Slate Interview: Its hard living on food stamps

It's available for anyone. It's not available for everyone.

Hey -- if you want to deal with the consequences of a motivated underclass, by all means. A motivated underclass without sufficient entry points into the economy -- and there are not sufficient entry points in America -- is a portal to violence. I'm not advocating violence; I'm saying that, when so few have so much and that few tells the many to shove it, the many typically resort to force.

The absence of a well-developed -- to the point of overused -- welfare structure is a one-way ticket to a banana republic where the state spends far too much time keeping its eye on the teeming masses.

 

Good job chucking the original curriculum. Your take on it was much better.

I suppose the lesson is: Don't be poor. But lots of poor people are saved. Lots of rich people are not.

 

I believe in some conspiracy theories but usually not in overreaching here's-how-The-Man-Works ones. That being said, the system or whatever is going to do what the system is going to do.

For a lot of the underclass, there are sufficient entry points into the economy. It's just that their job is to be grist for the prison-industrial complex. Right now, if a certain percentage of prisoners had turned away from crime at a certain point, devoting their lives to being mendicant monks, living on beans and water, it would be a huge hit to the economy. It's a horrible situation but that's what it is.

In any case, it certainly would be interesting if we had a motivated, educated working class who'd read their fill of Marx, Engels, etc. etc.

 

Doesn't a fairly significant percentage of people on food stamps have a job but not make enough to make ends meet?
And if I'm not mistaken, doesn't that group include a good number of military families?

 

Make them dance for their crumbs.

If you're at a point in your life where living a lower-class-but-not-destitute lifestyle off the system appeals to you, then the system has failed you enough that it's not going to kill us to give that to you.

 

This is a simple thing - if someone is able bodied and in need of welfare assistance, put them to work to earn their money. There are plenty of jobs that need to be done in the community that we have a built in workforce to do.

Those on disability, we should help.

But people who are healthy should be put to work

 

Make them build stadiums. It would be a win win.

 

Read a thing on CNN's web site about a town in Louisiana that's considered one of the poorest in the country and has the greatest wealth disparity between the rich and the poor.

The rich people, almost all farmers, complain endlessly about the poor people and how they are living on food stamps and getting rich off them. The average amount of money food stamp recipients receive is about $1,200 annually. The average farmer subsidy was about $600,000 and if I remember correctly, the most one farmer received the previous year was $13 million.

The total amount of money distributed via food stamps wasn't even the average of what one farmer got.

But yeah, food stamps. That's the problem.

 

My church is part of a network that runs a homeless shelter from October to April. We're in the suburbs, not in a stereotypical hard-hit urban area. Everyone has their own story on how they got there. Some of it is bad decisions, some of it is bad luck, some of it is both. Lately we've gotten a lot of single women with kids, often having fled an abusive or toxic environment. What would surprise people most is how many of them have jobs. We're open 6 p.m. to 7 a.m., but usually there are at least four or five people who have early wakeups so they can get to work. Many others leave for jobs after breakfast is over. Obviously, they're not taking the train to trade grain futures. The jobs generally are low-skilled, obviously. Some of them are people working their way back from substance abuse.

What happens with some of them is that they have a choice with their limited money: car or apartment. Or they don't make enough to have the luxury of that choice. The thing with the rental market these days is that while house prices have sunk, the demand for rentals is way up, so apartment prices are climbing.

The reason I bring this up is the common rejoinder to people on food stamps or assistance is: get a job! But many do have a job, except it's a job that doesn't pay squat.

 

It's also the case -- and I apologize in advance if this skirts too close to the political -- that many folks on food stamps etc. face, essentially, the highest marginal tax rate there is. Once you hit a certain point, every additional dollar of earnings means one less dollar of public assistance. NOBODY other than those at that boundary faces what is the equivalent of a 100% marginal rate.

 

To the "why don't people move to where the jobs are" suggestion ...

Moving is not cheap.

It costs to pack up your life: buying packing tape, maybe ending a lease early, etc.

It costs to transport: gas and food, maybe an overnight stay, maybe a moving truck. Even if you don't take anything with you, you still have to get yourself there.

It costs to establish yourself in a new place: security deposits, utility connections, fresh groceries, and all the little expenses that come with a new place (maybe you didn't want to haul a nasty plastic kitchen trash bin, so you buy a new one).

And this is not to count the cost of potentially moving away from your family and/or support network. There goes your free childcare, maybe a free Sunday meal, any job leads from friends and neighbors, etc.

Long gone are the days of companies paying to relocate employees, especially for low-skill or low-pay jobs.

Even those who "move to where the jobs are" face economic hardship; housing costs near the oil fields of West Texas and the Dakotas are sky-high due to demand.

There's no way to win here.

 

Not to mention, you can't trust employers to keep you employed.

Such as in the newspaper business the way it is now. For decades, journalists would move around the country for better gigs. Now, you have to seriously weigh the options of moving to a different area, because you don't know if your paper is going to cut jobs and leave you unemployed in a place where you don't know anybody. And we're talking about mostly college graduates here. Somebody who has less education and job skills would be left even more vulnerable if they were away from their support system.