In March, as many as 16 million American households have seen a sharp reduction in the size of their SNAP benefits or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program due to the discontinuation of pandemic-era SNAP emergency allotments.
do you sense, have you talked to democratic colleagues either in the senate or house who can be swayed by the president on this? reporter: i sense democrats want to get the government open. 14,000 people in florida are federal employees. look, a quarter of the people in my district get food stamps will run out of food stamp money at the end of the money. the president is holding hostage federal workers, people that get food stamps, people that get tax refunds, 500,000 people in my district alone, 70% of the people who pay taxes are going to get tax refunds, but only if we get the government open. this hostage crisis is man made by president trump. it has to stop. and we have to get the government open. you have heard the president, you have heard his advisers. we heard the vice president sharing misleading sometimes
in brazil up on, you know mountaintops going to work in helicopters and downtown office towers if we had mass craziness in the street, that kind of power. it s in our best interest to take care. how many tens of thousands would you give away during the great recession? hundreds of thousands to help people. i gave lot if you re talking about personal charity. the bottom line is it s not working. you should continue to do that. the splim these programs aren t working. we would agree, and the other bottom line is they never scale them back when things get better. exactly. last thought from you, wayne. is it okay for people to use food stamp money for steaks? it s crazy. all of that regulation of saying where you can spend the money and how you can eat and all of that is just more gobbled ddygookgobbledygook. say i don t care what you spend it on, but limit the money,
opportunity to focus more on my career. you re an able bodied guy. healthy. can work. do you think you re gaming the system? why would i be gaming the system? i fit in the qualifications. he fits the qualifications. and he does use the food stamps to buy loblobster. he does drive the case laid. he can buy the lobster because there are no who is to say you can t buy lobster? he chooses to spend his food stamp money that way. marine antoinette program on food stamps. who raised this guy? i d like to know the parents. can they be jailed? not a this point. he s responsible sort of for his own life. what about from his point of view? why get a job when he has it so great? he s driving a cadillac, eating lobster, on food stamps? jackpot. i think self worth and pride are overrated. very good point. is he working the system or
different business should take their place. one of the things we ve seen. when you look at earning projections from wall street analysts for walmart, for instance. things like the 5 billion dollar food stamp cut shows up in what wall street analysts say about the profitability of walmart, so much of walmart s revenue is coming from food stamp money and other government subsidies to low wage workers. exactly. if you take the case of walmart, the studies have been done show that you could walmart could accommodate a $12 an hour minimum wage by simply raising their prices 1.1% one time. the average walmart shopper would pay an extra $12 per year, and that would allow walmart to cover the costs of an extra $12 an hour minimum wage. i think a higher minimum wage makes much more sense for america, and gets us back to where we were in the late 1960s at the peak of our post war prosperity.