The Rise Of Food Stamp Use In America Steven Perlberg

thenews 2013.07.17 17:47 #11

Foodstamps Are Corporate Welfare

McDonald’s Math: You Can’t Survive Working for Us

This ridiculously condescending budget put out by McDonald’s in partnership with Visa has been making the rounds today. I’ll allow excerpts from the Gothamist article on it and their corresponding video do most of the explaining, but the key point I want to hammer into people is that food stamps are corporate welfare.

They actually are not welfare for the workers themselves, who undoubtably don’t have wonderful lives. What ends up happening is that because the government comes in and supplements egregiously low wages with benefits like food stamps, the companies don’t have to pay living wages. So in effect, your tax money is being used to support corporate margins.

Even better, many of these folks who get the food stamp benefits then turn around and spend them at the very companies which refuse to pay them decent wages. Who benefits? CEOs and shareholders. Who loses? Society.

I previously covered these topics in two popular posts:

Where Food Stamps Go to Die

The Stock Market: Food Stamps for the 1%

Guess what would happen if these companies failed to pay high enough wages and food stamps didn’t exist? There would be massive employee organizing and ultimately the companies would have to change tact. This of course doesn’t happen when the taxpayer makes up the difference, and that is exactly what they want. From Gawker:

Just in case you weren’t already aware of how difficult it is to survive on minimum wage, allow McDonald’s to lay it all out for you. The fast food giant has partnered with Visa to release a just-shy-of-condescending “budget journal” to help their employees manage their finances. In a hilariously obtuse budget breakdown, the Big Mac purveyor’s first piece of advice to employees: get a second job. Yup, even McDonald’s knows that workers can’t survive on the pittance they make flipping patties and fighting off customers.

With Another $3 Trillion FOREX - Trends, Forecasts U.S. government shutdown begins

techmac 2013.10.15 20:04 #15

So good that "only" 46 million are using food stamps. They will hardly feel the change

thenews 2013.11.01 19:00 #16

Today, America's Foodstamps Program Gets A 6% Haircut: What Happens Next?

Today, one of America's best-known welfare programs with 47.6 million participants or 15% of the total population, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program also known as "foodstamps" or EBT, is due for a substantial haircut: beginning Friday, there will be a phased in $5 billion reduction (6% of the program) for the 12 month period starting November 1st 2013. So what happens next?

Nick Colas of Convergex explains.

The U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (a.k.a. Food Stamps) is the largest means-tested social support program in the country, with $6.3 billion in direct monthly cash transfers to individuals for the purchase of food. Some 47.6 million people (15% of the total population) are in the SNAP program as of the most recent data (July 2013) and these individuals receive an average of $132 per month. This support is set for a cut on Friday, with a $5 billion reduction (6% of the program) for the 12 month period starting November 1st 2013. From a Wall Street perspective, these numbers may seem small at 0.0003% of GDP. From the perspective of Main Street, however, is means a cut of $36/month for a family of four receiving full SNAP benefits. Record levels for stocks, record level for SNAP participants… An odd societal disconnect, to be sure.

We’ve written about the U.S. Supplemental Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) in these pages over the years even though the topic bears no direct relationship to corporate earnings, interest rates, the Federal Reserve, or any other recognized business topic. The reason for this focus is threefold:

It is a very large visible government program with monthly data updates. There are, for example, 47,637,407 Americans in the SNAP program as of the most recent update (July 2013) from U.S. Department of Agriculture. A total of 23,074,914 households receive an average monthly benefit of $272.51. This amounts to $6.3 billion in monthly support. As a percent of the population, this is 15% of all Americans and +20% of all households in the program.
It is a good measure of how deeply the economic recovery in the U.S. is reaching through the socioeconomic strata. Qualifying for SNAP means you make no more than 130% of the poverty line and generally have limited assets. Those 47.6 million people in the SNAP program are, for all intents and purposes, a record high for food stamp participation once you exclude months where the program includes disaster assistance.
It generates a large amount of hate email direct to my inbox and voicemail from both ends of the political spectrum. From the right comes criticisms over certain parts of the US population using EBT cards (the debit cards used to distribute the program’s payments) to buy beer and potato chips. This, yes, does occasionally happen. From the left, we get missives that feel a lot like that guy who told the world to “Leave Britney alone!” Food stamps, these folks argue, are part of living in a just society, which doesn’t allow anyone to go hungry. Half of all the people enrolled in SNAP are children, so it is pretty easy to see their point of view as well.

In the spirit of bringing our two warring readerships together, I would propose the following statement: “Something has changed about America since the Financial Crisis, and the still widespread popularity of the SNAP program is emblematic of that shift.” Or, in the words of Bill Parcells, “You are what your record says you are.” The American economic record, based on the Food Stamp data, is still pretty lousy:

Before the Great Recession of 2009, enrollment in the SNAP program ebbed and flowed with the state of the U.S. economy. There are links to the data after this note, with the high water marks in 1976, 1981, 1992-4 and cyclical lows in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

The Demise Of The Interesting and Humour The State Causes The

thenews 2014.05.04 18:50 #18

The Number Of Working Age Americans Without A Job Has Risen By 27 Million Since 2000

Did you know that there are nearly 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now? And 20 percent of all families in the United States do not have a single member that is employed. So how in the world can the government claim that the unemployment rate has "dropped" to "6.3 percent"? Well, it all comes down to how you define who is "unemployed". For example, last month the government moved another 988,000 Americans into the "not in the labor force" category. According to the government, at this moment there are 9.75 million Americans that are "unemployed" and there are 92.02 million Americans that are "not in the labor force" for a grand total of 101.77 million working age Americans that do not have a job. Back in April 2000, only 5.48 million Americans were unemployed and only 69.27 million Americans were "not in the labor force" for a grand total of 74.75 million Americans without a job. That means that the number of working age Americans without a job has risen by 27 million since the year 2000. Any way that you want to slice that, it is bad news.

Well, what about as a percentage of the population?

Has the percentage of working age Americans that have a job been increasing or decreasing?

As you can see from the chart posted below, the percentage of working age Americans with a job has been in a long-term downward trend. As the year 2000 began, we were sitting at 64.6 percent. By the time the great financial crisis of 2008 struck, we were hovering around 63 percent. During the last recession, we fell dramatically to under 59 percent and we have stayed there ever since...

And the numbers behind this chart also show that employment in America did not increase last month.

In March, 58.9 percent of all working age Americans had a job.

In April, 58.9 percent of all working age Americans had a job.

Things are not getting worse (at least for the moment), but things are also definitely not getting better.

The month that Barack Obama entered the White House, we were in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and only 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job.

Since only 58.9 percent of all working age Americans have a job now, that means that the employment situation in America is still significantly worse than it was the day Barack Obama took office.

So don't let anyone fool you with talk of an "employment recovery". It simply is not happening. The official unemployment rate bears so little relation to economic reality at this point that it has essentially become meaningless.

Look, how in the world can we have an "unemployment rate" of just "6.3 percent" when 20 percent of all American families do n0t have a single member that is working?

Here is how that 20 percent figure was arrived at...

A family, as defined by the BLS, is a group of two or more people who live together and who are related by birth, adoption or marriage. In 2013, there were 80,445,000 families in the United States and in 16,127,000—or 20 percent–no one had a job.

So if one out of every five families is completely unemployed, then why is the official government unemployment rate not up at Great Depression era levels?

Could it be that the government is manipulating the numbers to make them look much better than they actually are?

Why don't they just go ahead and get it over with? They can just define every American that is not working as "not in the labor force" and then we can have "0.0 percent unemployment". Then we can all have a giant party and celebrate how wonderful the U.S. economy is.

And don't be fooled by the "288,000 jobs" that were added to the U.S. economy last month. For workers under the age of 55, the number of jobs actually dropped by a whopping 259,000.

If we were using honest numbers, the official unemployment rate would look a lot scarier. John Williams of shadowstats.com has calculated that the unemployment rate should be about 23 percent. I don't think that is too far off.

Meanwhile, the quality of the jobs in our economy continues to go down. The House Ways and Means Committee says that seven out of every eight jobs that have been "added" to the economy under Barack Obama have been part-time jobs. But you can't raise a family or plan a career around a part-time job. To be honest, it is very hard for a single person to even survive on a part-time wage in this economic environment.

The Rise Of Food Stamp Use In America Steven Perlberg - page 2