How the left manipulates the truth.

"House Republicans narrowly pushed through a bill on Thursday that slashes billions of dollars from the food stamp program…" - Ron Nixon, New York Times, 9/19/13

"This week the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill that would cut the federal food stamp program by roughly 40 billion dollars." -Hari Sreenivasan, PBS NewsHour, 9/21/13


Here's how left-wing activists arrive at the figure of $39 billion. The dollar figure of what the Democrats wanted to spend over ten years is $764 billion, but the Republican-led Congress passed a bill that spends $725 billion.The difference is $39 billion, and that's the "cut."

You're also probably not hearing that the taxpayers are spending about $80 billion annually for food stamps.

Or that food stamp spending increased under Obama from $39 billion in 2008 to $85 billion in 2012, and it doubled during the George W. Bush Administration, as reported by Katherine Rosario of the Heritage Foundation.

Or that the massive food stamp spending increases since 2008 occurred during a period of massive unemployment and underemployment. As the economy recovers -- surely it will over the next ten years, President Obama? -- the need for food stamp spending should go down.

Or that, as Robert Rector and Amy Payne of Heritage have written, "If converted to cash, means-tested welfare spending is more than five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the United States," so the amount of money we're spending isn't really the issue, it's how we're spending it.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/amy-ridenour/2013/09/23/how-liberal-media-misleading-you-about-food-stamp-cuts#ixzz2fo6pne18

Almost always when they say they are cutting, it is not really a cut, but a cut in the projected INCREASE for the next year.