Like so much of Republican orthodoxy, President Ronald Reagan developed the conservative doctrine on welfare long ago. “We should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare,” he said while still California governor in 1968, “not by how many are added.”
Republicans can celebrate meeting that standard. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly 3 million have stopped taking food stamps since President Trump’s inauguration. Not only is that a drop from 42,134,301 in February 2017 to 39,329,356 in May of 2018, it’s an overall drop of more than 8 million people since the program reached its peak under former President Barack Obama.
Republicans, no doubt, will credit a booming economy for the plunge, as they should. Gross domestic product is expected to remain above 3 percent for the entire year and the unemployment rate has dipped to just 3.9 percent. Recently, investment giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley raised their economic outlooks and Goldman predicted a future jobless rate of a mere 3 percent by 2020.
The last time unemployment was that low, the United States was rebuilding the globe from the rubble of the Second World War. Then, like now, the benefits of a booming economy were too good not to work.
This provides a sharp and helpful contrast between the Trump and Obama administrations. The number of people who needed the government to help with their groceries nearly doubled while Obama was in the White House. Only 26,316,000 took food stamps in 2007. In the wake of the Great Recession, though, and Obama-era policies designed to expand the food stamp population, that number jumped to 47,636,000, or nearly 15 percent of the U.S. population at its peak in 2013. Republicans accuse Democrats of deliberately weakening food stamp requirements to push the number enrolled as high possible.
Since that historic high water mark under Obama, the number of people using the program has dropped steadily One Trump innovation, in particular, contrasts with his predecessor’s administration and perhaps helped hurry that decline. In March of this year, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue created a new chief integrity officer to root out fraud, and, throughout this year, Republicans have talked openly about their plans to reform the program in the next farm bill. Combined, those two factors provide a powerful disincentive for those gaming the system.
But many more are honest people, simply gaining the means to pay their own way. Either way, the restoration of millions to self-sufficiency is good news any way you look at it.
