s really vital. So as I mentioned, folks who are using SNAP are usually in poverty. A SNAP participant receives about $2 per person per meal. So you cannot live large on $6 a day, it is impossible, but it’s a really crucial $6 a day. Folks like to talk about how SNAP works because it’s changed a lot over the past decades. We called the program food stamps for a really long time because they were physical stamps. Folks got stamps that had sort of extra purchasing power that they would take to a food retailer. They’d redeem that for their groceries.
Lily Roberts:
In the modern era, we use basically a debit card. So it’s called an EBT card, and it’s a pretty restrictive thing, sort of list of things that can be paid for with EBT. So you can’t spend SNAP on cigarettes or alcohol. You also can’t spend SNAP on prepared foods which is a really interesting dynamic in sort of the modern world. For example, you can’t go to Costco and spend your SNAP on rotisserie chicken, even though that’s a pretty reasonably economical and healthy way to feed your family. So SNAP really comes out of an era where we were trying to encourage cooking from scratch, and the assumption was that somebody was at home ready to make dinner from scratch every day. So SNAP still has really strong restrictions on what you can pay for.
Lily Roberts:
We’re going to be talking about big dollars and small dollars here. So in 2023, the federal government spent about $115 billion on SNAP. Almost all of that goes directly to households as benefits. There’s some money that’s like administering the costs. But importantly, and I think this is what we’re going to talk about a lot today, unlike unemployment insurance or TANF or other programs that we use to buttress people against sudden economic downturns or the loss of a job, up until House Republicans pass their bill this week, SNAP has always been a program where all of the benefits are paid by the federal government. That’s because we’ve decided that in this country, no matter where you live, you should not starve to death. And for all of the incredible benefits that the country receives from SNAP because of its power as an economic stimulus and from all the contributions of the people whose lives are improved because of SNAP, it’s a grand total of about one and a half percent of the federal budget. So it’s a really small line item in the federal budget, but it has incredible impact for families, particularly kids.
Speaker 2:
So there’s a lot in there.
Lily Roberts:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
First I want to ask a question, then I want to get to the details of the House Republicans’ cuts and what that will mean, not just for the recipients, but for the larger economy. What percentage of SNAP recipients are in households that are the working poor as opposed to… Obviously there’s some people with disabilities, et cetera.
Lily Roberts:
There are 4 million adults with disabilities on SNAP, 8 million seniors. Almost all of the rest of the folks are families that have kids and that are sort of the working poor. It’s really hard to be a single adult on SNAP. There are really strong restrictions including time limits, and so folks are almost always working if they’re not elderly, disabled, or taking care of a kid.
Speaker 2:
Okay. So the work requirements that the Republicans are putting on are really just intended to make it extremely difficult to qualify, to actually go through the paperwork of qualifying.
Lily Roberts:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
It doesn’t actually change who really qualifies.
Lily Roberts:
Exactly, and they’re just adding to the category. So SNAP already has among the strongest paperwork requirements of these federal programs. So the two things that are big changes, actually, there are three big changes to the paperwork requirements in this current bill. One is to increase the ceiling for how old you have to be to not be subject to the work requirements. So now they’re going to include older people up to age 64. They also have decided that… so they’ve always exempted parents of kids, but now they’ve decided that if your kid is seven, that doesn’t count as being a parent.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, because eight-year-olds don’t need to eat.
Lily Roberts:
Exactly. Famously, eight-year-olds don’t need to eat. The other way that they’re changing the paperwork requirements in this bill that’s really harmful for the broader economy as well is that there’s always been this approach to exempting parts of the country or moments in time when there aren’t enough jobs or enough training programs to absorb all the people who have lost jobs. So that’s really important during a recession. Basically a state can get a waiver to opt out of some of those requirements at moments when there just aren’t that many jobs in a given area, and the house bill eliminates that as well. So it’s really threatening SNAP as sort of an automatic stabilizer which is one of its strongest roles, right, that in moments of economic downturn SNAP is really there to catch people who have lost jobs, and again, keep them from really sort of abject poverty as well as bolster local communities’ economies too.
Lily Roberts:
While we’re talking about work requirements, I think it’s really important to sort of hammer away at the fact that over and over again decades of research show that what the Republicans are calling work requirements, what other people call paperwork requirements, I saw somebody this morning refer to them as welfare for Deloitte, but there’s this really interesting dynamic where they’re going to keep hammering on work requirements but work requirements do not lead to more work. They lead to more paperwork, they are documentation requirements, and over and over again we see that people lose access to the programs that actually help them get jobs. So people who aren’t going hungry, people who have healthcare, those people are more likely to get jobs and they’re likely to get better jobs that they stay in for longer. Just taking away the benefit because somebody has lost a job is the absolute reverse of what these programs are intended to accomplish for the economy and for individuals.
Paul Constant:
Can you walk us through what’s actually in the House GOP proposal so that we get everything on the table and what that means for SNAP?
Lily Roberts:
Yeah. So the bottom line is that it’s about a 30% cut to SNAP overall, but they’re getting to that 30% in a set of deliberately complicated ways that really set us up for terrible long-term consequences for the program and for the economy. So we’ve talked about the work requirements a little bit, but I think that’s sort of one of the headlines. It’s also something that they’re trying to do in Medicaid. Sort of subjecting new groups to more and more stringent paperwork requirements for both SNAP and Medicaid is just sort of this terrible double whammy for working families.
Lily Roberts:
Two other ways that are sort of important to highlight, the most obvious way to gut a program that gets dollars to people is to cut off the dollars. So one of the things that they have proposed is to sort of halt dollar increases that Congress had actually already voted for just a couple of years ago. So in the last bipartisan farm bill in 2018, Congress decided to finally change the way that they were calculating food benefits. So since the 1970s, we had had a sort of constant theoretical basket of groceries, and it was this sort of like bare bones imaginary grocery basket. You can imagine that the 1970s version of a grocery basket is not what families need to buy today. So for example, first of all, we have more food available to us, and we know more about nutrition. So we want people to buy leafy greens, not iceberg lettuce. We want people to buy milk, not frozen orange juice concentrate.
Lily Roberts:
So a few years ago, Congress started phasing in a new way to calculate benefits based on what we actually think a low cost, very low cost version of a healthy grocery basket is, but the House Republicans voted to freeze that increase. So it’s been phasing in and they would stop it where it is right now. And then so the other way to think about how they would cut SNAP is more about sort of how we structure economic programs in this country and what we ask of our federal government. It’s going to sound really wonky, so bear with me as I try to explain this, but it’s the-
Speaker 2:
It’s good. I love wonk.
Lily Roberts:
Good.
Speaker 2:
I don’t know if Paul’s as much into it as I am. So go on.
Lily Roberts:
Well, I’ll try to frame this wonkiness in terms of why it’s really important for both people who care about the broader economy and for how we solve political problems. So the whole history of SNAP, benefits have come from the federal government. States do the administration of the program, they figure out who’s eligible, they distribute the EBT cards that the benefits come from, but they don’t pay the benefits. That comes out of a century of history around food insecurity in this country. Coming out of the Great Depression, we saw bread lines and there was this deep moral belief held on both sides of the aisle that nobody in this country, no matter whether they live in New York City or Mississippi, should go hungry. We have plenty of food to go around and we have ways to solve this problem.
Lily Roberts:
So the bill that the House Republicans just passed says that at a minimum every state has to pay 5% of the benefits that its residents get in SNAP. That probably doesn’t sound like much, but in Pennsylvania, for example, that percentage last year would’ve been about three-quarters of what the state spends on community colleges. So it’s a huge line item, and 5% would be the minimum because they also want to penalize states for what’s called the error rate. That’s the amount of overpayment and underpayment of SNAP benefits. An error rate sounds like it’s going to be like large-scale fraud, but USDA and watchdogs and plenty of auditors agree that it is almost always very minor, very honest mistakes by state bureaucrats who are administering the program, or basically like a person forgetting to sign a form.
Lily Roberts:
SNAP has a really arduous application and recertification process. It’s a system that’s focused on accuracy, sometimes at the expense of access. So a lot of people get denied even though they qualify because they didn’t fill out the form quite correctly. When that happens in a form, the state then gets penalized because there’s significant monitoring and auditing of the state’s administration of the program. We’re talking really small dollars, like, oh, you are penalized for $1 overpayment and $1 underpayment, and that adds up to $2 in an error rate calculation that the state would then be on the hook for.
Lily Roberts:
So what this bill does is it tries to penalize states extra for these very minor error rates. Again, they’re small dollars and SNAP is among our least error-prone government service. So one thing to sort of compare it to is the tax gap. That’s the difference between what people actually owe in taxes and what the federal government collects. That’s about 15%. That’s basically twice as high as this SNAP error rate, and it’s a much, much larger dollar number, but we’re not penalizing the IRS for the tax gap. In fact, they’re like getting IRS auditors and staff to make it harder to collect the taxes. So all of this adds up.
Speaker 2:
That makes sense, because what’s really important is making sure that poor people don’t get an extra dollar or two as opposed to billionaires paying their full taxes. The billionaires are the productive members of society.
Lily Roberts:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, let’s punish that kid whose parent forgot to sign the 27th signature blank on the form because that’s how we’re going to have a strong economy. All of this adds up to the fact that a state could have to fund up to 25% of its SNAP benefits which that 25% would’ve been previously entirely the responsibility of the federal government. Meanwhile, they’re also upping the amount that the state has to contribute to the administration of the program. So if you’re keeping track, they’re making the administration more difficult because they’re adding paperwork requirements for more groups of people. They’re making the state shoulder more of the administrative costs. They’re penalizing the state for doing worse at administering the more complicated administration. And then they’re going to say, “And now you also have to pay more in benefits because of all of the ways that we’ve made administration harder for you.” There’s one more piece of this, which is that the federal-
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and states are rolling in dough, right?
Lily Roberts:
Right.
Speaker 2:
So this is no problem.
Lily Roberts:
Absolutely.
Speaker 2:
They’ll be able to cover the cost. Just run a deficit like the federal government can. Uh-oh, wait, that’s not possible.
Lily Roberts:
Uh-oh.
Speaker 2:
Sorry.
Lily Roberts:
You can’t and you can’t especially during moments when we’re in a recession. So in a recession, the state’s tax dollars go down, they’re collecting less revenue, a whole lot more people need SNAP because they’ve lost their jobs. And the reason that SNAP is an incredibly important automatic stabilizer for our economy is that because it’s funded by the federal government, which can run a deficit when it chooses to, it basically injects the local economies across the country with money that’s spent super quickly. So in times of crisis, the federal government can choose to spend a little bit more, and people who have lost their jobs inject that cash back into the community right away.
Lily Roberts:
But states are going to have smaller budgets and hundreds of thousands more people who need food assistance. SNAP is a program, it keeps recessions from becoming depressions. The money is spent nearly instantly. It keeps people from starving to death. When you take away that guarantee of federal benefits, you’ve taken away our national right to not starve to death. There are states that absolutely won’t be able to afford to pay benefits for everyone who needs them, and it’s going to result in enormous cuts across the country.
Speaker 2:
And it’s also spent locally. This is a really important point. So it’s spent with local retailers.
Paul Constant:
That’s the thing about the report that I thought we really need to touch on because we talk about hunger, and obviously that should be enough for people to care, but it’s also that [inaudible 00:20:17]
Speaker 2:
But it isn’t. We know it isn’t because they made bad choices, so their children deserve to be hungry.
Paul Constant:
But yeah, I wonder if you could talk about what it means for local businesses around the country.
Lily Roberts:
Yeah. Food is a thing that you buy in your community, and people sometimes can shop a little bit online, but almost all the time you are going to a local retail establishment and you are picking up your groceries. It could be Meijers or Albertsons or Giant Eagle. It could be a bodega. It could be your immigrant community market. That’s where you’re spending your SNAP dollars. There are hundreds of thousands of SNAP retailers across the country, and they’re everything from big grocery chains, Walmarts, to very small family-run businesses. There are also great programs across the country that have happened over the past couple of decades about using farmer’s markets. So many farmer’s markets now have programs where your SNAP dollars are doubled and you’re able to get access to fresh produce.
Lily Roberts:
Our analysis showed that there are 27,000 retailers in over 300 counties that are at risk of significant financial harm and potentially closure just because of these cuts to SNAP. They’re located in places where a large percentage of local residents use SNAP, and they’re also by and large in places where there are already very few options for places to buy food.
Lily Roberts:
So this is one of the things that we want to emphasize. It’s not just this SNAP recipient who’s at risk of these closures. It’s not even just the person who owns the grocery store or the cashier who’s at risk of losing their job. Because if the only place in your county to buy groceries is the dollar store and it loses a big percentage of its revenue and it closes, and the same thing happens in the next county over, suddenly you’re driving an hour each way just to buy food, that is a really quick way to make rural communities basically unlivable. We’ve talked a lot in the past decades about bringing jobs to different parts of the country, but if you can’t buy groceries without driving for an hour or two, you basically can’t live in a community anymore, and it becomes incredibly hard for that community to attract jobs or retain the residents that it has.
Lily Roberts:
It’s also really important to know that all of this is happening against the backdrop of other huge threats to the food system, from DOGE, from the Trump administration actions. So we’ve seen soybean farmers that sold their crops to the government for distribution abroad, they’ve taken huge losses because those contracts got canceled. USDA and FDA have had big staff cuts, and the Trump administration canceled grants that reimburse farmers for projects they’d already started. They canceled grants to food banks and programs that connect farmers with local school districts. So farmers and food safety net systems have lost their reliable partner, and they’re already having to cut back. So in normal times, they might be able to absorb some of the problems that are going to arise from having fewer retailers and fewer SNAP dollars, but they’re already barely hanging on. And so this could become a real problem across the country for just the access to food which is something that we’ve taken for granted in this country for a really long time.
Speaker 2:
Is SNAP still administered through the Department of Agriculture?
Lily Roberts:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
It is, because historically this is where a lot of the support of it came from. It was an agricultural support program as well as a food security support program. I’m not sure, I think from Ronald Reagan on, the idea of welfare queens buying steak and lobster with their food stamps, people have thought of this as a program for the urban poor, but in fact it lifts up huge swabs of rural America, not just the recipients and the retailers, but the agricultural sector itself.
Lily Roberts:
Yeah, and it’s really interesting to actually go back into the history of SNAP. So the original food stamp program, it was a solution to solve hunger, but it was also a solution to agricultural surplus. So in the Great Depression, we had all of this economic surplus. There were really visceral images of crop burning and slaughtering animals while we had these pictures of bread lines and folks literally starving, and in the Great Depression, that was really the way to make the match between agricultural surplus. That was the original federal food aid program. People were getting upset about… what the phrase of the time was, scarcity in the midst of plenty. So food aid became a logistical effort because it was focused on getting food from farmers straight to families. Retailers really pushed for this to become a currency-based system. That’s where the food stamps came in, the transition from you got a literal box of potatoes to you got a set of stamps that you could use at your local market because the retailers didn’t want to lose business if people were having their food needs met directly by surplus products.
Lily Roberts:
So it’s actually a really interesting history where, unlike with the rest of the New Deal programs, you had business interests like retailers like the Chamber of Commerce really in favor of a solution to hunger that makes sure that dollars flow through retailers. That’s one of the reasons why SNAP has really been sort of the last vestige of bipartisan support for the social safety net over the past couple of decades. Even though you had all this sort of Reagan-era fear-mongering, SNAP was largely funded by the farm bill which is a bipartisan effort where you’re doing both sort of like aid to farmers as well as food, and people could sort of make trades based on the priorities of their constituents. But we’ve lost that over the past decade, and then this house bill just sort of is a really unprecedented hit on how SNAP is administered and funded. Again, when you take away that federal commitment to the benefits and you put that administration on the states and you put the benefit costs on the states, it’s just going to equal a cut.
Paul Constant:
I know that SNAP even gets a little bit of a critique from the left in that there’s an argument that SNAP functions as a subsidy for low-wage employers like Walmart who… in the past McDonald’s has advised workers on how to apply for SNAP benefits rather than actually pay them a living wage. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that in terms of what you’ve seen in your analysis of SNAP.
Lily Roberts:
Yeah, I would say that’s totally true. The Walmarts of the world get away with having low wages because many of their employees have access to healthcare through the federal government, like Medicaid access or SNAP access or other pieces of this, but I would also say that that’s not the fault of the SNAP recipient. It’s certainly not the fault of the SNAP recipient’s kid. And so I think that’s why it’s so important to think about how our economic system works holistically. Let’s raise the minimum wage substantially and then also hold employers accountable for the sort of unpredictable churn and seasonality of low-wage work which is a huge driver of how much SNAP these workers need in any given month.
Lily Roberts:
It’s also part of why administering paperwork requirements is so challenging because at the low end of the wage spectrum, people are working different hours every week. They have to prove that they were employed last month and they’re looking for a job this month, but their job said, “Well, we had the Christmas rush and now you’re done for a while.” They’re having to prove all of that month after month to get access to SNAP. I think that’s the place where you need minimum wage policy and other constraints on corporate actors to ensure that they’re doing right by their employees. It’s not just Walmart. Famously, many graduate students at elite institutions have to apply for SNAP. There are plenty of employers who can basically get away with the low wages they pay but because of the federal system that’s set up to support people who make very little money.
Speaker 2:
I think what a lot of the outrage at retailers like Walmart is that Walmart double-dips.
Lily Roberts:
Yeah, they benefit from getting… people spend their SNAP dollars there too. Absolutely, and that’s one of the reasons why with this research on retailers, like Walmarts are threatened too. They’re big corporate actors, but if their grocery sales dip by 30%, that’s not enough of a… they’re going to claim that they’re going to have to close in that community, and I think it’s really incumbent on food retailers and people who are in the food system to be speaking up about how important SNAP is and to be saying how harmful these cuts would be because both for their customers and for their employees.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. What percentage of food retailers accept SNAP?
Lily Roberts:
It really varies from year to year. Let me actually… I’m actually not sure.
Speaker 2:
Because it’s not… I mean, they have to go through a qualification process as well, don’t they?
Lily Roberts:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
So it’s not something that a mom and pop business is necessarily going to be able to implement.
Lily Roberts:
And it really varied. I mean, there are convenience stores. There are small grocers that access this as well.
Speaker 2:
Farmer’s markets.
Lily Roberts:
Mm-hmm. I’m sorry, I don’t actually know the percentage of retailers.
Speaker 2:
Do you know, Paul, do they still do it here at the farmer’s market where they convert it to a script first at a booth, and then…
Paul Constant:
I don’t know how the process works. I know they do take it at the farmer’s markets here, but yeah, I’m not sure what the process is.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So you can use your SNAP to buy the $5 head of lettuce, so it’s going to go far.
Lily Roberts:
Yeah. My neighborhood one actually gives you an extra plus-up both for… it also gives seniors a plus-up which is a really nice addition as well, and really talks… it’s integrated with food education and cooking. There are gardening programs. So it’s a really robust set of food access.
Speaker 2:
What do you think, Paul? Should we get to the final two questions?
Paul Constant:
Sure, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:
Okay. What we used to call the benevolent dictator question which was a fun way of phrasing it before we had an actual dictator in the White House. We’re now calling it the magic wand question. Absent political constraints or any constraints, what would you do to make this system better?
Lily Roberts:
So there are sort of two answers to this, I’m going to cheat a little bit. I think that the true magic wand would be to re-envision how we guarantee economic prosperity in this country. So SNAP is an important and very strong program. There are definitely ways that it could be improved. So first of all, you could actually increase the benefits. Again, I mentioned it’s like about $6 a day. People often need to spend much more than that on food, and you could change program regulations around letting people use the hot bar at the grocery store or reflect the fact that a twelve-year-old basically eats as much as an adult does. There are sort of programmatic tweaks that you could make.
Lily Roberts:
But I would say that the bigger thing is that SNAP is a program. You can’t compare it to international comparable programs because other countries don’t really have equivalent programs to SNAP because they just give people direct and economic assistance, especially families with young kids. So the US has decided that food is one of the last places that we are comfortable just giving people direct economic assistance. We don’t do it through a tax credit on the back end. We don’t do all of these specific voucher things where we like hand them a box of particular potatoes. We just give people a debit card that’s preloaded with access to food. Other countries are doing that for a much wider range of needs. So they’re doing it for cash benefits, but they’re also subsidizing housing, there’s cheaper transit, there’s direct access to healthcare without the same expensive insurance market, they’ve got cheaper free child care. So turns out that when you provide all of those resources for people in the modern world, they generally don’t also need food support because they’re getting their needs met.
Lily Roberts:
So it might be a cop out, but my magic wand fix for SNAP would be a system in which we don’t need SNAP. Food is the most basic of these pieces, and it really feels like if we could cover other needs for people and people would be able to afford food in a regular market based way, we would have a much stronger economic system overall.
Speaker 2:
So obviously, pay people more.
Lily Roberts:
Pay people more, give them access to the services that they need. Eliminate these big ticket items so that you’re not nickel and diming people over two bucks per meal.
Speaker 2:
And our last question that we ask everyone is why do you do this work?
Lily Roberts:
I was thinking about this question, and I believe very strongly that every person has worth, and I believe that so strongly that I find it really frustrating to argue about the morality of policy. I do not want to wake up every morning trying to convince policymakers that a child in this country in the year 2025 should not starve. That’s really hard for me to give any grace to a lawmaker who wakes up in the morning and tries to take food or healthcare away from people. So for career, I wanted to try to appeal to the things that actually motivate policymakers which is, quote, unquote, “sensible economics” a lot of the time.
Lily Roberts:
So that means explaining that businesses do better when their staff are paid decently, and our economy does much better when kids don’t go hungry. I mean, we have all of these downstream effects of SNAP, for example, there’s endless research that shows that SNAP leads to better health, better economic outcomes, better educational outcomes. It’s so powerful for kids that you actually see test scores fluctuate based on when in the month kids take the test because so many families’ SNAP benefits run out by the end of the month.
Lily Roberts:
We can work on education policy, we can work on economics, but funding things at the front end is so crucial, and I think that that is the place where I want to spend my time in the policy world trying to improve the ways that we think of economic outcomes in this country as inclusive of those kids and the power that they’re going to have in the future to start businesses or innovate or whatever it is that they’re doing, whatever value they’re bringing, those things are only possible because we’re investing on the front end. If I have to make the morality argument, I’m going to lose my mind. So instead, I focus on trying to convince folks who claim to be interested in economic growth that this is a way that they can really affect economic growth long term.
Speaker 2:
Wow. But what about the moral hazard? If we feed all these children, they won’t have the incentive to the study hard.
Lily Roberts:
The children yearn for the mines. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, again, if I had to get up every day and contend with that, I would lose my mind pretty quickly.
Paul Constant:
That’s a fantastic answer. Thank you.
Lily Roberts:
Thanks.
Paul Constant:
I was very impressed with Lily’s answer to the why do you do this work question because I think that’s something we talk about a lot here at Civic Ventures is the idea of fairness not being an adequate incentive for politicians and for just talking about economics in general, right? I think it is good, it is enough for me to feed the hungry with my tax dollars. I’m perfectly happy with that. But I mean, there’s also the fact that every dollar of SNAP spending generates up to $1.50 in local economies, right? The fact that this benefits not just people, not just individual families, but also small corner grocery stores and farmers and food processors. It’s a genuine economic boon to the economy, and so, yeah.
Speaker 2:
There’s a large multiplier effect if a local grocery store goes out of business because they’re losing 30% of their business because SNAP gets cut off. That’s going to put more people out of work and in need of SNAP. It’s interesting, Lily mentioned that SNAP is an automatic stabilizer, and all of these programs are, SNAP, to a lesser extent Medicaid, but certainly unemployment insurance compensation. The whole idea is that when there is an economic downturn, and this is just basic Keynesianism, but when there is an economic downturn, these government programs pump money into the economy and more specifically the local economy which helps offset the downturn and keeps it from getting worse. That’s why, we’ve talked about this on the show before, ideas like a basic income or, we find a little more interesting, a federal job guarantee, they tend to kick in when the economy goes down and it helps keep the economy stable.
Speaker 2:
So that’s why you want to build automatic stabilizers like this into the economy, and it has nothing to do with fairness. It has nothing to do with morality, with justice. It’s just simply about taking this really complex economy that we have and keeping it stable. I’d hate to use the word equilibrium, but you need to stabilize it because the thing is about complex systems is they’re really, they can be really fragile. You can have this one event which can cause this cascading series of failures that leads to collapse, and that’s what something like SNAP helps prevent. The thing that really, that I find even more disturbing from all this though is when you look at the map… and we’ll provide a link in the show notes to the piece on at American Progress. When you look at the map of the 27,000 retailers who are vulnerable to SNAP cuts and you look at where the recipients are, where these benefits are most needed, you’ll see, just like with Medicaid, it is disproportionately red counties.
Paul Constant:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:38:13]
Speaker 2:
In blue states and red, and it is largely disproportionately the constituents of Republicans, not Democrats. This idea that these programs are programs that support the urban poor, the Democratic base is just not true. It’s not true in Washington State. It’s not true anywhere. The needs are in the rural counties, in the red counties. What I find frightening about all this is that they have to know it.
Paul Constant:
By they, you mean the politicians, the Congression-
Speaker 2:
Yes.
Paul Constant:
Yeah, Congress.
Speaker 2:
There’s this thing about, like with the minimum wage, and oh, you’re only going to hurt the people you’re trying to help. The Republican version of this is you are always going to hurt the people you’re trying to hurt. They’re trying to hurt these people, and it’s not the morality of it that I find frightening because I know these people are locked into this selfish, narrow-minded ideology. What I find disturbing about it is they don’t seem to be afraid of voter backlash. It seems like they’re doing many unpopular things in the same big beautiful bill, right? They are slashing taxes on billionaires which is very unpopular. We know this. The polling shows that people want to raise taxes on the rich. They want to tax the hell out of Nick Hanauer.
Paul Constant:
So do we.
Speaker 2:
Shh, don’t tell him. But also, programs like Medicaid and SNAP are really popular.
Paul Constant:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
They’re popular with people who receive them and they’re popular with people who don’t receive them. These are popular programs. Social security is really popular. They’re trying to dismantle it. They’re trying to dismantle Medicare, very popular, and they don’t seem to care because they don’t seem to fear voters.
Paul Constant:
Yeah, and I’m sure that this is where we’re going to get into the Goldy death spiral, and you’re going to say they’re not planning on an election happening or something like that, but I think it’s more simply they just trust that the systems that have kept them protected so far will continue to hold, right? That the Fox News apparatus and the whole right wing media sphere and social media will kick in and convince people that it’s the other side doing this or that it’s immigrants or that for some sort of like bathroom situation is somehow responsible for you not getting groceries. It seems like we’re reaching a point where growling, hungry bellies are going to speak a little louder than Facebook algorithms.
Speaker 2:
I don’t know. I mean, this is an administration, it’s a party that is run by chaos monkeys, and they thrive off of collapse. I mean, I look at a lot of the other economic policies just like, oh, we’re reducing tariffs, oh no, we’re raising tariffs. It just goes back and forth every day. They’re creating uncertainty and chaos. They seem to want to force the economy into recession. They seem to want to throw people out of jobs. They seem to want to make people hungry and not have access to healthcare. They seem to want to destroy people’s retirement savings and the social security system that people rely on. They seem to want to create all that suffering because I think they think they benefit from that.
Speaker 2:
When things are going well, you’re not going to be afraid of immigrants and gang members, and I don’t know who, trans people, whatever. You don’t need a scapegoat when things are going well, and this is a party that thrives off of scapegoating people. So I’m not saying that there won’t be an election, Paul. I mean, there’s elections in Putin’s Russia. I mean, they hold elections. I just don’t think… I think just like Putin, they don’t fear elections anymore.
Paul Constant:
Yeah, you’re better with quotes than I am-
Speaker 2:
Or they’re really stupid. I don’t know.
Paul Constant:
You’re better at quotes than I am, but do you know who said that something like, “No empire is more than two meals away from a revolution”? Have you ever heard that one before?
Speaker 2:
It’s familiar. I don’t remember who said it. Yeah.
Paul Constant:
Yeah. Well, it just strikes me that when you start messing with people’s bellies, you’re kind of touching a third rail.
Speaker 2:
But as Nick Hanauer said, it’s either a revolution or a police state.
Paul Constant:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Right? And looks like they’re betting on the police state.
Paul Constant:
Yeah. Well, at least in prison, you get three squares a day.
Speaker 2:
Ah well. Yeah. Oh, wait, wait. Is my other eye bleeding yet?
Paul Constant:
No, it’s still okay.
Speaker 2:
Anyway, if you want to read more from Lily about SNAP and the harm to retailers, oh my god, we’ll provide a link in the show notes. SNAP cuts are likely to harm more than 27,000 retailers nationwide. Yeah, not good for the economy. Hmm, who’d have thunk.
Speaker 5:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, @PitchforkEconomics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well, @NickHanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch, over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website pitchforkeconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.