I don't think SNAP is supposed to always cover 100% of food expenses. If you're near the cutoff point for benefits, you get some allowance, but you're expected to cover some of the food cost from your income. You would of course use your SNAP benefits first, since they are not fungible, so it is not surprising that you would run out before the end of the month. This does not mean that such households are unable to afford food for the remainder of the month, it just means that they have to pay for it themselves.
I just went and put some really sad numbers into a calculator and it told me I qualified for $500/mo in benefits for a family of three. This is definitely sufficient to provide three nutritious meals per day for three people anywhere in the country.
If we remove the fear of starvation (we can afford to feed everyone twice and barely put a dent in our military budget) a lot of people will have a HUGE improvement in their day-to-day happiness. This is one of those obvious huge moral positives we can do.
The only "down side" is there will never be fear of starvation.
Edit: The one progress I can see in a society is when we can basically say that certain problems that people may have... those problems just literally won't exist.
- basic housing
- 3 meals a day
- a basic level of health care
with the amount of cash flow in the US there shouldn't be a single person who has to worry about one of those 3.
edit 2: I mean any person who "struggles with hunger" which is ~40 mil. Also, that is in itself a terrifying number.
I agree with this general goal, but it is much more complex than it seems from the outset. Any program at this scale has to be thoughtful of the larger societal, moral, and cultural consequences it brings with it.
Just looking at free food, a fundamental question is: Is this expected to be a baseline that all people receive and then people buy additional/better food, or is supposed to be an option where many/most don't take the free food option at all?
If the former, then you risk massive waste. If the free food is mediocre, people will just take it, buy better stuff, and then throw out the crappy stuff. If you solve that with better food, you run into hard questions around the cost and quality ceiling. Food is one of those product areas where you can spend nearly limitless money on it, but it's not feasible for a country to give 100% of its citizens foie gras and cavier every day.
But, of course, deliberately drawing the line somewhere lower has connotations that people who use that food are "bad" because otherwise don't they deserve better food?
If the latter, then you run into the current problem with welfare that the people in power don't use the system at all, which gives you the principle-agent problem we see in welfare today where many people hate funding it because they don't benefit.
Then there are questions of how you manage this logistically. How do you reduce the risk of exploitation? If the government, say, gives out free bags of rice, how do you prevent a restaurant from just grabbing dozens of them and then using them for their food service? But if you spend too much effort on enforcement, then you waste resources on enforcement that could be better spent elsewhere.
It is a hard, complex problem. SNAP today is basically our current stab at it. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that could be swept away and easily replaced with something simpler and clearly better. Problems aways seem much easier when you are far away from them.
It seems like you are arguing against a couple of straw men here.
First off, no one is saying that we should give 100% of citizens foie gras and caviar.
While I understand your point about there being some stigma attached to funding and/or receiving food assistance, I think it would be lessened if it were freely available to everyone at their discretion. People (rich and poor alike) have certainly had no qualms about receiving unemployment in the current crisis and I think you will see a similar reaction to this food assistance program in New York.
Second, your example of a restaurant taking bags of rice is clearly not an issue with SNAP benefits as they exist in every state, nor is it a possible issue with the program in New York, since they are giving out full meals.
In fact, I expect that the system being trialed in New York will actually solve the issue of people selling or trading away their SNAP benefits, since poor folks just above the cutoff for snap, who would still benefit from food assistance, can just go and get a free meal themselves, rather than trading or buying discounted food from someone selling their SNAP benefits.
Trying to means test these kinds of programs just adds administration costs. "But a rich person might get some of the food!". So what, that rich person is paying taxes to support the program. Make it simple.
> but I'm sure you meant those in need, and not every American
I personally despise means testing. There has been so much hatred spewed over "welfare queen" that I am amazed we still do means testing and we have pulled it forward to things like the New York state Excelsior program (college education for first-time college students) and even for the $1,200 COVID-19 stimulus. It is very sad. We don't less means testing, not more.
I despise means testing as well. I also believe the moral hazard argument is over blown most of the time. I would like to see a guaranteed employer of last resort that pays enough for someone to live. This employer (federal agency) could adapt the work that is done to a situation. Provide opportunities for retraining and so forth. This could also provide the psychological safety many are in need of and reduce desperation. Means testing is expensive and causes many to not get the help they need.
I also like the idea of UBI combined with a flat tax (losing progressive taxation) for it's simplicity, but imagine all the tax lawyers and accountants that would be out of a job.
I’d rather see a $15 minimum wage, and an EITC run in reverse, where anyone that hires someone who is struggling gets a $10 credit for every hour paid.
I didn't read this comment as promoting means testing. I read it as "Even if they make the meals available to everyone, mostly just the people in need will use it". It was addressing the moral hazard risk that people often associate with these programs.
NYC will be able to publish just how many people took advantage of the meals. That's the baseline to price the program out nationwide, not the total number of US citizens.
I agree completely. I wasn't trying to make any judgment in my post though, I was just acknowledging "barely put a dent in our military budget," because my math assumes the extreme case that every American takes the $5/day.
I think the suggestion is that we can afford to oversubscribe a program like this, because it'd be a guarantee that you'd be able to eat (i.e. food on demand), not a push-based delivery of the resources (money/food stamps/etc.) required to be able to eat, that people would then feel that they "should" use up, thus using less of their own money.
Any American who didn't take advantage of a demand-driven food supply program on a given month, wouldn't be costing the program anything. It just means that they'd be able to instantly access food when in need, without first qualifying into the program.
Think less "food cash" (like food stamps essentially are), and more "no-limit food credit card" (with the government as the account holder.) You'd just go into a grocery store and buy whatever, and if you couldn't afford it, you'd pay for it with the food credit card (= the government would pay for it.) But if you don't use the card, it isn't accruing or expiring a balance. It's just there, waiting to be used.
One can think of this another way, with a different moral color but the same in-practice effects: imagine if they made shoplifting from grocery stores legal (i.e. every grocery store is now also required to act as a food bank), and the government promised to pay the store back for any shoplifting-related shrinkage. That's essentially what this program would be, except with the store able to track inventory through the till, since the food would still be being "purchased."
are you envisioning some mechanism to prevent people from having filet mignon and caviar every night for dinner? I'm not poor, but my grocery purchases would change a lot if I didn't have to pay for it myself.
Presumably we could come up with some sort of middle ground policy. For example, there could be certain foods that are excluded from the system or maybe only certain products are included. Or perhaps different products could use up more of a person's "food credits".
Nope; just assuming that the number of people taking advantage of this would be a power-law distribution rather than a gaussian, and so the economics would still work out in favor, even with people "abusing the system."
That, and perhaps the dollar-cost of your "free" food purchases would be taken into account in calculating your tax bracket.
In a couple days, New York will probably release the number of meals served. Divide that by the population of New York and then multiply that by your $596 billion. Even if it's 10% (no way it will be this high), that's $60 billion, or around 9% of the budget, otherwise known as a "dent".
I wish i could reply to the comment below about means testing. The reality is even if this were means tested, many people wouldnt opt into it...so short story, I agree with you, it would be much cheaper than you're describing.
Feeding America claims to deliver meals at $0.10 each by rescuing food that would've been wasted, and they claim even buying at wholesale would run about $2/meal ($1.67/lb * 1.2lb/meal).
Rescuing wasted food doesn't work once you scale it to a hundred million people.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely in favor of a food/housing program that's available for everyone. I am also a communist though, so it's an easy sell for me.
Maybe it’s because I’ve never been poor enough so I don’t get it, but I’m a lot more worried about losing housing and healthcare than food. Food’s super cheap compared to those (unless you’re a meat-with-every-meal type, and picky about which meat) and there are tons of government and community programs to provide it.
There are logistical complications around ability to complete the red tape, and personal irresponsibility or access to low-cost options when spending the SNAP money, but big-picture SNAP is fine.
Should people be entitled to spend all their post-tax income on luxuries and get welfare support for basic needs? That's a more extreme position than supplemental support for people with some wealth.
To add to your basics, don’t forget clothing and education. I think those are the 5 basics that are necessary to ensure every person can participate in society without fear or shame.
It's hard to be like "omg everyone should have food, shelter and sanitation" and "omg climate change from overpopulation"... There's even a national security memorandum from back in the 1960s discussing various population restriction methods.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that people should strive to be self-reliant. Not: "how can we meet people's needs?" but "how do we help people meet their own needs?". Like the old proverb about giving a man a fish vs. teaching a man to fish.
Everyone always shuts down that second question with "they can't help themselves until their basic needs are met" which is incredibly hand wavy and disingenuous, in my opinion. Half of being poor is in the mind. If poor people are to become middle class people, there needs to be a change in the mind. This change doesn't automatically happen "because money". Changing the mind needs to come from teachers and mentors and the poor person has to want to change and start thinking and acting differently.
If you get everyone reliant on a monolithic omnipotent government, then when said monolithic government fails all of helpless leeches will die (and that could be millions).
I think it's better if we strive for a minimalistic government where members of society strive to be self-reliant and in terms of "safety nets" the government's goal is to promote and encourage self-reliance.
You are absolutely correct, but it can sound to a reader lacking nuance as if you were arguing that other factors (outside the mind) aren't important. Many people suffer from the prison of two ideas, and wrongly misinterpret this argument as a denial of important social, cultural, historical factors.
> If poor people are to become middle class people
If this is the goal, you need to be pushing to radically restructure the way society and the economy functions. You cannot have everyone employed at, say, $60K a year in the one we have.
Most of the time when people say this, they prefer to focus on individuals rather than systemic issues - "this one person pulled them self up by their own bootstraps - surely others can, too. And "others" can, and do. That leaves people who can't. Now what?
> I think it's better if we strive for a minimalistic government
The problem is capabilities. Libertarian fantasy-states work in frontiers and sometimes in low-population, high-homogeneity areas. As population increases, many public goods need management[1] and public management means the state necessarily takes on more functions. So you need to work on your plan to massively reduce population or get yourself a new planet if this is your goal.
Your desire to drive self-sufficiency by intentionally depriving those in need cannot work in our current world and simply results in performative cruelty.
> Half of being poor is in the mind
Have you been poor? I have have been very poor. I grew up that way. I know what you're talking about, and I suspect you honestly don't understand how condescending and insulting it is.
[1] Growing up in a very rural town in Tennessee, people used to routinely burn their trash. Try that in San Francisco.
which is great when schools are open. this also means that parents aren't going to go hungry, and that neither will go hungry over the summer/prolonged school closures right now.
These free meal programs are the schools providing meals to their students during school closings.
And the bigger point is that (during normal times) SNAP doesn't need to cover 100% of kids meals per month; most meals in a month are already provided for free through school.
Many school districts do offer supplemental feeding programs during breaks, and our local district is still distributing free lunches to students in need. But this isn't universal across the country and a lot of people do fall through the gaps.
Okay now try to eat like an actual human being and make it work for $500 over 30 days.
The dollar amount itself is fine, but SNAP should be supplemented with basic commodities. Beans, rice, flour, sugar. The prices for these when purchased at the volume of the federal government drop to near nothing.
If you buy mainly beans, rice, flour, frozen chicken, etc for your monthly food you will be far under $500. It's all the other distracting items in the grocery store that add up.
Yes. $500 doesn't go very far if you're feeding two teenagers and want to have food variety. Spices are expensive and the price of vegetables goes by the season. That's why I think they should have a supplied commodity benefit in addition to the money.
I lived on $200/month in SF (single person) and I definitely didn't "eat like an actual human being". But the problem was definitely me and not that it wasn't possible.
Usually in those financial conditions you also know your time is better spent elsewhere. An extra hour per day practicing for interviews is much better use of your time than cooking. So you do the most efficient thing possible, which is just throw whatever is cheapest per lb into a slow cooker and eat it for the rest of the week. Most stuff is pretty disgusting after a few days in the fridge.
It's probably possible do meal prep cheap/fast/delicious, but I definitely never learned how. Tips appreciated!
> ... $500/mo in benefits for a family of three. This is definitely sufficient to provide three nutritious meals per day for three people anywhere in the country.
This is an unbelievable assertion.
That’s $5.48 per meal for 3 people. Have you tried to feed 3 people a consistently nutritious meal on $5.48 per meal everywhere in the country? What is your nutritious meal plan for 3 meals each day, 365 days per year, that doesn’t exceed $500 everywhere in the country? What are the ages and average caloric needs of each of the 3 people in this hypothetical family? How do you maintain $500/mo when, presumably, at least 1 member of the family’s caloric needs will change over time.
I’d love to see the meal plan that works for 2 adults and 1 child for $500/mo, for 18 years, everywhere in the country.
How do you handle snacks with $500/mo—do you just tell people tough luck, you only get to eat at specific mealtime? How do you compensate for the increased caloric need of a child who regularly engages in sports and physical activity—do you just tell them to stay hungry, or tell them they can’t engage in such activities?
I mean, I cook for my family so I have some idea what goes into each meal. Typical dinner will be rice, some protein, and some vegetables. By far the most expensive bit is the protein. Our staple is chicken thighs which can be had for $2-3/lb. We use maybe half a pound per person (generous estimate), so the protein cost is on the order $6/meal. The rice costs next to nothing, maybe 20c. And the vegetables might be a dollar a head. Spices and such are de minimus. Adding it all up we have about ~$10 to feed a family of four dinner, plus maybe 20-30c worth of milk for each child.
So, that's in the neighborhood of $300 a month for dinner. Again, a generous estimate, because really wifey and the kids don't eat half a pound of meat each. Breakfast and lunch are vegetarian, so much cheaper. This is in inner Brooklyn, so not far off from the most expensive food locale in the US. Hawaii is significantly more, but few other places are. We could make it work on $500/month if we had to, for sure.
Same. Live in a medium COL area (Portland, OR) and we feed the entire family on about 300/month, and we eat generously, with pastries, sweets, and other 'luxury' items. If we went to a more modest diet, we could probably do it on 200/month.
Thank you for posting this. Long ago I investigated how cheaply I could eat. I researched nutritional needs, created a spreadsheet, priced items at the supermarket.
It was easy to keep myself well fed at a cost far below standard assistance levels.
When I encountered poor people complaining their money ran out, I discovered that some were hostile to the very ideas of thrift, self reliance, or any principals of stoicism.
Many people were never taught this stuff and the world does not exactly go out of its way to make it obvious how to play the food game properly. All the advertising and all the media point you to inefficient purchases. And really, I guess most poor people are doing exactly what I talked about -- buying and eating efficiently. It's the counterexamples that make the news.
Also FWIW I'm not saying it's easy to be poor. In many domains it's extremely painful and difficult. But I think we can acknowledge that while also pointing out that meeting food needs using $500 of SNAP benefits is an eminently doable challenge.
I agree regarding obviousness, marketing, difficulties of poverty, and doable challenges. I'm not convinced about "most poor people" and exceptions making the news. I've lived in several very poor communities in several parts of the US, and observed widespread cultural norms undermining the very ideas of cost efficiency and self restraint.
I realize I'm too ignorant to confidently propose systemic solutions, but on the education front I do wonder if it would help to offer government financed courses in shopping and budgeting (along with nutrition) bundled with SNAP benefits.
I'm able to feed a family of 4 for <$500/mo. We eat lots of rice, pasta, etc. which you can get large quantities of, for cheap. Add in some proteins and veggies for variety and nutrition and we are well under $500/mo.
I can vouch for this, having grown up on 'food stamps' as well as most of friends it really isnt enough for a family.
A few times as an adult I've also fallen on hard times and used snap benefits, it was enough for me as a single guy who can cook and knows to eat cheaply, but its hard and not fun.
However where I lived you need a mailing address to get benefits so when I was really down and I was homeless I got no benefits.
That's why this meal program in NYC is so great, it says right at the bottom there is no need for registration, it's actually accessible to everyone.
When someone runs out isn't the relevant stat. A person could receive $100/day and still run out in 17 days if they are ridiculous. The real question is can a person reasonably feed themselves on $4/day. I would submit the answer is 100% yes for the vast, vast majority of locations in the US. You can do your own web search for the litany of sites/postings on how to eat on < $1/day. You have 4x that amount in your budget.
You can feed yourself for $4/day if you already have:
- Cooking supplies (pots, pans, plates, silverware, etc)
- 1h+ / day of free time to spend on cooking and shopping for food
- A fridge and pantry to store food in
- An oven and/or stove to cook your food
For a significant number of people that cannot afford to feed themselves, one or more of these are compounding factors.
By providing meals instead of $, this program is much more equitable.
I genuinely don’t know: how common is it for an American that lives in a home (rented/owned/subsidized) to not have a hotplate, fridge/freezer and random assortment of plates, cutlery and pots?
Rentals usually include appliances in N. America.
Thrift store are usually full of small appliances (people shy away from used blenders or used kettles), unmatched cutlery and plates. Pots may be harder to come by, but a large and small one covers most use cases.
Used appliances are usually cheap because of the upgrade treadmill. I understand that coming up with $150 for a fridge or $25 for a hotplate. Maybe we need a better system for those capital costs.
This is an awful "gotcha" straw man. It's not reasonable to expect every person in every response to cover every case. No communication would occur if we held everyone to that bar.
If a person needs a prepared meal they can go to a soup kitchen which is also funded by taxes. Forcing everyone to that model would be really authoritarian. I'd much rather let people get what they want to the extent possible.
And from that sample site, they seem to have an abundance of time to exploit sales and an excess of freezer/storage space. I'm sure there are counterexamples, but I have always gotten the impression those "eat cheap" sites are run by stay at home parents with an excess of free time or people using them to generate income.
This is somewhat misleadingly worded: it makes it sound like what they receive each month is 17*4 = $68. The actual average per month is $127/recipient.
I ate plenty well as a grad student on $120 a month. If that’s $127/person that’s plenty for just food. If that’s $127 for a family of 3 that’d be rough.
As, a college student with limited funds, I noticed I could keep my daily food costs down to 1$-3$/day range by eating healthily: It's at least 4 times cheaper than eating at mcdonalds. (and this was in CA, one of the most expensive areas) https://kale.world/eating-healthy-is-four-times-cheaper-than...
took 3 seconds to find this by googling "average snap per month". I could find national numbers from secondary sources that cited federal sources but couldn't easily find a hyperlink to those federal sources.
But I am sure just as easy as typing Source? you could find your answer
SNAP is not intended to cover the cost of a recipient's entire food needs. The S stands for "supplemental".
You can argue that is should cover a recipient's entire food needs but it seems a little misguided to criticize the program for failing to meet an objective it doesn't have. Furthermore, federal programs have to be careful not to do things outside their mandate less they run into territory where they don't have political support and lose funding. SNAP probably couldn't get away with providing the full cost of food even if they were able to.
They didn't criticize the program, they responded to a post that stated a fact about SNAP and made an apparently associated representation It seems like largely the US has been and will continue to keep people fed.
Saying SNAP isn't enough is pretty clearly a response to the representation.
I just went and put some really sad numbers into a calculator and it told me I qualified for $500/mo in benefits for a family of three. This is definitely sufficient to provide three nutritious meals per day for three people anywhere in the country.