The average SNAP recipient receives about $4 a day and sees their balance run out after just 17 days.
This is not enough.
This is not enough.
I just went and put some really sad numbers into a calculator and it told me I qualified for $500/mo in benefits for a family of three. This is definitely sufficient to provide three nutritious meals per day for three people anywhere in the country.
If we remove the fear of starvation (we can afford to feed everyone twice and barely put a dent in our military budget) a lot of people will have a HUGE improvement in their day-to-day happiness. This is one of those obvious huge moral positives we can do.
The only "down side" is there will never be fear of starvation.
Edit: The one progress I can see in a society is when we can basically say that certain problems that people may have... those problems just literally won't exist.
- basic housing
- 3 meals a day
- a basic level of health care
with the amount of cash flow in the US there shouldn't be a single person who has to worry about one of those 3.
edit 2: I mean any person who "struggles with hunger" which is ~40 mil. Also, that is in itself a terrifying number.
327,000,000 people * 365 days * $5/person/day = $596,775,000,000 yearly Or $596 billion
$693 billion is the Wikipedia number for DoD budget, so that actually checks out.
Of course, that's more than "put a dent in the budget," but I'm sure you meant those in need, and not every American (which is the calculation I did).
I personally despise means testing. There has been so much hatred spewed over "welfare queen" that I am amazed we still do means testing and we have pulled it forward to things like the New York state Excelsior program (college education for first-time college students) and even for the $1,200 COVID-19 stimulus. It is very sad. We don't less means testing, not more.
NYC will be able to publish just how many people took advantage of the meals. That's the baseline to price the program out nationwide, not the total number of US citizens.
My view is different: public money should go to public good. I don't think that good is served by interfering with markets. If they need $10/hour to justify hiring someone, what is that person going to do for those hours? I think public good is served by training and paying people to deal with collective action problems: failing/at-risk infrastructure, poverty, health care in places with little or no access to it under the private health care and insurance systems, and things like that.
Private companies can be part of that, but the initiative has to be led by the public and the people they elect to lead them, not private interests.
I also like the idea of UBI combined with a flat tax (losing progressive taxation) for it's simplicity, but imagine all the tax lawyers and accountants that would be out of a job.
Questions...
1. How would that program handle people who were unwilling to work? Possible answer off the top of my head: maybe they get sent home or terminated from the program for a period of time, and the pay for the "Job Guarantee" job would need to be somewhat more desirable than the benefits received for not working at all (assuming the person is capable of work).
2. How would the program prevent managers with personal bias against particular people on the Job Guarantee program dismissing them so they are sent home to receive the lower paying "able bodied but unwilling to work" pay? Possible solution: Any dismissal is time limited (or exponential, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, then in yearly increments), and also the first 3-4 steps would simply involve a transfer to a different manager. To reduce the likelihood of bias, managers should be representative of the general population in any potentially important characteristics such as gender, race, and also political orientation (Democrat, Republican, or other).
3. What would prevent minimum wage employees from moving to the government jobs program instead? (I'm anticipating a potential Republican question.) Possible answer: the pay would be lower.
4. Does this create any kind of perverse incentives for the government or corporations? "Well, we don't need to care about access to college, or jobs in the US, because everyone has a guaranteed (below minimum wage) job".
The main benefit of a Jobs Guarantee is it would be palatable to the 50ish% of voters who are opposed to "handouts" without work. And in theory some of the people who work at these jobs might have more self respect, and might maintain good habits that would let them re-enter the regular workforce in time.
Now, if we did have a Jobs Guarantee and something like 25%+ of people were on it, and there are just no jobs for these people to do even for the general betterment of society at large without any profit motive, then that starts to make a good argument for UBI rather than having people do useless work. Start with letting people on the Jobs Guarantee or other jobs, "retire" at an earlier and earlier age, and/or insert 1-2 months of vacation per year, and/or reduce the number of days worked per week or the number of hours worked per day to receive the benefits.
I am hoping we get a non-means-tested corona $1000 after the shitty one, and then things for UBI pick up for there. If we need a mix of UBI and JG for some time, so be it.
A reasonable appeal process and the ability to change managers or move to a different site.
I would build vocational training into this. You are in training either at your choice or as an assignment. Looking for another job would also be acceptable. If you don't have a GED, your only option would be training. I view unemployment as mismatch between the skills you have and the work that needs to be done or there is a slack in demand and we are trying to figure out what to do. I would build a strong scholarship program for those who demonstrate the ability for university level education. You would demonstrate that by your efforts in other training.
Making the pay less than minimum wage I think would be counter-productive. I would eliminate minimum wage and use this as a counter balance to compete with businesses that rely on minimum wage workers.
Any American who didn't take advantage of a demand-driven food supply program on a given month, wouldn't be costing the program anything. It just means that they'd be able to instantly access food when in need, without first qualifying into the program.
Think less "food cash" (like food stamps essentially are), and more "no-limit food credit card" (with the government as the account holder.) You'd just go into a grocery store and buy whatever, and if you couldn't afford it, you'd pay for it with the food credit card (= the government would pay for it.) But if you don't use the card, it isn't accruing or expiring a balance. It's just there, waiting to be used.
One can think of this another way, with a different moral color but the same in-practice effects: imagine if they made shoplifting from grocery stores legal (i.e. every grocery store is now also required to act as a food bank), and the government promised to pay the store back for any shoplifting-related shrinkage. That's essentially what this program would be, except with the store able to track inventory through the till, since the food would still be being "purchased."
That, and perhaps the dollar-cost of your "free" food purchases would be taken into account in calculating your tax bracket.
I mean... they'd be told that that would happen in advance. Wouldn't that then serve as an incentive to avoid making a pattern of taking home the more-expensive food? (They could still do it rarely, though. A one-time $50 bump in spending isn't going to affect your taxes.)
Here, people don't have any money or food stamps "burning a hole in their pocket." They just have their own money, and an unlimited line of credit for grocery stores that would "come due" in the form of taxes at the end of the year (but which would only end up costing them anything-at-all if they tried to live beyond their means.)
The only real presumption I'm making here, IMHO, is that people would be too ashamed to buy the "below your means" items (e.g. rice and beans) on this credit, if they didn't have to. Just like people are usually too ashamed to go to food banks if they don't have to.
I will say I'm not a big fan of using shame to gate off this benefit. my intuition is that shame alone is not enough to stop most people from seeing a way to stretch their grocery budget, if they can use it to buy anything they want. if it is effective, then that's only in proportion to how dehumanizing the experience of using it is, which is also kind of shitty.
if we're already assuming people can budget reasonably well, why not go with a UBI-like food stipend and enroll every citizen? calibrate it so people with zero income get a reasonable (possible COL-adjusted) amount to afford a month's worth of healthy meals and phase it out smoothly respective to income. can't really be abused unless you hide your income and also avoids the fiscal cliff.
If you take my sibling comment about tax effects into account, this means that, as people over-consume a "free" food, and its price rises, they're effectively making larger and larger "purchases" which will have an effect on their taxes.
On the other hand, if it turns out that the food was only expensive because few people were buying it, in a sort of vicious circle—then when everyone buys it, and forces demand up, it'll force supply up, too, and the food will get cheaper for everyone, not just for people who get it "for free."
For example, if it turns out that we only weren't factory-farming caviar because of the low demand, but it's perfectly possible to do so, then we'll just turn into a society that farms and eats a lot of cheap caviar. No market distortion; just "unlocking" market efficiencies we couldn't previously reach, because the demand side didn't previously have the dollars to vote with. Everybody wins!
Feeding America claims to deliver meals at $0.10 each by rescuing food that would've been wasted, and they claim even buying at wholesale would run about $2/meal ($1.67/lb * 1.2lb/meal).
https://www.feedingamerica.org/ways-to-give/faq/about-our-cl...
So, $5/day ?
Rescuing wasted food doesn't work once you scale it to a hundred million people.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely in favor of a food/housing program that's available for everyone. I am also a communist though, so it's an easy sell for me.
Just throwing that out there.
To be clear, I am against any attempt at population control. I want to keep awareness on the fact that many others do, though.
But we do have a great potential to poison our environment if we don't rein in the pollution.
In my opinion, the US military and the manufacturing industries of China and India by far do the bulk of poisoning the environment and impacting climate change.
I'd much rather have, as a US taxpayer, those assets diverted to healthcare and basic subsistence, too. I'd rather that charities do it, though, and wish it was easier for philanthropy to be more efficiently implemented. We can't even get enough masks out, for cryin out loud.
But damn if we can precision kill someone on the other side of the planet without due process of law! Or find all your domestic social media traffic in October 2016
If you have no income/assets, you can get $600+/month for a family of 4. https://aix-xweb1p.state.or.us/caf_xweb/SNAP_Estimate/actCal...
There are logistical complications around ability to complete the red tape, and personal irresponsibility or access to low-cost options when spending the SNAP money, but big-picture SNAP is fine.
Should people be entitled to spend all their post-tax income on luxuries and get welfare support for basic needs? That's a more extreme position than supplemental support for people with some wealth.
Everyone always shuts down that second question with "they can't help themselves until their basic needs are met" which is incredibly hand wavy and disingenuous, in my opinion. Half of being poor is in the mind. If poor people are to become middle class people, there needs to be a change in the mind. This change doesn't automatically happen "because money". Changing the mind needs to come from teachers and mentors and the poor person has to want to change and start thinking and acting differently.
If you get everyone reliant on a monolithic omnipotent government, then when said monolithic government fails all of helpless leeches will die (and that could be millions).
I think it's better if we strive for a minimalistic government where members of society strive to be self-reliant and in terms of "safety nets" the government's goal is to promote and encourage self-reliance.
If this is the goal, you need to be pushing to radically restructure the way society and the economy functions. You cannot have everyone employed at, say, $60K a year in the one we have.
Most of the time when people say this, they prefer to focus on individuals rather than systemic issues - "this one person pulled them self up by their own bootstraps - surely others can, too. And "others" can, and do. That leaves people who can't. Now what?
> I think it's better if we strive for a minimalistic government
The problem is capabilities. Libertarian fantasy-states work in frontiers and sometimes in low-population, high-homogeneity areas. As population increases, many public goods need management[1] and public management means the state necessarily takes on more functions. So you need to work on your plan to massively reduce population or get yourself a new planet if this is your goal.
Your desire to drive self-sufficiency by intentionally depriving those in need cannot work in our current world and simply results in performative cruelty.
> Half of being poor is in the mind
Have you been poor? I have have been very poor. I grew up that way. I know what you're talking about, and I suspect you honestly don't understand how condescending and insulting it is.
[1] Growing up in a very rural town in Tennessee, people used to routinely burn their trash. Try that in San Francisco.
Just looking at free food, a fundamental question is: Is this expected to be a baseline that all people receive and then people buy additional/better food, or is supposed to be an option where many/most don't take the free food option at all?
If the former, then you risk massive waste. If the free food is mediocre, people will just take it, buy better stuff, and then throw out the crappy stuff. If you solve that with better food, you run into hard questions around the cost and quality ceiling. Food is one of those product areas where you can spend nearly limitless money on it, but it's not feasible for a country to give 100% of its citizens foie gras and cavier every day.
But, of course, deliberately drawing the line somewhere lower has connotations that people who use that food are "bad" because otherwise don't they deserve better food?
If the latter, then you run into the current problem with welfare that the people in power don't use the system at all, which gives you the principle-agent problem we see in welfare today where many people hate funding it because they don't benefit.
Then there are questions of how you manage this logistically. How do you reduce the risk of exploitation? If the government, say, gives out free bags of rice, how do you prevent a restaurant from just grabbing dozens of them and then using them for their food service? But if you spend too much effort on enforcement, then you waste resources on enforcement that could be better spent elsewhere.
It is a hard, complex problem. SNAP today is basically our current stab at it. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that could be swept away and easily replaced with something simpler and clearly better. Problems aways seem much easier when you are far away from them.
First off, no one is saying that we should give 100% of citizens foie gras and caviar.
While I understand your point about there being some stigma attached to funding and/or receiving food assistance, I think it would be lessened if it were freely available to everyone at their discretion. People (rich and poor alike) have certainly had no qualms about receiving unemployment in the current crisis and I think you will see a similar reaction to this food assistance program in New York.
Second, your example of a restaurant taking bags of rice is clearly not an issue with SNAP benefits as they exist in every state, nor is it a possible issue with the program in New York, since they are giving out full meals.
In fact, I expect that the system being trialed in New York will actually solve the issue of people selling or trading away their SNAP benefits, since poor folks just above the cutoff for snap, who would still benefit from food assistance, can just go and get a free meal themselves, rather than trading or buying discounted food from someone selling their SNAP benefits.
And the bigger point is that (during normal times) SNAP doesn't need to cover 100% of kids meals per month; most meals in a month are already provided for free through school.
This is an unbelievable assertion.
That’s $5.48 per meal for 3 people. Have you tried to feed 3 people a consistently nutritious meal on $5.48 per meal everywhere in the country? What is your nutritious meal plan for 3 meals each day, 365 days per year, that doesn’t exceed $500 everywhere in the country? What are the ages and average caloric needs of each of the 3 people in this hypothetical family? How do you maintain $500/mo when, presumably, at least 1 member of the family’s caloric needs will change over time.
I’d love to see the meal plan that works for 2 adults and 1 child for $500/mo, for 18 years, everywhere in the country.
How do you handle snacks with $500/mo—do you just tell people tough luck, you only get to eat at specific mealtime? How do you compensate for the increased caloric need of a child who regularly engages in sports and physical activity—do you just tell them to stay hungry, or tell them they can’t engage in such activities?
So, that's in the neighborhood of $300 a month for dinner. Again, a generous estimate, because really wifey and the kids don't eat half a pound of meat each. Breakfast and lunch are vegetarian, so much cheaper. This is in inner Brooklyn, so not far off from the most expensive food locale in the US. Hawaii is significantly more, but few other places are. We could make it work on $500/month if we had to, for sure.
It was easy to keep myself well fed at a cost far below standard assistance levels.
When I encountered poor people complaining their money ran out, I discovered that some were hostile to the very ideas of thrift, self reliance, or any principals of stoicism.
Also FWIW I'm not saying it's easy to be poor. In many domains it's extremely painful and difficult. But I think we can acknowledge that while also pointing out that meeting food needs using $500 of SNAP benefits is an eminently doable challenge.
I realize I'm too ignorant to confidently propose systemic solutions, but on the education front I do wonder if it would help to offer government financed courses in shopping and budgeting (along with nutrition) bundled with SNAP benefits.
The dollar amount itself is fine, but SNAP should be supplemented with basic commodities. Beans, rice, flour, sugar. The prices for these when purchased at the volume of the federal government drop to near nothing.
what exactly are you saying here? I spend about $300/month on groceries and I eat pretty well.
edit: maybe you're still talking about feeding a family of three?
You could eat a steak a day at that budget
Usually in those financial conditions you also know your time is better spent elsewhere. An extra hour per day practicing for interviews is much better use of your time than cooking. So you do the most efficient thing possible, which is just throw whatever is cheapest per lb into a slow cooker and eat it for the rest of the week. Most stuff is pretty disgusting after a few days in the fridge.
It's probably possible do meal prep cheap/fast/delicious, but I definitely never learned how. Tips appreciated!
A few times as an adult I've also fallen on hard times and used snap benefits, it was enough for me as a single guy who can cook and knows to eat cheaply, but its hard and not fun.
However where I lived you need a mailing address to get benefits so when I was really down and I was homeless I got no benefits.
That's why this meal program in NYC is so great, it says right at the bottom there is no need for registration, it's actually accessible to everyone.
Here's one sample site: https://www.budgetsaresexy.com/how-to-make-nutritious-meals-...
You can prep in bulk and fridge/freeze, but you need that space to do it.
Then again, I’ve been eating a lot of rice, dried pulses and stew of whatevers left/on sale lately.
For a significant number of people that cannot afford to feed themselves, one or more of these are compounding factors.
By providing meals instead of $, this program is much more equitable.
Rentals usually include appliances in N. America.
Thrift store are usually full of small appliances (people shy away from used blenders or used kettles), unmatched cutlery and plates. Pots may be harder to come by, but a large and small one covers most use cases.
Used appliances are usually cheap because of the upgrade treadmill. I understand that coming up with $150 for a fridge or $25 for a hotplate. Maybe we need a better system for those capital costs.
If a person needs a prepared meal they can go to a soup kitchen which is also funded by taxes. Forcing everyone to that model would be really authoritarian. I'd much rather let people get what they want to the extent possible.
Arguably this is still insufficient, though.
As, a college student with limited funds, I noticed I could keep my daily food costs down to 1$-3$/day range by eating healthily: It's at least 4 times cheaper than eating at mcdonalds. (and this was in CA, one of the most expensive areas) https://kale.world/eating-healthy-is-four-times-cheaper-than...
took 3 seconds to find this by googling "average snap per month". I could find national numbers from secondary sources that cited federal sources but couldn't easily find a hyperlink to those federal sources.
But I am sure just as easy as typing Source? you could find your answer
You can argue that is should cover a recipient's entire food needs but it seems a little misguided to criticize the program for failing to meet an objective it doesn't have. Furthermore, federal programs have to be careful not to do things outside their mandate less they run into territory where they don't have political support and lose funding. SNAP probably couldn't get away with providing the full cost of food even if they were able to.
Saying SNAP isn't enough is pretty clearly a response to the representation.