Pearl River I try to imagine the readership of the New York Times, both in print and online. I wonder how many read past the headline of an op-ed piece that announces that the federal food stamp program is only designed to provide $6 per day.
The pull quote announces that “Requiring people to work for SNAP benefits risks pushing many off the program.” The desk man at the Times that wrote the headline and inserted that pull quote, as it’s called, didn’t have much time to really read the piece by Tracie McMillan. Her whole point was not that there would be any “risks” in “pushing many off the program,” but that that the system itself, as currently established to certify work, would guarantee a reduction of the program. As she reports,
…the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new requirements [in the Republican budget bill] would save $92 billion by 2034. Researchers estimate that the change would put 11 million people at risk of losing their food assistance – roughly a quarter of current recipients. Four million of them are children.
Six dollars a day doesn’t get anyone much food, so any arguments about dependency seem false on their face. What can anybody buy at any grocery in New York for six bucks? What can any family buy anywhere in America for that amount? Precious little. The only thing six dollars is better than is nothing, because that means hunger knocking on the door of starvation. Why would anyone in power do this to people? The answer is that cutting $300 billion from the food stamp program will enable “…the nation’s 0.1 per cent wealthiest households – those earning at least $4.3 million – an extra $390,070 on average…” in 2026.
The piece documents the grinding bureaucratic nightmare involved for an eligible recipient to obtain this entitlement with the story of a single working mother in Michigan who had to call the state office to recertify her family based on her work on a monthly basis. She called at 930 am and was “162nd in line” and then “missed the return call at 4pm, because…get this… she was working, but “It took another day to get a person on the phone – and two months to get … health care and food assistance back.” She doesn’t say the obvious, that this is what happens in a blue Democratic state and not in the dark red South where the degree of difficulty is exponentially greater.
If anyone made it to the end of the piece, they would find the simple truth that it’s not work, but the wages that force families to go through this system that claims to be about work, but is really about preventing payments to eligible families. The need for fair wages at work, should have been the main message, as she writes,
If the Trump administration honestly wanted to end the dependency, it would raise wages. According to a 2016 study from the Economic Policy Institute, for every $1 increase to the wages of low-income workers, spending on government programs, including SNAP, would most likely drop by at least $5.2 billion a year. The same study found that raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 would have reduced spending on government assistance each year by $17 billion (around $23 billion today). Those figures suggest that, even today, raising wages would save more money than SNAP work requirements do.
Amen.