More Than 1 Million Households off Food Stamps, Thanks to President Trump

A sign in a market window advertises the acceptance of food stamps on Oct. 7, 2010 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Commentary

Our economy is so strong that more than a million American households are no longer dependent on food stamps, and newly employed workers can proudly say that President Donald Trump is the reason they can feed their families without government assistance.

According to the latest food stamp enrollment data from the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the number of Americans on food stamps consistently decreased every month during the last fiscal year.

Earlier this month, the USDA also revealed that more than 1.4 million households have stopped using food stamps since shortly after Trump took office in 2017—a remarkable milestone that demonstrates the effectiveness of Trump’s economic agenda.

This is a remarkable achievement—not just as a matter of economics, but in human terms. Many food stamp recipients are ashamed to use them in public due to the stigma of dependency, and helping those people become self-sufficient elevates their self-esteem and restores their pride.

Of course, the massive decrease in the number of Americans who depend on food stamps directly contradicts the liberal lie that Trump’s economic agenda helps only the rich.

Almost every prominent Democrat in the United States publicly criticized the president’s middle-class tax cuts, claiming that the initiative was nothing short of a “Ponzi scheme.”

“This is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme that corporate America will perpetrate on the American people,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi said in 2017. “But if you’re the wealthiest 1 percent, Republicans will give you the sun, the moon, and the stars—all of that at the expense of the great middle class.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders also denounced the proposal at the time, attempting to portray it as a tax cut for the wealthy. “Only 12 percent of Americans believe the wealthy should receive a tax cut,” he wrote in a tweet. “So of course, Republicans are trying to give the wealthy a huge tax cut.”

Even the mainstream media was happy to amplify the Democrats’ delusion, flooding the United States with a tsunami of biased analyses attempting to discredit the president’s economic vision.

Contrary to all this criticism, however, Trump’s economic agenda proved to be a winning formula for U.S. prosperity, creating robust GDP growth, a thriving labor market, and higher wages, enabling more people to climb out of poverty.

The same can’t be said of the true food stamp president, President Barack Obama.

According to the USDA, a record 20 percent of U.S. households were on food stamps in 2013—a full year into Obama’s second term in office.

The overall economy wasn’t doing very well, either—at the end of Obama’s first term, the unemployment rate was more than double its current mark, hovering above 8 percent for most of 2012.

Regrettably, the Democrats were far less vocal about the needs of the poor when they were the ones calling all the shots in Washington.

Indeed, liberals were mute when Obama’s policies hamstrung the U.S. economy and prolonged the recession. Where was the outrage over the disastrous unemployment rate or the record number of U.S. households on food stamps back then?

Now that the economy is booming once again, liberals have suddenly rediscovered their concern for the poor. They’re too late, though—Trump’s pro-growth policies are lifting people out of poverty and proving once and for all that the liberal welfare state is just a poverty trap.

Darrell Scott is CEO of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, and a member of the Donald J. Trump for President Inc. advisory board.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.