Food Stamp Nation
"The lessons of history ... show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."
These searing words about Depression-era welfare are from Franklin Roosevelt's 1935 State of the Union Address. FDR feared this self-reliant people might come to depend permanently upon government for the necessities of their daily lives. Like narcotics, such a dependency would destroy the fiber and spirit of the nation.
What brings his words to mind is news that 41.8 million Americans are on food stamps, and the White House estimates 43 million will soon be getting food stamps every month.
A seventh of the nation cannot even feed itself.
If you would chart America's decline, this program is a good place to begin. As a harbinger of the Great Society to come, in early 1964, a Food Stamp Act was signed into law by LBJ appropriating $75 million for 350,000 individuals in 40 counties and three U.S. cities.
Yet, no one was starving. There had been no starvation since Jamestown, with such exceptions as the Donner Party caught in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846-47, who took to eating their dead.
The Food Stamp Act became law half a decade after J.K. Galbraith in his best-seller had declared 1950s America to be the world's great Affluent Society.
Yet, when Richard Nixon took office, 3 million Americans were receiving food stamps at a cost of $270 million. Then CBS ran a program featuring a premature baby near death, and told us it was an infant starving to death in rich America. The nation demanded action, and Nixon acted.
By the time he left office in 1974, the food stamp program was feeding 16 million Americans at an annual cost of $4 billion.
Fast forward to 2009. The cost to taxpayers of the U.S. food stamp program hit $56 billion. The number of recipients and cost of the program exploded again last year.
Among the reasons is family disintegration. Forty percent of all children in America are now born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent. Among African-Americans, it is 71 percent.
Food stamps are feeding children abandoned by their own fathers. Taxpayers are taking up the slack for America's deadbeat dads.
Have food stamps made America a healthier nation?
Consider New York City, where 1.7 million people, one in every five in the city, relies on food stamps for daily sustenance.
Obesity rates have soared. Forty percent of all the kids in city public schools from kindergarten through eighth grade are overweight or obese.
Among poor kids, whose families depend on food stamps, the percentages are far higher. Mothers of poor kids use food stamps to buy them sugar-heavy soda pop, candy and junk food.
Yet Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to the Department of Agriculture that recipients not be allowed to use food stamps to buy sugar-rich soft drinks has run into resistance.
"The world might be better ... if people limited their purchases of sugared beverages," said George Hacker of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "However, there are a great many ethical reasons to consider why one would not stigmatize people on food stamps."
The Department of Agriculture in 2004 denied a request by Minnesota that would have disallowed food stamp recipients from using them for junk food. To grant the request, said the department, would "perpetuate the myth" that food stamps users make poor shopping decisions.
But is that a myth or an inconvenient truth?
What a changed country we have become in our expectations of ourselves. A less affluent America survived a Depression and world war without anything like the 99 weeks of unemployment insurance, welfare payments, earned income tax credits, food stamps, rent supplements, day care, school lunches and Medicaid we have today.
Public or private charity were thought necessary, but were almost always to be temporary until a breadwinner could find work or a family could get back on its feet. The expectation was that almost everyone, with hard work and by keeping the nose to the grindstone, could make his or her own way in this free society. No more.
What we have accepted today is a vast permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by the rest of society—fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer's expense for their entire lives. We have a new division in America: those who pay a double fare, and those who forever ride free.
We Americans are not only not the people our parents were, we are not the people we were. FDR was right about what would happen to the country if we did not get off the narcotic of welfare.
America has regrettably already undergone that "spiritual and moral disintegration, fundamentally destructive to the national fiber."
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Perhaps the Federal Government should stop advertising the food coupon program. Just a thought ...
I find it amazing that "poor" children always seem to find money for cell phones. Maybe there's an unadvertised government program subsidizing those as well.
Draw it out to the logical conclusion, Pat: 4 decades of the "Great Society" have hallowed out the middle class, promoted obesity and a wide decline in standards of every sort, destroyed restraints on vulgarity in language, dress, comportment, and taste, promoted a degraded and degrading multiculturalism, given rise to the reign of the cost-benefit analysis and the economist, and undermined the basis for neighborly human relationships. Government has been a willing foot-soldier in promoting cultural debasement and disregard for the beautiful and the worthy. In the end, it's a war of values.
The interesting thing about the "those who pay double fare and those who ride free" is that it is not a rich and poor division.
Sometimes, it could even be the opposite. It is urban people in the richest cities of any nation who get the most welfare, while more rural folk who could be getting back much less from the state than they pay.
To grant the request, said the department, would “perpetuate the myth” that food stamps users make poor shopping decisions.
But is that a myth or an inconvenient truth?
I agree with Pat about the dole and its corrosive influence on a people and a culture but here is another inconvenient truth for the party of less government and more war:
The cost to taxpayers of the U.S. food stamp program hit $56 billion in 2009. The cost of the Iraq War hit $1trillion and rising in the same year. The refrain of this same old tired song is "On to Iran!"
What is truly sad about this dismal state of affairs are that there are people in genuine need who still largely fall through the cracks of the system, and others who get some help and really need it. When I was working in a city that shall remain nameless, I encountered the extreme difficulty of getting help to people who really needed it, when the non-profit organizations and governmental entities were simply too lazy to do anything about them. Luckily for one couple who contacted us in city hall, the much maligned Illinois Township governments were able to get them enough assistance to survive. If you are too poor to afford a phone, or a car, and live in a rural area, you are simply ignored by those who are tasked and paid to help the needy. In some other cases, we managed to bend the rules a bit to save some other unfortunate people. My experience is that too often those needing a safety net are pushed out of the way by people using the system as a hammock.
I know of other people who have significant debilitating illnesses, and cannot work despite really wanting to do so. Disability programs and Medicaid are essential for their continued survival. One would think that the churches would step up and help in these cases, but apparently their situation does not conform to established ideas on Social Justice.
Why would Americans need food stamps? Moral decline? Maybe. Or maybe this (courtesy of Dr. Paul Craig Roberts):
"The latest jobs report issued today shows that America’s transformation into a Third World economy continues. The economy lost 95,000 jobs in September, mainly due to cuts in local education and federal employment. Part of the loss of 159,000 government jobs was offset by 64,000 new private sector jobs.
Where are the new jobs? They are in non-tradable lowly paid domestic services: 32,000 were in health care and social services, and 33,900 were in food services and drinking places."
I think we need to be careful about the conclusions being made too hastily from cited statistics.
Firstly, those are just the marginal changes of people coming in and out of the workplace for just one month of September. One month figure - even though a man out of work from one job optimistically finds another within two to three months, and realistically in four to five months. Nobody depletes his savings in such a period that he can't afford food or drink. My father was out of work for a year and my mother's business in a very lean time in the same period, and we lived off our savings in the exact same way as before. Non-essentials or luxuries, we didn't get, although we never got much of those things before either.
Secondly, waiting tables and flipping burgers is never a permanent situation, and McDonalds and Starbucks all have 100% employee turnover annually in their rolls. Isn't it a good thing that temporary jobs are available for those who need them in the intermediary period? To say America is becoming Third World just because a temporary wage job is taken is a little faulty, because even temporary wage jobs are not available in the Third World.
Thirdly, the reports of unemployment need to be considered in terms of actual flesh-and-blood-people. People move out of the workforce and then move back in to the workforce, just as another set moves out of the workforce before they move back in to the workforce. And so on. It's a shift of people between jobs while companies attempt to turn their capital deficit into a capital surplus that can employ people. And if capital is depleted, what jobs are left? The misleading conclusions of Dr. Roberts assumes that the 159,000 teachers who lost their jobs have now become burger flippers from among 64,000 of them. Also, government employees losing jobs and private sector employees losing jobs is a whole different ballpark. Government employees don't have specific education for specific work, and don't have marketable skills. Their loss of jobs is not just a cyclical problem, but a structural problem, and most government employees can only find more work as government employees.
Dr. Roberts' faulty use of statistics is frequently criticised by many who care to patiently read through his columns. Once, he said that real incomes have not risen across the 20th century. Which is a meaningless claim by itself. We didn't have treated water supplies, family budget automobiles, airplanes, highways, inkjet printers, industrial processed meat,.etc in 1930, so there's no comparison between prices of goods today and back then, because people didn't use the same goods. The consumer price index attempts to separate change in price levels from change in goods consumed, which is why it either considers what would be the cost of today's goods basket with yesterday's prices or what would be the cost of yesterday's goods basket with today's prices. That comparison is only meaningful on a year-to-year basis, but not from 1930 to now. I apologize for a slightly less than flattering remark, but Dr. Roberts is not as sharp and bright as he used to be in the 1990s, and there are several people who attest to the same; a few who once saw him speak in a seminar found his statements to be confusing and incoherent. And then there are his troubling claims about conspiracies, with not enough evidence to back them up properly. As a source, he is not the strongest person to cite.
He was citing statistics from somebody else's (The Bureau of Labor Statistics) report, not his. You don't have to be the sharpest knife in the block to see the long-term decline of the American economy. The jobs that people used to move in and out of no longer exist (in America).
I was only talking about his interpretation of those statistics, not the statistics themselves.
The initial point was about food stamps however - obesity is more common in First World nations due to poor quality of food available to the poor, and the massive overproduction of food leads to large scale destruction of what is produced. Americans have not reached such levels of poverty that they can't buy food; South Korea had a far worse and longer financial crisis than America has now, and nobody fell hungry there.
Do we really believe that most of those unemployed in the US are not even able to afford food? It's not that hunger can't exist for them, of course it can. Except the 40 million people using food stamps include many people who have automobiles and homes that they own. It's not the fact that they can't afford food, but rather prefer to spend less of money they have on food. Why else did Reagan mention people who buy steaks with food stamps and why else do we hear of young men buying Playstations and Xboxes when you'd think they'd barely afford food and drink with their earnings?
To quote Clyde Wilson: "Call me simple, but I don't understand - how come the government spends billions on food and says hunger is still a problem."
@9: PCR is well-known for his thunder, and if his conclusions are not always correct he is certainly good at drawing attention to problems that many comfy folk would like to wish out of existence. (While I'm on the topic, if I may, I recommend Martin Hutchinson, another bearish economic/financial analyst, whose English wit and mostly well-reasoned spirits I find highly effective in his assessments of who is responsible for the bads of our day and where things might lead.)
You are correct that no one in America is in danger of starving, except for anorexics. But their treatment is of a different nature. The kernel of truth in PCR's analysis, though, is that standards of living in the U.S. are on a long-haul decline. The same is true of other countries. We will certainly not revert to anything like the running urban scandals of the 19th century, but the decline is worrisome all the same, particularly in terms of it's political implications in the age of mass opinion: will the real culprits gets their blame and due or will we descend into a nasty new era of polemics and false promises?
Also, it is not always true that five months is enough to get back on one's feet. In many cases yes, but I know people on both sides of the ocean who have been looking for many more months. As for intermediary jobs, they are good to a degree, but the employers who furnish them have contributed to a cheapening of the quality of society, as you hint by your citation of figures of obesity. It's a part of a system that is overall immoral. If anyone thinks that is too extreme, consider that 1 youth in 10 attempts suicide here in Europe at some point. We cannot simply blame this on individual weakness: the system that encourages people to be weak must be condoned as well. In this PCR, whatever his lack of rigor, is no disappointment. It is not enough to call for the quick band-aids of budget cuts or cognitivo-behavioral therapy, as do respectively "conservatives" and socialists in the contemporary political scene. They themselves should be fired, as only a start.
We cannot simply blame this on individual weakness: the system that encourages people to be weak must be condoned as well.
CONDEMNED, not condoned. Definitely NOT condoned.
The immigration problem is a large part of the blame for this condition. What needs attention, I think, is not the freeloaders. but the struggling working poor. In what used to be a society good for the common man, there are millions who are actually working and overworking, barely keeping their heads above water, and seeing no hope for their children to progress. The system is set up now to reward the rich, the clever but unscrupulous, and the useless.
@12: No doubt you are right, but it is important not to be simplistic. I spent a couple of summers working with my father or in a factory near his (he's an engineer) and most of the white American line workers had illegitimate children, sometimes from several women. In fact, I would say the rates among that socioeconomic stratum approached those cited by Buchanan for blacks. There is clearly a more general crisis of ethic in American society--in or out of work--and there is plenty of blame to go around.
Illegal immigration is an attractive target because deporting those would, all by itself, alter the demographic balance and buy a bit of time so far as the majority-plurality tipping is concerned. And of course there is plenty of justification for following such a course with a clean conscience. But affterward, the challenge would be to get the whole country to accept a repeal of the 1965 act. In the current political climate that would be a huge stretch.
I would point out that since the "civil rights revolution," i.e., forced integration, the white social decay has moved steadily toward the black situation. As was predicted by critics of the revolution.
There was a time when bright young men from the white working class could rise into the professions. Affirmative action and the progressive impoverishment of the working class have put a stop to that. Along with immigration---the medical professions are now heavily occupied by Asians, for instance.
Only from the white AMERICAN working class can we hope to have sound leaders of society in the future. They are the seed corn.
Dr. Wilson is right, but no one else is saying anything like it except perhaps Elizabeth Wright. I note, by the way, that the "Party of Five Consecutive Wives"--the Newt Gingrich Republicans--have now launched an attack on the "Party of Food Stamps." It's going to be an interesting election, morality and integrity versus welfare queens.
. Dr. Wilson writes,
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"What needs attention, I think, is not the freeloaders. but the struggling working poor. In what used to be a society good for the common man, there are millions who are actually working and overworking, barely keeping their heads above water, and seeing no hope for their children to progress. The system is set up now to reward the rich, the clever but unscrupulous, and the useless."
Dr. Wilson is on the right track: when a sawbuck barely stretches to cover a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and a dozen eggs, working stiffs are suffering.
Here is some relevant data from measuringworth.com: in 1974, the year my earnings peaked as a car mechanic, (before I got bright ideas like wandering the world and going back to school) the average hourly wage for production workers (skilled labor) was $5.44. Measured by its share of per capita GDP, this would require an hourly wage of $36 in 2009 money, while the average wage had in fact risen only to $26.15. By that measure, even someone with a good job has lost over 25% of his economic power. This of course does not take into account the increasing scarcity of these jobs, the shifting of many of them that remain to a part-time basis, etc.
@12 Dr Wilson
The system is set up now to reward the rich, the clever but unscrupulous, and the useless.
I've quoted this line half a dozen times today. Thanks for making me sound smart. I owe you a few shots of Virginia Geltleman. I hope to meet you in Charleston next month.
The excoriation of "Food Stamp Nation" is all well and good, but it's "Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid Nation" that is at the root of most of our current economic woes. What, pray tell, does Mr. Buchanan have to say about that ??