“Hunger cliff” looms as 32 states set to slash food-stamp benefits
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
Unemployment is being touted as being the lowest since 1969. This seems fair to me.
I grew up at and below the poverty line in Brooklyn, and my Dad would not apply for them. He had the old world tough it out and do anything to support the family creed. There were people in our neighborhood who would buy someone else's groceries to swap them for beer and cigarettes. I even shined shoes when I was 8, but that was my idea. I asked for a copper colored metal shoeshine kit for Christmas. Suits would see an 8-year old shining shoes and tip me big! I bought my first telescope at a fire sale at a hobby shop from my earnings at 9.
What was the median single family home price ratio to median minimum wage annual income when you were growing up?
Anyway, it is a slash because the economic ramifications of the pandemic haven't ended. Food prices spiked dramatically because of it and have not gone down. They are continuing to go up.
It's unfortunate that people who suffered generally want other people to have to suffer like they did. What you're describing is not a happy, uplifting story of bootstraps. 8 year olds having jobs is sad.
(8 year olds needing to work to provide for their themselves or family is, of course, sad.)
I’m a fan of the opposite angle, using zoning laws to force the construction of large amounts of high density large apartments and then heavily taxing vacancies, think 4br 2k sq ft. (No empty buildings, no new construction made off entirely studios and 1br, ever shrinking). A glut of high rent properties to drive the prices of everything else down, and a reason for people with money not to run to the suburbs and keep income diversity in cities.
Getting the government to give people money makes it more likely that people will get money from the government. Who would have thunk?
The bootstrap myth continues: it's a modern misinterpretation of a metaphor for an impossible feat. It takes money from someone or somewhere else to get clothes, housing, water, food, and sanitation. It's a tale as old as time the segment of people who blame the unfortunate for their circumstances and insist they should help themselves by performing a miracle with nothing.
I think 8-year-olds spending more time inside their house in front of a TV or tablet than a prisoner is much more tragic and sad than an industrious 8-year old who wants to go out and make life happen for themselves and not becoming an obese child to later develop hypertension and diabetes from being a couch potato.
I don't want people to suffer. I don't know where you get that. I grew up without phones or TV in the 70s. I didn't know my childhood and crime-ridden neighborhood (highest in NYC for 8 years) would fill several Oprah shows. Aside from the intermittent violence, my friends and I were happy. Saving up for that telescope and working for things for myself created who I am today. And although anecdotal, I can tell you that seeing them turned in for cash for beer and cigarettes doesn't fit the rosy-glassed narrative of those who only read about it. I would also make the argument that I believe people also ate less. All of my working class neighbors were slim and generally fit from working manual labor and not eating today's large-sized portions. We have more than ever in this country than ever before, so to postulate that it's worse doesn't seem to fit my experience. I've also lived in a an Indonesian rice-farming village in Java for a year where 40% of the homes or more had dirt floors. I've traveled and lived in many other places for about 15% of my life, and self-reliance is not a myth, and it brings happiness and confidence to most people. I believe there are people that neither working for themselves or relying on others works for them, and this is truly sad, but not everyone can be saved from themselves or society.
I'd second the request for the thought process behind this judgement. We should have a worse safety net when the number of people who need it is lower?
The fewest number of people who want jobs can‘t find one since 1969. That’s great.
But that won’t tell us how useful the job is. If the job from 1969 paid 3x what a job today pays (after inflation) then a person working the same number of hours in a minimum wage job today may need assistance where the 1969 person didn’t.
(3x was just an example BTW)
I think what the poster was trying to get at was: if conditions have returned to status-quo, one would tend to think (all other things being equal) that a return to the SNAP status-quo would be reasonable.
You can make the argument that the safety net ought to be better; but talking about a "hunger cliff" seems rather emotive.
If you qualify for a benefit then it is in your best interests to maximize utilization of such. I certainly wouldn’t have any concerns.
The tax code is setup as a game of accumulated chicanery due to the regulatory capture of the political system by enormous centers of wealth.
America isn't a good place to be anything but ultra rich. There are different strata of wealth: 1 car, 2 cars, 1 home, 2 homes, PA, 5 homes, ASW, 20 homes, and a personal wealth fund.
For good or bad, people have been conditioned to depend on others. Safety nets are of course good --but we also do not want to make society dependent upon them whether because adult jobs don't pay enough due to job exports, or unmitigated drug addition crisis or other. For psychological health, people need to have the opportunity to be self reliant.
Why does the noble level of "self reliance" always happen to be exactly where other people don't have to pay taxes directly to sustain others? Surely we should go further, and tear up municipal roads and utilities. People would feel so much more independent if they had to spread their own asphalt and wire their own substation.
Realistically, there's a psychological value in dependency, particularly in understood dependency. If you have to think of yourself as beholden to others in some way, it incentivizes even the most self-centered of us to ramp up the civility and empathy.
Compared to European countries, America is one of the worst places to be poor and most Americans don't realize how bad they have it.
Taking away pennies from people who's inelastic needs would be seriously harmed by small cutbacks doesn't make sense when socialism for the rich delivers 200%+ net cash outflow. It's more than inhumane, it says "F U" to those who are living paycheck-to-paycheck or who are functionally disabled and cannot hold a job but don't qualify for SSDI. SSDI, in some cases, can take anywhere from 1 to 6 years to be resolved.
Growing up my parents would sometimes skip meals to make sure my sibling and I had enough to eat, and thinking about it now in the context of both a housing crisis and increases in low income families cutting back on ‘discretionary’ spending such as food, I’m left quite dissatisfied in the modern world that it cannot provide a basic level of sustenance to the people.
Oh well, someone needs to own several mega-yachts so some level of starving is required I guess /s.
-Marie Antoinette
Rousseau wrote the anecdote about an anonymous princess who said that in 1765; Marie Antoinette didn't arrive in France until 1771.
edit: maybe years of tax subsidy and/or tax avoidance might add additional culpability.
There is absolutely no reason why someone who works for Amazon or Uber or all the fancy tech companies where the upper management takes millions should not earn liveable wages and rely on food stamps to supplement their income.
Your argument is that, if we get rid of welfare, companies will raise wages. So welfare is just taxpayers subsidizing companies. You've constructed an argument to get rid of welfare!
It is, or should be, a living wage[1].
Someone in full employment should be able to meet their basic needs and that of any dependants. This includes things like healthcare, housing, food, transport, etc.
Harvester Judgement
In 1907 Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, President of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court, set the first federally arbitrated wages standard in Australia.
Using the Sunshine Harvester Factory as a test case, Justice Higgins took the pioneering approach of hearing evidence from not only male workers but also their wives to determine what was a fair and reasonable wage for a working man to support a family of five.
I dare say central north america might make some movement there within a century or two.
The right solution here would be for the government to enforce minimum wages in a way that is reflective of the true cost of living in a local setting. No exceptions.
Why is the "subsidy" to the business and not to the person? After all, it's not like if the person stops being an employee, that he won't have any food needs. What you're claiming is basically the copenhagen interpretation of ethics. A person on foodstamps working at walmart is walmart's fault, because walmart is the employer. However, if the person ends up being unemployed, but still needs foodstamps (or even more, because he's not drawing an income) then it's uhh... nobody's fault?
Social safety nets should be a way for people to fall back on when circumstances force you out of a job. They should not be a default so that big corporations can pay you less.
How does providing welfare make it so "big corporations can pay you less"? Is the the thinking that if your expenses were $1500/month, your job paid you $1000/month, and the welfare provided you $500/month, that you'd not demand $500 from your employer?
Amazon average starting pay is now $19/hr for front-line. A full-time worker on $19/hr is not SNAP eligible until they're the sole earner for a family size of four.
However, Amazon intentionally hires workers that technically are not full time, not because workers don’t want to work more, but because the company manages its workforce in a way where certain percentage of the employees are not full time. Also, $19 is not the starting wage for all over the country.
Also yachts employe people. To build them, to man them, to repair them, to fuel them etc.
In the modern world most advancements take the form of less workers required for the same amount of production, however because we have largely reached "peak arable land", the efficiency goes up, but you can only get so many crops out of each hectare.
The only real "solution" is to limit population growth; or start looking for ways to optimize for calorie efficient crops, with more centralized and industrial scale food production for the proles.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-All-Purpose-Flour-10L...
That 4 dollar bag has ~16000 calories in it, so at 2000 calories a day, this works out to about 50 cents a day, for a base level diet that will prevent hunger, as the word "hunger" is understood by us readers-of-dictionaries.
If you prefer cake over bread, you will primarily need this other base ingredient:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Pure-Granulated-Sugar...
...and that is a bit more--55.9 cents a pound.
Now, you may say, "Cake is not good enough." If you thought that, you share a very common sentiment. Ask anybody who actually works at Walmart about what is being purchased on EBT cards, and it is not flour and sugar for making cake. If people just wanted cake, they could pay using their own money and not even notice the expense. But that is not what they want.
It's not the 17th century, or the 1950s anymore, most households don't have someone spending 24/7 on domestic chores.
You could have picked a million better cooking examples, I don't understand why you went with bread.
Voila, delicious soda bread.
No kneading, no rising, no yeast, no proving, no loaf tins, no mixer, no added time, no work surface, just mix and cook. Optionally swap ~50-75g of the flour for oats, or some-all of the milk for plain yogurt.
Yes yeasted bread takes more time but soda bread is really good and way more convenient.
Mix everything together, let rise for a while (for most recipes; the pizza dough I've made a few times only wants to stand for 10min), and bake.
Surely things can be adjusted to have it rise for 6-8 hours (overnight) rather than for 2-3 hours?
Yes, some would even argue that it gets better if you leave it for several days.
They picked bread because the ingredients are simple. They've likely never baked bread in their life and have no idea what a time/effort sink it is. It's not the hardest thing to make from scratch but as you say it's not practical for someone with a day job.
This is all besides someone subsisting entirely on bread would end up very malnourished. It might carry a lot of calories but it's missing a lot of important necessary nutrients. But hey the math is simple! Therefore people shouldn't go hungry!
I really don't understand this to the point it feels comical. It's not practical to make bread if you have a day job???? There's like 20 minutes of work in making bread and the timings are actually extremely forgiving not "particular" at all. Seriously now what a bizarre conversation.
Most people have also gotten used to being able to eat whatever they want when they want it.
You do need other things, but far less than people tend to assume.
> on a typical day less than 1 percent of households now face “very low food security.” That low figure contrasts with the 17 percent of U.S. households that currently receive food stamps.
> The study found that SNAP shoppers bought slightly more junk food than non‐ SNAP shoppers.
Quotes from https://www.cato.org/blog/snap-15-billion-junk-food
SNAP is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Another pertinent quote. From NIH in case you don't like Cato.
> It is no longer controversial to say that the United States food system does not support a healthy diet
Also heard a bunch of different ways to turn them into cash.
Second, this is complicated by the fact that "healthy" vs "unhealthy" food vibes are often factually incorrect. People assume cheaper and less labor intensive food is unhealthier, when in reality sugar is sugar. For example, this study points out SNAP recipients bought more "prepared deserts". That makes complete sense - they're far less likely to bake themselves or eat out, but there's little evidence that premade the sugary baked goods they ate less healthy than home baked ones.
Third, this study is talking about tiny effect sizes. A 2.15% increase in sugary beverage purchase, really?
Finally, on a moral level I believe everyone has the right to make poor decisions. Just because someone receives government benefits doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to trade off momentary enjoyment for long-term health issues, especially if society has ruined their long term anyway.
People are starving to death in America?
https://journalistsresource.org/economics/welfare-reform-imp...
The US subsidizes cheap, unhealthy crops like cow corn to manufacture HFCS.
Without subsidies, cane sugar would likely be cheaper than HFCS or beet sugar.
And that Walmart can grossly underpay its employees so much that they need social benefits to survive is another indirect, but pervasive and perverse, transfer of wealth from the lower and middle to the wealthy owners of corporations.
I often seen foodstamp eligibility used a marker of poverty, but this is largely an anachronism from the past where foodstamps were reserved for the destitute.
Many states now set the requirement at 200% of the federal poverty level. Which is allready fairly generous--that puts 5 member households as foodstamp eligible if their income is under 70k.
Because eligibility is determined by household size and income, you can have two people living in the same city working the same job, but one is eligible for foodstamps and another is not.
This is a common tactic that left-wingers use to prove that wages are insufficient, and that companies are exploting society because some full time workers are eligible for food stamps.
This fails on 3 fronts: 1. The threshold for food stamp eligibility is sufficiently high that normal wages qualify, eg. 70k. 2. Technically any wage can qualify for food stamps if one's household size is large enough. 3. We also believe in equal pay for equal work.
Like the unemployment rate and actual standard of living, obesity and food insecurity are loosely coupled but somewhat independent things.
An EBT program might be able to funnel dollars into grocery store tills, but it doesn't necessarily mean efficient delivery of quality foods.
Poverty often involves multiple dimensions of constraints. While it might be easy to simplify an argument by saying "buy 20kg bags of beans and rice and cook that for 93 meals a month", that neglects factors like:
* Burdened workers/parents who lack the time/remaining energy to prepare labour-intensive home-cooked food. Opening a tin or putting something in the microwave for six minutes is an awfully compelling proposition.
* Poor housing, where you might not have good cooking or food storage facilities. If you don't have a working fridge, many fresh ingredients are too perishable. If you have an infestation, bulk foods are just a hazard. There's plenty of wholesome meals you might have a hard time cooking if you're limited to a hot plate or microwave.
* Food deserts, where you have to buy what's reasonably available at what's likely extortionate prices.
There's also a bit of a hedonistic limit. We're not just chugging Food Packets to increase an on-screen stamina bar. Most people are not going to be able to stick to a tightly planned, "optimal health" meal program if it doesn't offer at least occasional luxuries and modest variety. Look how even rich people can't stick to diets. This is not a moral failing, but trying to balance health and taste concerns with tight financial restrictions often triggers "poor choices".