There are 42m Americans on EBT.
That equates to 12.3% of the population.
EBT is such a popular program because ‘free’ lobster, steak, energy drinks, and candy, are very attractive offers.
If we did away with EBT and set up food centers that only handed out necessities like rice, corn flakes, milk, and ground beef, there would be a line of only 8 people.
Cornflakes are not necessities. They are absolute garbage. People who are this preachy should be a bit more careful with what they say.
We actually used to have this. My parents used the commodity foods program back in the 70s, you’d show up on certain days, and they’d give you a box of food for your family, stuff like cheese, powdered milk, peanut butter, cornmeal, flour, canned vegetables, molasses, powdered eggs, and dry beans. It was reasonably nutritious and would keep you alive. The current WIC program is similar, but it’s vouchers that you can spend on basically the same stuff at the store: milk, cheese, vegetables, beans, bread.
There is no reason at all we can’t go back to the commodity foods program, or make SNAP more like WIC.
It is disturbing that it’s 12% of the population that can’t put food on the table without this program. There are only two possibilities. There’s either a lot of fraud or something is badly wrong with how the economy is organized. Either way, pretending that everything is just right is not the way.
It’s both. There is a lot of fraud, *and* the economy is effed up. I looked it up today, and we are just under the 50th percentile for household income. We are not going hungry, the bills are paid, and we’re never late on the rent… But that’s *only* because we have no debt, we have a robust social support network between family and church, we cook every meal at home, have zero subscription services, we don’t go to doctors unless somebody’s dying, and we do not buy anything new if we can get it secondhand. There are families living on the exact same income who are completely broke and in debt just because they live in a higher-rent area, have a chronic health condition that requires maintenance medication, have their kids in daycare, or did something stupid and totally normal like take out a car loan. That’s all it takes to get from us, to paycheck-to-paycheck and filling in the gaps with credit cards.
We’re right in the middle, and our expenses usually work out to right about even with our take-home pay, and then our tax return gets banked for emergencies, and the occasional used car purchase.
50% of US households are worse off than we are.
I’m actually surprised that it’s only 12%
That makes me extremely curious what the percentage of the population are using Section 8 housing assistance.
My husband is in engineering and we are in a similar position. Our non-tech family think we are rolling because all they see is that we don’t have debt outside of our mortgage (which we only have because we lucked into the bottom of the market in our area). They don’t see me working my tail off to make every dollar count twice. For goodness sake, I hang dry our laundry when it’s not actually raining so that I can use my natural gas budget for canning the produce for the rest of the year. He just got a tiny raise and–yay! We no longer qualify for section 8 housing.
Right?
Our last rental had (luxury!) a garage. I had clothesline strung all across it, and did not use the dryer for over two years while we lived there. I’m… really bummed that I can’t do that at the new house, but still dry as much as possible over railings, plastic chairs, and the folding rack.
And yeah, this is the weirdest sort of financial limbo, where we have no debt, we’re still trying to save for a house downpayment in case the market comes down in our lifetimes… but also we drive the junkiest car in the church parking lot and dress from thrift stores. There is no convenient socioeconomic slot people can mentally sort us into. We’re wealthy because we never get our power turned off. We’re poor because the kids wear secondhand shoes and our cars are 10-20 years old. Wealthy because we can ‘afford’ to forgo a second income and homeschool the kids. Poor because we can’t eat takeout or go on vacations or buy a house. Wealthy because we’re pretty good at being poor? Poor because we don’t prioritize being wealthy over educating our kids?
I keep waiting to meet all the other overeducated thrifty working-class homeschool families.
But I guess we are unicorns?
We’re here! Really! Maybe we don’t have good enough PR?
I told a double income mom at church that we were hoping our 25 year old Camry would last a few more years so that we could make it through a couple of kids learning to drive in a solid car with lower insurance. She looked at me like I had grown two heads. She had really never considered getting her kids a “junker” to minimize the financial exposure that a new driver presents.
I’d never ask, of course, but I miss the new clothes that my in-laws used to give my kids when they had disposable income. Thrift stores are hit or miss on quality. On the positive side, my daughters are learning to sew their own so they can wear what they want and don’t have to wait for me to do it.
I’m very proud that my kid decided completely on her own that her first car will be an old beater to take her to her job where she’ll make money to buy the car of her dreams. Which will be pink, and she’s already found out how much wrapping costs.
I still go to my job in an old beater, happy that the concept of a car payment is alien to me.
I am currently making forays into sewing my own, because quality is such an issue with secondhand… and I’ve reached an age where I know exactly what I want, could be happy wearing the same thing for the rest of my life, and it’s only fashionable once every fifteen years. If I could sew it, in nice durable fabrics…
I am baffled by people who buy their teenagers new cars. That’s a whole other universe with bizarre alien customs. My parents considered it a rite of passage, and an important part of learning to drive, that we learn on an old, decrepit, manual-transmission junk car: we can all drive stick, we can all do basic car maintenance, and we can all diagnose and repair common auto malfunctions and handle roadside emergencies. I plan to do the same with my own kids.
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…and yes, we thrifty almost-poors need a chatgroup, a slick logo, and a mascot or something.
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“There is no convenient socioeconomic slot people can mentally sort us into”
Yeah… I know that feeling. My family was often…. short of funds, but a mantra of my mother was that we. were. not. poor. For her that was a state of mind as much as anything and while we had friends who were poor (and a few who were rich) we never had the…. poor mindset which was marked by a kind of fatalism and short term thinking.
I’m a bit sympathetic since a lot of it is trying to make things less bad (or as one anthropologist put it: work the system to their least disadvantage). But it’s not something I could ever do…
My grandmother (Depression-era childhood, family barely scraped by, ate everything that they could catch) defined “poor” as having little money *and* being helpless and useless. She maintained that as long as you were working, saving, using your resources wisely, and living virtuously (i.e. not drinking, gambling, or womanizing), you were. not. poor. And yeah: “poor is a state of mind” is deeply ingrained.
I expect everybody’s got their own set of definitions to let them maintain some self-respect, even if the hierarchy they are definitely not at the bottom of is invented for the purpose.
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It’s nice to be told so once in a while 😉
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I have never understood why SNAP operates differently from WIC. My daughter was on WIC for a while after her son was born, and I was impressed with how well-designed (for a government program) it was. She could spend it only on real food, not junk. And I’ve never seen anyone throw a public hissy fit because you can’t spend WIC benefits on candy and soda pop and twinkies. If we must have government-run food programs, let’s at least please make them make sense.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because WIC is a smaller program, so they can get away with it being more complicated. You have to go into the office once a month or so in person which cuts down on fraud. When we were signed up, it was a stack of vouchers, with different expiry dates, for different categories of foodstuffs. Like, you can purchase $9 in vegetables, 2 gallons of milk, 2 things from this list of eligible grain products, 1 pound of WIC-approved cheese, that sort of thing. I watched more than one poor lady with an infant in tow nearly in tears at the checkout trying to figure out which vouchers she could use this week, and what she could and could not purchase with them.
So while I like the program in theory, it’s overcomplicated for a lot of the people who need to use it 
IMO the commodity foods program was better in a couple of ways, and we should bring it back: 1) there’s nothing overcomplicated about giving someone a box of food, and 2) we got more bang for our tax buck when the govt was buying commodity foods wholesale from the producers. The way EBT works now, we (the taxpayers) are paying retail instead of wholesale for every purchase. IIRC the main reason that happened was that corporations wanted a cut of that sweet EBT moolah. Now, the excuse is “poor people don’t know how to cook if you give them ingredients”. They used to do cooking classes as well. There’s no reason we have to subsidize Walmart in order to feed the poor.
On having 8 people in line though… naw. Lots of people would still sign up, and there would still be abuse of the program. There was a brisk black market trade in “government cheese” back in the day– it was a swappable, saleable item, from what I hear. But I think a bit of black market cheese would be a lot less harmful on the whole, than whatever we’re doing now.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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