Here is the FULL transcript of the program:
If you are more concerned with the debt over individual freedom why not FORCE Americans to buy Volts so GM can pay back the bail-outs.
You can’t read.
While Santorum’s position is in line with the other candidates in the GOP field, there may be no one left in the race, including the President himself, who is more directly responsible for the growth in the food stamps program than Rick Santorum.
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Notably, the Bush administration was not attempting to eliminate the granting of automatic eligibility in its entirety, but rather only to restrict this status to beneficiaries who were already receiving some other form of cash welfare benefit, where some minimum level of means testing had already been performed. The effort by some state administrators to bypass statutory means testing by simply handing out a piece of paper seems like just the type of regulatory loophole that Congress would have an interest in closing. In the name of fairness, if not fiscal restraint.
But not Rick Santorum, apparently.
In the year following Santorum’s effort to lead the defeat of this proposal in the Senate, 18.7 percent of the households receiving food stamps were deemed automatically eligible under this loophole, which equated to about 2.1 million households (source). By 2010 this figure had grown to a whopping 51.3 percent of all households receiving food stamp benefits, or just over 9.4 million households (source). That’s nearly a 350% increase in only 5 years, and probably accounts for most of the increase in the total number of people receiving food stamp benefits outside of the effects of the economic downturn.
Thanks to Rick Santorum’s “leadership”.
Now that’s not to say that many of these individuals and families would not otherwise be eligible for food stamps. I’m sure many of them would, perhaps even a majority. But with over 50 percent of food stamp recipients now exempt from basic means testing, it’s a safe bet that there is a significant amount of over-spending taking place. Consider that if the 5-year savings number was $574 million in 2006, then 350% of this total (reflecting the increase in the number of recipients deemed automatically eligible since then) would be just over $2 billion. The actual number is probably much higher given that spending per recipient has also increased significantly in recent years.
Rick Santorum promises to cut food stamps spending if he is elected, but he had a prime opportunity to rein in the program when he was in the Senate. Not only did he vote the wrong way, but by his own admission he played a central role in blocking what would have been a very reasonable change in the way the program is administered. If the accusation of being insensitive to the plight of the poor was enough to convince Santorum to oppose such a reasonable, and ultimately nominal reduction in food stamp spending in 2005 – when the unemployment rate was less than 5% – I’m not sure why we should believe that he would resist this same type of pressure in making the more significant cuts he has promised.
http://www.verumserum.com/?p=38111
He said INDICATE that they’ll be held accountable for covering their own health care costs. Sounds good to me. His discussion of the requirement for insurance was just kicking around ideas to a difficult problem. Let’s focus on the health care solutions he’s finalized and posted on Newt.org and not every little topic that came up in a long brainstorming discussion.