Robbing the Poor to Feed the Rich

Kicking 14.4 Million Children off of Food Assistance Should be a Crime

Contrary to what some people might believe, obtaining federal funds to help offset the cost of food through SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) is not an easy task. I would definitely not use words like “lazy” to describe the process. No part of needing and using food stamps is easy. None.

First, it’s always a good reminder that food stamps are not supposed to be enough to sustain you. The program in and of itself is supplemental and not what most folks have to use them as: the only funds in their budgets allocated for a certain type of item you can purchase at grocery (and most convenience) stores. Many use food banks to supplement SNAP. You cannot purchase toilet paper with food stamps, or diapers, or tampons, or things like can openers. You cannot purchase food that has been heated or is “ready to eat.” That whole roasted chicken people love to tell people to buy for soups is not covered, and would be an out of pocket expense. Food stamps are meant to boost a budget, not be the budget, yet most of the time they are.

What do food stamps actually supplement? Low wages. A person working full-time at minimum wage still qualifies for food stamps. I worked 30+ hours a week at $9.00/hr and still received about $300 a month, meaning I received about $10 a day to feed myself and my daughter. That’s about the norm: SNAP benefits average about $6 per person per day. If a house has no income, the average is about $8-$9.

The My Little Ponies were always welcome at the breakfast table.

Qualifying for food stamps is not a simple task. Because of something called “means testing,” you must prove that you are poor enough to need help. You fill out paperwork containing pages of questions. You provide proof to back up your answers. This takes hours, and you try not to scoff at questions about whether or not you have a burial plot, how much money is in your bank account, and what your car is worth. You’re “just” trying to get a few bucks a day for food, and they’re acting like you’re trying to cheat the system to get tons of cash, even though the fraud rate is less than 5%. If you’re an able-bodied adult who does not have children younger than six, you are required to prove that you’re working at least 20 hours a week. As a self-employed individual, this meant I had to ask for written statements from all of my housecleaning and landscaping clients.

Finally, you get everything together and hand it in. Then you wait. You set up an appointment with a caseworker for an interview and might have to risk getting in trouble with your boss to take off work to do it. Then you wait some more.

Sometimes you wait for weeks or even months. Sometimes you find out that you make $100 a month too much to qualify. Sometimes you get an envelope with an EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) card in the mail that you can use like a debit card, but when you use it, you have to tell the cashier that you’re going to pay for your food that way. Sometimes other people hear that and glare at you. Sometimes the cards just don’t work. I’ve walked out of grocery stores with my head hanging, leaving the bagged up food I’d just painstakingly selected behind, because my food stamp allowance was all the money I had. That was the milk I had the coupon for, the pancake mix, the oatmeal, and the cheapest crackers I could find. I left it all there and returned home with nothing.

Making it difficult to apply for and use government assistance is purposeful, in my opinion. SNAP is an entitlement program, meaning the funding for it goes up and down depending on the need. The harder it is to apply for food stamps, the fewer people receive them, and the projected need for the program decreases, meaning the money can be spent elsewhere. I’ll leave it for you to assume where those funds might go.

Emilia Story in 2008

As a parent to a toddler, one of my greatest joys was watching my kid enjoy food. It felt like a bit of a failure when it wasn’t “good” food, which probably explains why I have dozens of photos of her eating fresh produce. I know that I wasn’t eating much, or at all, when these moments were captured. The berries we foraged and the bananas or apples we acquired from a “free” box were for her, not me. Most of my personal food budget consisted of coffee with whole milk and sugar, oatmeal, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and packets of ramen or boxes of rice that I added cabbage, eggs, and frozen veggies to. And whatever my daughter didn’t eat. The rest of the money we had for food went to keep her fed, and hopefully smiling while she ate.

My daughter probably didn’t notice, but I watered down apple juice, added minimal amounts of milk to cereal, and cut the thinnest slices of cheese. When I shopped for food, I all but skipped the produce section and scouted the aisles for clearance items. I had to budget for dish soap, and used sponges until they began to fall apart. I got in the habit of stealing toilet paper and tampons whenever a public restroom had some sitting out. Everything we needed, even groceries, were scrounged up in one way or another.

A whopping 20% of the children in America eat food that’s been purchased from food stamps. Single parents make up 53% of SNAP recipients. Of those, over half live with mothers who have never been married. Within a given year, 89% of households with children and a non-disabled, non-elderly adult work at a job that pays wages, and 75% within a typical month.

The average taxpayer will contribute about $32.45 a month to SNAP, and about $200 to our military. Food stamps are more visible, and therefore left to scrutiny, even though they account for only 1.5% of our total federal budget. There’s also a hard line between those who qualify and those who don’t, which creates a lot of bitter feelings for the ones who earn too much to get help. When I relied on food stamps, I knew what that line was, and worked as much as I could without going over. After I no longer qualified because my income was too high, it certainly didn’t mean we were never hungry, it just meant that I never told anyone we needed help to pay for food.

Much of my work as a professional writer has focused on dismantling stigmas that surround people who live in poverty, especially single moms. It’s been my personal vendetta to show that the “War on Poverty” was actually a war on single mothers. What we used to call “welfare”, which is now a program called TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), has not changed the “goals” for its recipients in decades. From the Office of Family Assistance website:

1. provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives;

2. end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;

3. prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and

4. encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.

Right around the time President Lyndon Johnson began his war on poverty, creating the safety net programs we still use today, the Republican candidate for president in 1964, Barry Goldwater, went on record to say “I don’t like to see taxes paid for children born out of wedlock.” Remove the last part for a second and look at what it actually says, which is “I don’t like to see taxes paid for children.”

To me, punishing single moms through starving their children seems a little extreme, but our current administration is threatening to do that this coming Saturday, November 1st, by refusing to use emergency funds for SNAP. It won’t be the last time. Our federal government has been doing this since they realized the program allows women to be less reliant on men.

14.4 out of the 73.3 million children in our country receive food assistance.

20%.

1 in 5.

Every single one of them deserve to not just eat, but enjoy their food. When they do, I hope on of their parents get a picture of that. I hope they look back on it someday and feel, just for a moment, like a little less of a failure.

Until next time.

xo,

-step.