Study Reveals Why Food Is Getting So Expensive: Blame What Biden Did to Food Stamps
Joe Biden’s massive increase in spending on food stamps — the highest increase in history — is also forcing regular Americans to spend more at the grocery store as the SNAP program has had the effect of driving food prices sharply upward, a new study reports.
The August report from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) found that Joe Biden’s administration pushed through a massive hike in food stamp spending and even violated all the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) own procedures in the effort to fast track the hike. And the increase has affected the price of food for everyone, not just the government.
The FGA report revealed that in 2021, the Biden USDA enacted the biggest permanent increase in food stamp benefits since the food stamp program was first started after passage of the 1964 Food Stamp Act.
By 2022, food stamp spending skyrocketed to $119 billion, “a sixfold increase over the last two decades,” the FGA reported. To break it down, the FGA noted that in 2019 the U.S. government was spending $4.5 billion a month on food stamps. But by 2022, it had risen to an astounding $11 billion monthly.
There was also an “emergency allotment” that temporarily increased food stamps during the pandemic which drove the spending to that $11 billion mark FGA explained. Thankfully, that has been sunset, but even when the emergency spending lapsed in February, spending remained nearly double the 2019 level and settled in at $8.6 billion a month.
Further, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Biden’s food stamp spending will reach $1.1 trillion over the next ten years, the highest ever seen.
Under Stacy Dean, the woman Biden appointed as the Deputy Under Secretary for USDA’s Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, the department increased benefits by an average of 27 percent in 2022, an expansion set to cost the U.S. taxpayer $250 billion over the next decade.
The FGA, which was founded in 2011 to study government overreach and suggest policies to reduce federal spending, also said that the spending increase was pushed through despite the department’s practices on policy implementation.
“In her quest to rush through this massive welfare expansion, Ms. Dean and others in 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 Ms. Dean’s accelerated timeline,” the FGA wrote.
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Worse, the Biden USDA did not submit the reports required by law to Congress and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) before unilaterally enacting the changes. This, the FGA says, makes Biden’s food stamp spending hikes actually illegal.
All this doesn’t just have an effect on government spending. In fact, the massive increase in food stamp spending costs all of us, not just in higher taxes, but in inflationary pressures that drives up the cost of food.
Researchers at the World Bank, for instance, tallied the data from 2.6 million barcodes that captured costs to consumers between Dec. 2019 and March of this year. The data indicates that prices have increased by about 24 percent. That correlates to an increase of one percent for every 12.5 percent increase in food stamp spending, FGA said.
The FGA ended its report saying that if Congress puts a halt to Biden’s illegal hike in food stamp spending and rolls it all back to 2019 levels, it could save the taxpayers $193 billion over the next decade.
The FGA is 100 percent right about the wild rise in food prices. Just this month it was revealed that the cost of a typical American breakfast has skyrocketed to highs not seen since the worst of Jimmy Carter’s Stagflation years.
Eggs, for instance have gone up an astounding 46.8 percent, butter is up 23 percent, and fresh fruits are up 26 percent.
The costs for our Independence Day cookouts soared this year, too.
The cost of beer was up 8 percent; soft drinks, up 14 percent; bread, up 22 percent; ice cream, up 9 percent; processed cheese, up 10 percent; and potato chips, up 15 percent.
Over all, the spending on our July Fourth cook out supplies averaged $93.34 in 2023, which was up $9.22 from last year’s $84.12, according to a National Retail Federation survey.
The pressures have been slamming consumers throughout Biden’s time in the White House. In February of last year, food commodities had seen a 40 percent hike and that pushed food prices up for everyone.
The Biden regime may be claiming that it is “helping” the poor with this massive hike in food stamp spending, but in reality, all he is doing is hurting the whole country. After all, even his food stamp recipients are getting less food for their welfare allowances thanks to Biden’s economically disastrous policies.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
