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[quote=Anonymous]From Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman's newsletter today.  It's a long thoughtful post with a lot of data and I  don't want to copy too much of his content in the below for reasons of copyright, but have excerpted some of his 4 points.

[quote]The Hunger Games Begin
While in in the check-out line, I often see some patrons, typically elderly and/or disabled, paying with EBT cards. EBT cards are the way the government delivers food aid under the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. SNAP has become a crucial part of America’s social safety net, with more than 40 million Americans relying on those EBT cards to put food on the table.

And unless the government shutdown ends this week, which seems basically impossible, federal support for SNAP will be cut off this Saturday.

Here are four things you should know about the imminent hunger games.

1) This is a political decision — specifically, a Republican decision

Despite the government shutdown, the SNAP program isn’t out of money. In fact, it has $5 billion in contingency funds, intended as a reserve to be tapped in emergencies. And if the imminent cutoff of crucial food aid for 40 million people isn’t an emergency, what is? The Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, also has the ability to maintain funding for a while by shifting other funds around. But Donald Trump has — quite possibly illegally — told the department not to tap those funds.

Furthermore, the Republican majority in the Senate could maintain aid by waiving the filibuster on this issue. They have done this on other issues — for example, to roll back California’s electric vehicle standard. Furthermore, passing legislation to keep food aid flowing would require that Mike Johnson, the speaker, call the House back into session – something which he refuses to do. 
2) The pain from lost food aid will, if anything, hurt Republican voters worse than Democrats
Consider, for example, Owsley County in Kentucky. The county is 96 percent white, and last year it cast 88 percent of its votes for Trump. Also, 37 percent of residents are on SNAP.
3) Despite what Republicans believe, SNAP recipients aren’t malingerers.  	
That myth is punctured by a quick look at who gets SNAP. The fact is, the great majority of SNAP recipients can’t work: 40 percent are children; 18 percent are elderly; 11 percent are disabled. Furthermore, a majority of recipients who are capable of working do work. They are the working poor: their jobs just don’t pay enough, or offer sufficiently stable employment, to make ends meet without aid.
4) Food stamps are an investment in the future.  We have overwhelming empirical, statistical evidence that SNAP, by improving the lives of young children, is an extraordinarily effective way of investing in the future.Children whose families received SNAP benefits grew up to become healthier, more productive adults than children whose families didn’t receive benefits. Spending money to help families with children is an extremely high-return investment in the nation’s future.
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