Who’s Hungry For The Truth About Food Stamps? (Hint: Not Journalists)
https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/11/just-how-dumb-are-todays-journalists/
A headline in Axios over the weekend carried this scary warning: “An increasing share of American adults are going hungry.”
The “shocking data point” comes, the story says, “at a time when the stock market is hitting record highs and President Donald Trump just signed a bill slashing food benefits.”
But take a look at the chart Axios published in that tear-jerking story, which is based on data from Morning Consult. Notice anything?
Morning Consult started tracking “food insecurity” in 2021. And, sure enough, it was on the rise – the entire time Joe Biden was president.
Look at what has happened since Trump has been in office. It’s back down to where it was nearly two years ago and appears to be moving sideways.
Axios is hardly the only news site to claim that the One Big Beautiful Bill “slashes” food stamps – which now goes under the euphemism Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – and will cause millions to go hungry.
As The Guardian put it, “the cuts amount to the largest in the program’s history. They come at a time when food insecurity is already on the rise in all 50 states.”
The Guardian apparently got its talking points from the leftist Center for American Progress, which makes the same point. “Moreover, this legislation comes at a time when food insecurity is rising across all 50 states, reaching levels not seen since 2014.”
But look at the sources that the Center for American Progress (CAP) – a favorite “think tank” for many journalists – links to in its screed about the horrors of the OBBB.
One goes to Feeding America, which published a report on food insecurity this May. However, the data in that report go through only 2023. What it finds is that families’ food budget “shortfall” was rising – under President Biden.
The other link takes you to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report on food insecurity, which also only has data through 2023. And check out the chart from that report.
Food insecurity was high for most of President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, went steadily down in Trump’s first term, then spiked under Biden. (Interestingly, food stamp enrollment also went up under Obama, came down under Trump, then rose again under Biden.)
So, does anyone want to guess what else was happening during those Biden years?
Oh, right! Inflation was shooting up, thanks to Biden’s massive spending splurge. As food costs skyrocketed, families struggled to afford basic necessities and, as evidenced by these charts, more of them experienced “food insecurity.” But when did you ever hear anyone in the press or at CAP attack Biden for causing this terrible hardship?
Instead, Biden was praised for massively expanding spending on food stamps.
In his first year, SNAP spending shot up 43%. The New York Times reported at the time that Biden engineered “the largest permanent increase to benefits in the program’s history,” which will “add billions of dollars to the cost of a program that feeds one in eight Americans.”
All the OBBB does is set food stamp spending back on its previous, pre-Biden course.
Bear in mind that all this information is easily available to any reporter covering this story.
Of course, there’s the deeper problem with all these horror stories – namely, the assumption that a decline in the number of people getting food stamps is a bad thing.
Shouldn’t the goal be that nobody is getting food stamps? That no one is dependent on government to help them afford groceries, because the economy is booming, people are earning decent wages, and inflation is under control?
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