Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » food stamps

Food Stamp Stigma

jstuart — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:04:11 +0000

New Orleans One day I write that receiving food stamps is the “new normal,” as we say in New Orleans, and the next day there’s a front page story in the Sunday Times by Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff with a headline that includes the words: “stigma fades.” Wow! Am I ahead of the curve or what?

Probably “or what?”

Looking county-to-county and expounding on the research of Professor Mark Rank of Washington University in St. Louis, there are plenty of “I told you so” points the story makes:

- Almost 1 in 8 people in the USA are on stamps. More than 36 million people.
- Almost 25% of the nation’s children are on stamps.
- Cities like Memphis, New Orleans, and St. Louis have more than half of their children on stamps.
- Racial differences in participation are significant with 28% of African-Americans, 15% Latinos, and 8% whites.
- The head of the federal program is clear that, in the words of Citizen Wealth, we need “maximum eligible participation,” and must enroll the 15-16 million people who are not yet enrolled.
- The key one can find in reaching many of the new enrollees, as I have demanded in Citizen Wealth, is outreach.

I could go on, but it would get boring, and the point of this piece is not crowing. Quite the opposite.

Reading the article, just like being on the streets and out on the trail, I could not find the any real evidence for the proposition that the “stigma” of receiving food stamps is fading, as trumpeted by the headlines. In fact the actual interviews in the story, particularly with recent white participants who have signed up for the program, all seemed to carry the weight of regret, shame, and sense of exceptionalism about their own participation in the program that I have found talking to my Tea Party friends. Where whites are still 1 of 12 compared to blacks now moving to almost 1 in 3, the stigma still seems certain and stunning, and a huge barrier to enrollment.

The barrier seems to only collapse for two reasons from what I can tell on close examination of the story’s argument: (1) desperation pure and simple (which hardly reduces the stigma) and (2) outreach where someone convinces a recalcitrant but eligible family that they need to enroll for the good of their family, particularly the children.

Nothing about this story signaled to me “problem solved.” Instead the only real point seemed to be that in one beautifully written sentence: “Across the country, the food stamp rolls can be read like a scan of a sick economy.”

Where Under Secretary Kevin Concannon is right, and the article (or at least the gratuitous and missleading headline is wrong!) is that now is an opportunity to finally have the federal, state, and city governments put up, so that others will shut up about the fake dependency of receiving some benefits that help working families take care of their families. There is something so fatally wrong about a society that would invest more weight (and the attendant psychic damage) in having people care about what their neighbors think and their potential scorn, than in the first priority of making sure that your family is taken care of fully no matter what.

Changing the name of the program from food stamps to SNAP, and talking about nutrition rather than hunger, are not real changes, nor will they help us get the rest of the job done and done permanently, not just during these desperate times. We need a real effort that puts thousands of staff, volunteers, and others on the street and in the job centers to make and win the case to get all eligible families enrolled.

Stimulate that, Obama Administration!

Food Stamps Are Normal

jstuart — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:23:44 +0000

New Orleans Food stamps are a part of growing up, and in fact may be more common in the American experience than apple pie. Being hungry in childhood also seems to be something commonly shared according to surveys of the nation’s teachers.

Living in the world’s richest country, it is now normal for children to need assistance at some point during their childhood. This is a right of passage in America.

The numbers were published by sociologists from Cornell and Washington University using 30 years of data by the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Simply put, they say at some point in their childhood, about half of the nation’s children will experience poverty.

There is a brouhaha because many ideologues, as I have found in my discussions with many recently while on the Citizen Wealth trail, still want to believe in the “culture of poverty” and “welfare dependency” myths, even though real life and hard numbers indicate that reality is different. In real life most people’s experience is transitional. They are on, often because of unemployment or unexpected divorce or health setbacks for a period of time, and then off again. Statisticians lined up to support the conclusions of the sociologists about the high level of sometime participation in food stamps.

Others note that even as the evidence is clearer and clearer, we are still not getting food stamps to many people who are eligible and need them. The urgency of a campaign to achieve maximum eligible participation is critical.

This is another one of those situations where the question of whether or not people are willing to really look at the facts, rather than their ideologies is critical. In talking to people about Citizen Wealth over and over they cited times when they had been unemployed, or on welfare, or poor, but they wanted their personal narrative to read they they had “pulled themselves” up by their bootstraps and others were lazy and less deserving. In fact the evidence is that their story is not exceptional, but commonplace for most people who find themselves using the rights and benefits provided by our society and the government we instruct. They are simply normal. We in fact need a way to look at the experience of poverty now as normal and therefore something that we are prepared to fix immediately and fully, rather than allowing the psychic damage and continual threats to well-being.

Don’t get me wrong. It shouldn’t be normal for children to be hungry. It’s an outrage and a scandal, and we need to be angry and get aggressive in solving this problem. But, we need to tear down the political and partisan walls around this issue, and realize that we are hurting people permanently even when their experience in poverty may be temporary, by refusing to understand that this is a failure of government, politics, and institutions, and not necessarily a failure of the poor and people themselves.

Then there will really be Thanksgiving!

Citizen Wealth Stimulus Program: Food Stamps

jstuart — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:21:15 +0000

New Orleans Here’s a shocker. The one piece of the stimulus package that everyone seems to agree is working is Obama bump in the food stamp program. Furthermore, the success is such that there is real discussion now in Congress about giving the program another bump. Now we’re talking about citizen wealth meaning real income security.

An article in the Wall Street Journal on 7/7/09 by Roger Thurow quoted one source that “estimated that food-stamp spending will increase between $10 billion and $12 billion this year from $34.6 billion in 2008.” That would mean a real increase of more than 30% to the nation’s poorest working families, and that’s a big WOW!

Furthermore, business are even getting (ok, yes, just as I argued in Citizen Wealth!),

“When we look at the acceptance of food stamps, it becomes part of a larger and longer strategy to us,” says Ken Smith, chief financial officer of Family Dollar Stores Inc., a Charlotte, N.C., chain with 6,600 outlets in 44 states. A recent customer survey estimated that about 20% of Family Dollar customers receive food stamps.

In Chicago, where the number of households relying on food stamps is up 15% over a year ago, according to the Chicago Community Trust, food-stamp receipts are cushioning the blows of the recession. Without the food-stamp increases, “we would have been hurting more,” says Joe Garcia, controller at Moo & Oink Inc., a meat retailer with four stores in the Chicago area.

There were even favorable comments about the much maligned program echoing other arguments that many of us have made for decades about expanding the program and breaking down its barriers.

Money from the program — officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — percolates quickly through the economy. The U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates that for every $5 of food-stamp spending, there is $9.20 of total economic activity, as grocers and farmers pay their employees and suppliers, who in turn shop and pay their bills.

While other stimulus money has been slow to circulate, the food-stamp boost is almost immediate, with 80% of the benefits being redeemed within two weeks of receipt and 97% within a month, the USDA says.

Within this context it should not be a surprise that even the tightest fisted and conservative Congressmen are starting to hear what both farmers and business people are saying in their district, and that’s “give us more food stamps!” I might wish they were finally doing the right thing for the right reason as they gear up for the current debate, but that’s probably too much to hope for.

At least for a change they are doing the right thing!