food stamps
lborkowski | July 10, 2017While much public attention is (appropriately) focused on the Senate bill that would shred the Medicaid program, House Freedom Caucus members are pushing a proposal to shred other parts of the social safety net: welfare, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and food stamps, or Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). Both the Senate BCRA and the Freedom Caucus budget proposal aim to cut spending on these crucial assistance programs while granting large tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has put forward a budget…
lborkowski | April 16, 2014The list of 2014 Pulitzer Prize winners announced earlier this week includes several journalists whose award-winning work addresses public health issues.
The Boston Globe Staff won the Breaking News prize for “exhaustive and empathetic coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing manhunt that enveloped the city, using photography and a range of digital tools to capture the full impact of the tragedy.” Among the many articles in the Globe’s extensive coverage of the April 15, 2013 attack and its aftermath are pieces on the first responders, hospital workers, and therapists who…
sastyk | November 18, 2013In the last few years, a number of political leaders have tried to live on a food stamps budget. Among others Newark Mayor and political heir-apparent Cory Booker and current and former governors of Colorado and Oregon. Some have done so to draw attention to the limitations of food stamps, others with the intent of proving that their benefit is sufficient. A number of writers have done so too, as have celebrity chefs and others. A number of people have asked me to do it as well, and I've always refused.
This isn't because I don't think I can - it is because frankly, I know for a fact that…
lborkowski | November 8, 2013According to the latest figures from the Census Bureau, 15% of the US population lives in poverty. The figure’s even worse for children: 22% of those under 18 are living in households with incomes below the federal poverty level. The US economy is officially out of the recession, but an estimated 95% of all the income gains since 2009 have gone to the 1% of the US population with the highest incomes. For millions of people, food stamps (technically, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) make the difference between buying groceries and going hungry. Yet Congress has allowed…
lborkowski | October 25, 2013Ian Frazier's in-depth New Yorker article on homelessness in New York seems especially timely, coming after a government shutdown that demonstrated how quickly low-income workers can fall into homelessness if their paychecks suddenly stop. (The shutdown also demonstrated some things about Congress, but I won't get into that here.) Here in DC, contract employees who serve food and clean offices in federal buildings were abruptly out of work. John Anderson, a line cook at a Smithsonian Museum, told the Washington Post's Jim Tankersley he had to work out a deal with his landlord because he…
lborkowski | July 13, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Hunger in America can be hard to see. It doesn't look like the image of hunger we usually see on our TVs: the wrenching impoverishment and emaciation. Talking about American hunger is hard because, well, there's food all around us. Everywhere you look, there's food — people eating food, people selling food, people advertising food, people wasting food, people dying of eating too much food. The obesity epidemic alone is getting so big that it's slowly swallowing the health care system in billions of dollars of care.
We have a food problem.
But food cost money. So for some…
sastyk | January 19, 2012Well, as the republican donnybrooks narrow down, the enemy becomes evident - the American poor. Newt Gingrich particularly dislikes poor folk, especially poor children, because after all, if they were good people they wouldn't be poor, they'd be working 50 hours a week in some nice sweatshop!
Celeste Monforton at The Pump Handle has a nice post on the realities of the food stamp recipients Newt claims are lazy buggers.
"And we think unconditional efforts by the best food stamp president in American history to maximize dependency is terrible for the future of this country."
It is absolutely…
cmonforton | January 17, 2012Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich likes to pump himself up by picking on other people. Several weeks back his target was "children in the poorest neighborhoods." Now it's people who receive food assistance.
Others have checked his claims about President Obama being the "food stamp President," but Gingrich also suggested that if you are on food stamps, you aren't earning a paycheck. According to data assembled by the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, however, a hefty portion of households receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are…
sastyk | September 14, 2011The USDA indicates that in 2010 there were above 17 million households in the US (out of about 115 million households total) that were food insecure, and had trouble getting enough food on a regular basis. Only 59% of those households, however, received Food Stamps, WIC or School lunches, the three largest US food subsidy programs that make up the bulk of US nutritional supplementation programs. Which means that nearly half of all households were either receiving no support despite food insecurity, or relying on food pantries, soup kitchens and other resources.
One of the most significant…
sastyk | July 26, 2011On Friday, in a move that shocked, truly shocked America, President Obama said that food stamps were more important than Defense. Since this sort of prioritization is one of the fundamental differences between the US extreme right (aka Republicans) and the US center-right (also known as the Democrats), the fact that this caused an uproar among Republicans should also stun you. Republicans warn us that slashing America's defense budget until it is only double the next largest nations will cripple us, Democrats call the Republicans meanies, and everyone ignores the point.
The point is that…
sastyk | July 14, 2011Over the years I've written a great deal about SNAP/Food Stamps and other hunger alleviation programs, but I've never written anything specifically about WIC, which I have tended to lump in with other food programs. I've been thinking, however, a lot about WIC lately, because it has come on the budget chopping block in the US - along with other food security programs including the CSFP which serves low income seniors and the emergency food program that provides commodities to emergency food pantries. While Republicans restored funds for military bands, they took them out, as is customary,…
lborkowski | March 31, 2011New York Times columnist Mark Bittman (famous for his writing on food) reported on Tuesday that he was joining more than 4,000 others who've been fasting to call attention to House legislation's proposed cuts to programs for the poor and hungry. He explains:
[The poor] are -- once again -- under attack, this time in the House budget bill, H.R. 1. The budget proposes cuts in the WIC program (which supports women, infants and children), in international food and health aid (18 million people would be immediately cut off from a much-needed food stream, and 4 million would lose access to malaria…
sastyk | March 24, 2011From Alternet (actual Bill text at site), it turns out that House Republicans have a plan to prevent fighting for labor rights - hunger!: Maybe they've got firehoses too! And attack dogs, that would be good. Or maybe they could just shoot them - that's an old favorite way to disrupt strikes!
Much of the bill is based upon verifying that those who receive food stamps benefits are meeting the federal requirements for doing so. However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family…
sastyk | May 13, 2010I was out of town when Zuska posted this piece about trying to feed a family on a food stamp budget, and I've been meaning to respond to her suggestion that I might have something to add for a while. The article she builds on is one in which chefs try and come up with food stamp budget menus that are also healthy and appealing. Zuska comments on the difficulty of this, and challenges me to come up with something too:
A few problems with any of these solutions: as noted in the article, cooking from fresh ingredients takes more time than buying processed food, so although you get more, and…
sastyk | April 5, 2010During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy.
It was only later that I realized how central this "buying the ingredients of food…
sastyk | March 25, 2010It is interesting that young and unemployed (two words that are now virtually synonymous) and highly educated folks are using food stamps to buy high quality food - and taking a lot of heat for it. I can understand the visceral reaction that people have, but I also think it is fascinatingly difficult to try and figure out what we think poor people should eat - we criticize them freely for buying junk, and then we criticize them for buying high quality food. Where is the space that the poor are free to choose in?
Controversy about how they use food stamps marks an interesting shift from the…
sastyk | March 12, 2010The Miami-Herald is reporting today that food stamp use has more than doubled among Floridians in the last three years:
More than 2.5 million Floridians are on food stamps, up from three years ago where 1.2 million residents received assistance.
That's according to records kept by the Department of Children and Families, which administers the program.
DCF Secretary George Sheldon told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Tuesday that Florida's food stamp rolls grew the fastest in the nation since 2007.
Some of this is due to increased efforts on the part of states to expand access, but it is also,…
sastyk | February 21, 2010From Alternet, a good piece on what it really means to be one of the six million Americans with no income at all save food stamps:
In March 2009, in the midst of the worst job crisis in at least a generation, Eva opened the last welfare check she will ever receive. She is one of a growing number of people in the United States who can't find work in this recession but don't qualify for government cash assistance, no matter how poor they are or how bad the economy gets.
Without the help of welfare, Eva doesn't have enough money left at the end of each month to feed her daughters full meals.…
sastyk | February 16, 2010Robert S. McElvaine's _Down and Out in the Great Depression_ is a fascinating look at America during the Depression. Compiled from letters written to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, it presents Americans in their own words, saying what they thought was most important in the Depression. Besides the pleas for help and the accounts of the situation on the ground, there was a profound anger at those who needed help. "Paddle your own canoe or sink" one letter wrote. A "Poor Southern Arkansas Woman" wrote that she felt she was a slave required to carry thousands of idle men on…
sastyk | February 5, 2010I somehow missed this Times article in January that documents the rising number of Americans living on nothing but Food Stamps. If you missed it too, you have to read it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html
This is the American equivalent of living on $2 per day.
Sharon