I recently read the excellent book Breadline U.S.A. by Sasha Abramsky.
In this book, Sasha Abramsky shares the stories of many food insecure people he met during his study. He also lived the life. The author spent 7 weeks on a poverty budget eating the way millions of people do. Those 7 weeks, he pretended he was an average McDonald's worker earning the median McDonald's wage of $8.23 per hour which works out to $17,118 a year taking home $1,131 a month.
And eating off that proved difficult. The limited budget required planning every meal in advance. There was no room for error in this budget. Spending as little as $10 a week over budget would result in $500 credit card debt after one year; substantial for an $8 an hour worker. His food purchases weren't especially healthy or appealing. Examples include non-brand canned goods such as spegettio's, green beans, pork and beans, boxed mac and cheese, frozen pizza's, some pasta, rice, and cheap bread the author said he could eat 10 slices of and still feel hungry. He became socially invisible during this time as well.
The author did better than some Americans. His pretend budget assumed no credit card debt, prescriptions, or other bills. The budget included $80 a month for payments on an old car; but during the 7 weeks this car didn't require any repairs. In real life, low wage workers will have these bills.
In this book, the author notes about 35 million Americans are what he considers to be "food insecure." Approximately 10 million Americans regularly skip meals. ABC News put the figure at 50 million.
The stories are heartbreaking. People eating nothing except oatmeal for breakfast and potatoes for dinner. Others eat pancakes every meal (flour and water). They run out of butter and syrup towards the end of the month and just eat the pancake- sometimes this is a few days, sometimes a week, at times two weeks. Parents may not eat so their children can.
Rising gas prices have seriously exacerbated the problem. Oil prices quadrupled from year 2000 to 2008. While the middle class may forgo holiday travel or weekend trips, millions of low wage workers have to spend 25% to 30% of their take home pay on gas just to get to work and to medical appointments. They have to choose between going to work and putting food on the table. The modest drop in gas prices since their 2008 peak is due to the recession. When the economy improves, it is probable gas prices will rise significantly above their 2008 peak. Wages - especially for low paid workers - won't keep up further exacerbating the problem.
The impact of high gas prices on the working poor is especially serious in rural counties. A person living in a rural area may have to commute 100+ miles to a city to get to work and back or get to needed medical appointments. If you have a low wage job, you just can't afford this. So people join the ranks of the unemployed or forgo medical care. The book has numerous stories about people who lost jobs because they could not afford to get to work.
Yes, I would support expanding the food stamp or SNAP program but there are other excellent ideas.
The author has an excellent idea we create a "Gas Stamp" program that would work similar to the food stamp program. Gas stations would accept gas cards the same way supermarkets take food stamp debit cards. I would expand that to allow qualifying individuals to also receive cards they could use for public transportation, if they so choose. Finally, many poorer Americans can't afford more fuel efficient cars. I would strongly favor bringing back the popular "Cash For Clunkers" programs with adequate subsidies to allow poorer people to upgrade their vehicles. I would consider this a "2 for 1" helping solve two problems with the same dollars.
The author considers America's hunger problem and environmental problems related. I never realized this before reading the book, but it certainly makes sense. The author also strongly supports the government starting an SUV buyback program similar to how some cities have created handgun buyback policies. He supports massive investments in clean energy.
And I'm intrigued with Beach Babe in Fla's comment in this diary
A vegetarian in a Hummer produces fewer carbon emissions than a meat eater in a Prius
The author also talks about the need for living wage laws. Our cities have begun to take the lead in trying to require those who want to do business in the city to pay a living wage. Didn't Franklin Roosevelt say goods produced at a non-living wage should be considered "contraband?" In 1968 the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour - it would be $8.70 an hour today if it had kept pace with the inflation rate. That would be a $1.45 an hour increase from the current level, resulting in a pay raise for approximately 30 million people. Note we would need to increase the minimum wage even more to restore the working poor to 1968 purchasing power because the inflation rate for poor people is significantly higher because they spend a much higher percentage of their income on food, energy, and housing. The motto is simple. If you work for a living, you are entitled to a living wage.
In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson and Great Society Democrats such as Bobby Kennedy raised hunger as an issue. This paragraph got to me:
In April 1967, a generation after Franklin Roosevelt pledged to bring America out of its Depression, Senators Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark visited the Mississippi Delta and interviewed African American residents who were literally starving. The testimony they reaped -descriptions of malnourished children with bloated bellies, of shacks that lacked electricity with not a whit of food on the shelves - shocked the nation..The Senators, author Loretta Schwartz Nobel wrote in her book Starving in the Shadow of Plenty 'drove along the bleak unpaved back roads of the Mississippi Delta, stopping at shack after shack and seeing themselves some of the starving, diseased, and retarded children of America.'
Also in 1967, the Citizens Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition released a study about infants dying because their mothers could not afford milk. The study also showed there were Americans suffering from rare hunger related diseases such as Kwashiorkor and Marasmus
These findings, plus the 1968 CBS News documentary by Edward R. Murrow entitled CBS Reports Hunger in America increased public awareness in the country. The result was both Presidents Johnson and Nixon greatly expanded the food stamp program. The country made a lot of progress against hunger in the 1970s. Then came Ronald Reagan and trickle down economics.
The media has also moved way to the political right. We've gone from Edward Murrow's documentary about hunger to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh spouting off about how rich America's poor are. The Heritage Foundation has been quoted as saying America's poor have too much, not too little food. The political left needs to create alternative media (Daily Kos is one example) to get the real facts out there and persuade. I believe in appealing to people's better angels. If given the right facts, won't most people make the right decision?
We need to greatly increase the country's safety net because too many people are falling through the cracks when it comes to a broad range of issues from the food stamp program to unemployment benefits to health care. The U.S. government official definition of poverty is grossly inadequate. We statistically define poverty as income of $10,590 for a single person, $13,540 for a couple, and $21,203 for a family of four. The book quotes Bob Pollin as saying a minimum income of $10 an hour is needed for a single person to achieve a "semblance" of economic security.
There are 43 million people in the United States receiving food stamp assistance.
This New York Times interactive map illustrates there are parts of the country where 30% to almost 50% of local residents receive food stamp benefits.
31 million children benefit from the school lunch program. Around 9 million women benefit from the WIC program.
I've read there are millions of people who are eligible for food stamps or other programs and don't apply. The reasons probably vary from embarrassment to not knowing they are eligible to transportation or time off work issues. We need to make the process faster and easier for people who are in need.