The Food Stamp Program Is An Overwhelming Success. That Might Also Be Its Downfall.

In 1968, CBS showed a baby die on national television.

The hourlong Hunger in America program opened with a doctor using his thumb to try to pump air into the lungs of an emaciated baby. Viewers might have assumed the child was starving in some remote, developing country until the narrator assured them otherwise.

He was an American, the narrator says as the infants shoulder sags. Now, he is dead.

The show aired when there was an intense focus on hunger. Congress had held hearings on the issue, and the year before the CBS report, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) made a high-profile trip to the Mississippi Delta to draw attention to the plight of starving children (and to himself, since he would soon be a presidential candidate).

On his visit to the delta, Kennedy saw a 2-year-old girl sitting on the floor in the backroom of a windowless shack. This little kid seems not to be able to stand up, but seems old enough to be able to stand up, Peter Edelman, a Kennedy aide who accompanied the senator, recalled in an interview. So he kneels down and spends, who knows, five minutes maybe it seemed like a very long time trying to get a response from this child.

The childs mother explained they had no money and couldnt afford food stamps. Kennedy had seen poverty all around the world, but claimed hed never seen anything as bad as what he saw in Mississippi. He was absolutely shocked, Edelman said.

Kennedys hunger trip triggered visits from doctors, researchers and journalists including the CBS reporters. And those news reports led President Richard Nixon, who hailed the CBS report and wanted to get ahead of Democrats on the hunger issue, to urge lawmakers to liberalize domestic food assistance policies.

That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable, Nixon wrote in a 1969 message to Congress , adding that the moment is at hand to put an end to hunger in America itself.

An early version of the food stamp program started around the end of the Great Depression, when lawmakers wondered why the U.S. government had intervened to help struggling farmers by buying up excess crops, but didnt have a program for hungry people. In the decade after Nixons message, Congress gradually expanded the program and removed barriers to enrollment, including the requirement that poor people use their own money to purchase stamps. Enrollment surged from 2.8 million in 1969 to a peak of 47 million in 2013, amid the fallout of the Great Recession. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as it is now known, has grown from a tiny pilot project to one of the most important safety net programs in the U.S.

The starvation that once prevailed in the Mississippi Delta and elsewhere in the U.S. has basically been wiped out. Today, the U.S. faces what seems to be the opposite problem: widespread obesity fueled by an overabundance of cheap, unhealthy food. In other words, the conditions that justified the expansion of food stamps have changed drastically.

Nixon said action to alleviate hunger would be recalled with pride, but Republican rhetoric about food stamps is more typically tinted with shame . They describe it as yet another failed safety net program something thats cost hundreds of billions of dollars but hasnt decisively won the War on Poverty. And now they have their best chance in years to radically change the program in a way that would make America hungry again.

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