Must-read: Robert Greenstein: “Jeb Bush, Please Talk to Bob Dole About Food Stamps”

Must-Read: Robert Greenstein: Jeb Bush, Please Talk to Bob Dole About Food Stamps: “[Jeb] Bush could profit from a conversation with… Bob Dole…

…Dole’s conclusion, after years of work… was that food stamps represent the single most important accomplishment in American social policy since Social Security…. Before the early 1970s, each state set its own food stamp eligibility standards…. Surveys by medical researchers in the late 1960s found shocking rates of malnutrition and nutrition-related diseases — akin to those in some Third World countries — among poor children in parts of the South and Appalachia.  These findings prompted President Nixon to lead a successful bipartisan effort to establish national food stamp eligibility standards. Studies in the late 1970s, after the national eligibility standards and other reforms that Dole had championed took effect, found dramatic reductions in child malnutrition and nutrition-related decreases.  The researchers concluded that the impressive progress was due in large part to the federal reforms extending and expanding food stamps…