From USA Today:
Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.
More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the federal-state program aimed principally at the poor, a survey of state data by USA TODAY shows. That’s up at least 17% since the recession began in December 2007.
The increase in the food stamp program is even more dramatic:
More than 40 million people get food stamps, an increase of nearly 50% during the economic downturn, according to government data through May. The program has grown steadily for three years.
and
More than 4.4 million people are on welfare, an 18% increase during the recession. The program has grown slower than others, causing Brookings Institution expert Ron Haskins to question its effectiveness in the recession.
As unemployment benefits run out, more people are turning to what we used to call “welfare,” which is now TANF, Temporary Aid to Needy Families. In Philadelphia:
Between February and June, the number of people receiving welfare through the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has climbed 2 percent in New Jersey to 98,856 and 3 percent in Pennsylvania to 217,884.
Camden County has hovered near the top of New Jersey’s welfare rolls for years, fueled primarily by the city of Camden and its decades-long struggle to bring jobs back to the once-bustling manufacturing center. Since the beginning of this year, those numbers have only grown.
TANF is a temporary program, intended to aid people and get them back to work. Obviously, the getting people back to work part is especially challenging right now.
Nidia Sinclair, a middle-aged social worker from Panama who strolls through the office in bright embroidered dresses, says the task of getting people off welfare and into the workplace has never been harder, and her clients know it.
“It’s a work-first program, but the problem is, with the economy the way it is, there’s no work,” she said. “The frustration level is very high right now.”
(if you read the whole online article, you may find the comment section disturbing.)
In Williamsburg, Virginia:
Agencies that help people are simply overwhelmed.
In Williamsburg, for example, the number of families on food stamps rose by 28% in the past year. Food stamps in James City soared even higher, by 60% to 1,638.
Many are suffering from losing their jobs. Temporary welfare cases rose by 31% in the city and 22% in James City. Medicaid cases rose by about 9% in each locality.
Adult protective services cases and child protective services cases in the city rose as well, although the numbers are smaller.
As many as 10% of the city population of 13,000 are suffering.
Safety net program budgets have been on the chopping block for years. The need for services is already surpassing the funds available to help people. How much worse do things have to get before our elected officials wake up to the ongoing crisis?
Tags: food stamps, Medicaid, public assistance, TANF
States are begging for federal aid. And this week, the Senate is voting on an aid package that would give states Medicaid dollars, as well as money to keep teachers on the payroll. There is a catch. The money for this aid will be taken from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - formerly known as food stamps.
That’s right. To pass this aid package, the Senate is willing to take food away from children and families:
But to gain the votes of the Republicans necessary for passage, the bill includes “pay fors” to make it deficit-neutral. There is language to close a foreign tax credit loophole, raising $9 billion. Billions more come from tinkering with Medicaid drug prices and rescinding unspent funds from a variety of programs. But controversially, the bill will also likely slash $6.7 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the benefits formerly known as food stamps. This might result in a cut in benefit checks from one month to the next — an unprecedented event in the history of the benefit.
American food stamps are not generous, averaging only $4.50 a day even after being bumped up in the recession-era stimulus — less than you’d need to buy two meals at McDonald’s. And since the start of the recession, the number of families depending on them has skyrocketed. The economic crisis has pushed 12.9 million people into SNAP; as of April, more than 40 million collect the bare-bones benefits. More than 6 million Americans report no income whatsoever except for SNAP — because they are not eligible for unemployment insurance, Social Security, disability or other programs.
and:
Still, the suggestion caused outrage on the Hill. The House Appropriations Committee originated the education-jobs provision in a war supplemental bill, and in an interview with the Fiscal Times, its chair, Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.), first revealed that the White House had suggested cutting SNAP early in the summer.
“We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here,” he said.
It ain’t easy to find offsets? He’s joking, right?
But this is also a question of priorities, of what gets cut. Bernie Sanders put up an amendment last month to cut about $35 billion in oil and gas subsidies. It failed. Republicans are arguing to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the rich with no offsets, and they may well succeed. But food assistance for poor families? You can get the votes to slash those.
How can this be? Sadly, it all comes down to money and influence:
The oil and gas industry, of which BP is a member, reported $169 million in 2009 lobbying expenditures.
Poor people spent $0 on lobbying.
Tags: food stamps, Medicaid, SNAP
Two things that are going to remain shocking no matter how many times they play out: The fact that
About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay.
And how some legislators respond to the existence of people living on nothing but a couple hundred dollars a month in food stamps:
“This is craziness,” said Representative John Linder, a Georgia Republican who is the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”
We’ve seen this before, of course. Remember the Missouri legislator who said that “hunger can be a positive motivator” when opposing a summer lunch program for kids?
But it is still shocking and appalling that anyone would think—or pretend to think, for the purposes of scapegoating others—that people would be comfortable living off the type and amount of food you can get for maybe $200 a month, with no money for anything else. That people who worked hard at jobs from physical labor to real estate sales would enjoy selling their blood, denying their children decent meals or new clothes, scavenging for discarded furniture to sell.
There are two ways you think people are comfortable with this: Either you just don’t think about it. You don’t think about how little food you can get for that money, and how many things food stamps don’t buy. Or you deny the basic humanity of food stamp recipients and tell yourself it doesn’t matter if they suffer.
Why you’d want to do that is another matter.
Tags: food stamps, nutritional assistance
Something to think about:
Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.
The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
People in this country are generally agreed (not entirely, but mostly) that it’s a bad thing for kids to live in poverty or go hungry, so this study should give at least a few people some pause.
I had a moment a couple years ago that was something like being hit over the head—I read something about free and reduced-price school lunches, which was not a topic I’d given much thought to in recent years. I don’t remember what I read, but this is the basic information that stunned me:
Today, the United States Department of Agriculture spends $8.3 billion a year to provide free and reduced-priced lunches for 30.6 million children whose families are at or below 130 percent of the national poverty level, about $26,845 for a family of four. The program also provides reduced-priced meals for students who are between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level, or $38,203 for a family of four.
Because I knew quite a few kids in grade school who received free or reduced-price meals, even though I spent kindergarten through third grade in a neighborhood school that drew from a small area of mostly one- or two-family homes…a “good neighborhood,” you know? More to the point from how I saw things as a kid—because it’s not like I thought “oh, I live in a good neighborhood”—I largely missed the class distinctions between families. Everyone felt pretty much the same to me. In fifth and sixth grade, when we were transferred to a larger school, I could have pointed out the poor kids. But it turns out that even in my little neighborhood school, I had classmates whose families were seriously struggling. And in my childhood obliviousness I really gave no thought to what it meant that they paid less than the 90 cents or so that was full price at the time.
Since the free lunch article I excerpt from above is about high school students not taking their free lunches because of the stigma attached, I guess my obliviousness was a good thing at the time. But it goes to show that when we think about poverty and hunger and how the economy is organized to address those things, we have to shake off our obliviousness to realize that these things are more widespread than perhaps we realize.
Tags: food stamps, poverty, school lunch
