America’s new hunger crisis
The United States is the world’s wealthiest nation, yet there still is families and children who don’t have enough to eat. Hunger in America exists for over 50 million people. That is 1 in 6 of the U.S. population – including more than 1 in 5 children.
Poverty: In 2012, 46.5 million people (15.0 percent) were in poverty. Food Insecurity and Very Low Food Security: In 2012, 49.0 million Americans lived in food insecure households, 33.1 million adults and 15.9 million children.
As Congress debates exactly how many billions of dollars to cut from the government’s main food assistance program for low-income Americans, a new report finds that the existing safety net has failed millions of people who must constantly worry about how to feed themselves and their families.
On the Nov. 1 the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits fell for more than 47 million lower-income people – 1 in 7 Americans – most of whom live in households with children, seniors or people with disabilities. Barring congressional intervention, the maximum payment for a family of four will shrink from $668 a month to $632, or $432 over the course of a year.
That amounts to 21 meals per month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The cuts will leave participants in the program, better known as food stamps, with an average of $1.40 to spend on each meal. The amount people get could sink even more if Congress makes deeper cuts later this year when House and Senate lawmakers try to hammer out a farm bill.
The Nov. 1 benefit cuts “will be close to catastrophic for many people,” said Ross Fraser, a spokesman for Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief charity, which estimates that this week’s SNAP reduction will result in a loss of nearly 2 billion meals for poor families next year.
Food stamps are the government’s biggest nutrition-assistance program for low-income people and, along with federal unemployment benefits, a key support system for the most vulnerable Americans.
More than three-quarters of households getting food stamps include a child, elderly person or someone with a disability. Some 83 percent of families are at or below the official poverty line (roughly $11,500 for an individual and $23,500 for a family of four).
Not surprisingly, participation in SNAP has soared during the epic downturn and ongoing job slump that followed the housing crash, with an additional 21 million people added to the rolls since 2008. Today, more than 1 in 4 U.S. children live in a home that gets food stamps.
SNAP gets a lot of use: Statistics show that roughly half of all U.S. children go on food stamps sometime during their childhood; half of all adults are on them sometime between the ages of 18 and 65. The USDA estimates that, as of last year, nearly 15 percent of American families, or 18 million households, lacked enough food at least some of the time to ensure that all family members could stay healthy.
Another group with lots of members in SNAP: Veterans. U.S. Census Bureau data show that, in 2011, some 900,000 former U.S. military personnel lived in households that used food stamps.
SNAP costs about $80 billion a year, which amounts to roughly 2 percent of the federal budget. It is paid for entirely by the federal government, although administrative costs are shared by states. Congress reauthorizes funding for the program every five years.
Payments are scheduled to decline this week because Congress three years ago voted to reverse a temporary increase in benefits made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a 2009 law passed to bolster the sagging economy.
As the economy was melting down, lawmakers at the time lifted monthly SNAP payments by $20 to $24 per month. Economists say this is an effective way to stimulate growth because the poor must spend almost all of their money just to get by. That, in turn, funnels money into the economy, creating a “multiplier” effect as food benefits spent in a grocery store generate revenue for other businesses.
The size of SNAP cuts will vary by state. California faces the largest spending reduction, at $457 million, which will affect more than 4 million people. Other states with large populations of SNAP recipients expected to see big cuts include Florida, Michigan, New York and Texas. Some states have already sought to trim the rolls by imposing new eligibility requirements for food stamps. In Ohio, for example, able-bodied people must work or get job training at least 20 hours a week to qualify for SNAP.
Although in recent decades women have made historic advances in nearly all areas of American public life, a staggering number of women across the country are still teetering on the verge of poverty and economic disaster, a new report, co-authored by NBC News special anchor Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, released Jan. 12 shows.
The key findings paint a portrait of an estimated 42 million women — and 28 million dependent children — saddled with financial hardship. “These are not women who are wondering if they can ‘have it all,'” Shriver wrote in her introduction to the report. “These are women who are already doing it all — working hard, providing, parenting, and care-giving. They’re doing it all, yet they and their families can’t prosper, and that’s weighing the U.S. economy down.”
Amid an apparent boom in female empowerment and participation — a time in which women earn the majority of secondary degrees and represent more than half of the country’s voters — the report says that millions of women are still struggling on the margins of American society, bruised by the recent recession and the day-to-day trials of family finances.
Women make up close to two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in the country — and upwards of 70 percent of those low-wage workers receive no paid sick days whatsoever, according to the report.
Former President George W Bush introduced the assistance plan in 2008 at the start of the recession. Under the programme, jobless people received an average monthly stipend of $1,166 for up to 73 weeks. The White House says the benefits have kept millions of families out of poverty, but many Republicans argue that the scheme’s annual $25bn price tag is too expensive.
Lawmakers failed to agree on an extension of the scheme before the US Congress began its winter recess. The stalemate comes two months after a budget fight in the US Congress led to the partial shutdown of the government.
More than a million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits after an emergency federal programme expired on Dec. 28. An estimated 1.3 million people will initially be cut off with the end of the “emergency unemployment compensation”, US officials say. Millions more could be affected next year after they lose state benefits, which in many states expire after six months.
Ways and Means Committee Democrats today released new estimates showing how many additional people in every state will lose their unemployment benefits each week that the federal program remains expired.
Dec. 28, 1.3 million people nationwide lost their federal unemployment insurance. In the first six months of 2014, an additional 1.9 million Americans will lose their coverage as they exhaust their state benefits and are unable to receive federal unemployment insurance – with 72,000 losing their benefits each week during the first half of 2014. The figures are based on Department of Labor data.
At the same time GOP is now to deny insurance to millions in poverty in 2014. The Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) will start this month (and over 4 million people without insurance have qualified, and will be getting Medicaid now thanks to the new law). This Medicaid expansion will cover those people who made too much money to get Medicaid in their state in the past, but don’t make enough to buy their own insurance or qualify for federal subsidies to buy that insurance.
For example, Texas requires a person to make no more than $3,737 and be a parent of dependent children to qualify for Medicaid — only about 19% of the federal poverty level. If Texas had expanded Medicaid, people making up to 138% of the poverty level would have qualified for Medicaid. But Texas didn’t expand Medicaid, which means those people making between 19% of the poverty level and 138% of it will not be able to get health insurance (although there is the possibility that the federal government may offer subsidies to those between 100% and 138% of the poverty level in states like Texas that refuse to expand Medicaid).
And Texas is not the only state refusing to expand Medicaid. At least half of the states, 25 in all, have opted to not expand Medicaid. These are states that are currently being run by Republicans — Republicans who believe health care is not a right, but a privilege that should be offered only to those affluent enough to pay for it. For them, their hard-hearted ideology is more important than the lives of the poor and disadvantaged citizens in their states who will be unable to access life-saving preventative care.
The only option left for these people is to wait until they are sick enough to go to the emergency room — and for thousands each year, that is too late because their disease will have progressed too far to be treated. In plain language, these Republican state governments have sentenced them to death.
And this is not a small number of people who are being denied health insurance (and thus access to adequate health care). It is about 4.8 million people in those 25 states combined. Five of those states contain 59% of those people denied insurance (and the other 20 states contain the other 41%).
The federal government will be paying ALL of the additional expense of expanding Medicaid for the next 10 years, and will continue to pay 90% of the cost after that. That means these states could afford to cover their poor and disadvantaged citizens with Medicaid. They just don’t want to — because they don’t care for those citizens, and they think they can get some political advantage by refusing to expand Medicaid.
Making matters even worse is the fact that most new jobs that are being created are low-wage jobs — jobs that pay too much to qualify for Medicaid in these states, but not enough to qualify for a federal subsidy to buy insurance. And these same Republicans want to keep the minimum wage low. They see nothing wrong with paying people a poverty wage, and then denying them health insurance.
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