The Senate has finally passed a bill that will give aid to states to help them close budget gaps on Medicaid, as well as prevent layoffs of teachers, firefighters, police and other state workers. The bill achieved cloture this morning 61-38, with all Democrats and two Republicans (Snowe and Collins) voting in favor.
The final version of the bill totaled $26 billion. Combined with the $34 billion unemployment re-authorization two weeks ago, the final total on the “second stimulus” package comes out to a paltry $60 billion. Originally, the target had been $253 billion, for a much wider variety of programs and projects.
The bill will reduce the deficit, but it does so in part by making $11.9 billion in cuts to foodstamps, something which even the 1996 welfare act did not do:
And they expanded the cuts to SNAP. A CBO score released last night shows the revised version more than pays for itself, reducing the deficit by $1.37 billion over the next ten years. SNAP benefits face a $11.9 billion rollback starting in April, 2014. A family of three can expect their benefits to drop about $50 a month.
Never before have congressional policies actually created a month-to-month cut in food stamps. Even in the 1996 rollback of numerous welfare programs, SNAP benefits just grew more slowly than food inflation.
The fight is on over the next 44 months to prevent these cuts from actually taking effect. It is difficult to imagine a way the cuts can be prevented in a 60-vote Senate, meaning that the fix will either have to happen in the budget process or after filibuster reform. The fight will be made even more difficult given that the White House suggested and supported these cuts.
The entire process behind the second stimulus saga seems to prove Stoller’s theorem The theorem states that the most likely outcome is not the worst outcome, but rather the most annoying outcome. In this case, no unemployment extension and state aid bill would definitely have been the worst outcome, but a heavily watered down version that took up several months of Senate time, and cut foodstamps in the process, was definitely the most annoying outcome.
STATE BLOGS
