Missing - The Food Stamp Program - NYTimes.com We'll get to that later. That was the dismissive answer of Speaker John Boehner on Thursday, when asked if the House would restore the food stamp program it had just coldly ripped out of the farm bill. "Later," he said, Republicans will deal with the nation's most important anti-hunger program. "Later," maybe, they will think about the needs of 47 million people who can't afford adequate food, probably by cutting the average daily subsidy of $4.39. But right then their priorities were clear, as a bare majority rushed to provide $195.6 billion over 10 years to Big Agriculture. Most of the money went to subsidies for crop insurance and commodities, demanded by the corn, rice and sugar barons who fill campaign coffers. The choice made by the House in cutting apart the farm bill was one of the most brutal, even in the short history of the House's domination by the Tea Party. Last month, the chamber failed to pass a farm bill that cut $20.5 billion from food stamps because that was still too generous for the most extreme Republican lawmakers. So, in the name of getting something - anything - done, Mr. Boehner decided to push through just the agriculture part of the bill. For decades, farm subsidies and food stamps have been combined for simple reasons of political expediency. Farm-state lawmakers went along with food stamps to keep the crop subsidies flowing; urban lawmakers did the reverse. The coalition may have been an uneasy one, and it cost the taxpayers untold billions in wasteful payments to growers, but that was the price for helping the hungry. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has repeatedly showed, the food stamp program (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) has long been one of the most effective and efficient anti-poverty programs ever devised. When counted as income, SNAP benefits cut extreme poverty nearly in half, a new study shows. Most families who get the aid have an adult who is working. Now that coalition has been sundered, and the future of food stamps is threatened. If the program is not returned to the five-year farm bill, it will have to be financed through annual appropriations, which puts it at the mercy of the Republicans" usual debt-ceiling stunts and government shutdown threats. House leaders said they would submit a food stamp bill "later," but that will probably include the right wing's savage cuts and unprecedented incentives for states to shut out poor families. Neither will get past the Senate or the White House. The only way forward is for a Senate-House conference committee to restore the food stamp program to the farm bill (the Senate bill contains a far more modest $4 billion reduction in food stamps). Since compassion is no longer an incentive for the House, the threat of a cutoff to the big lobbyists will have to work, just as it always has.