Skip to main content

Work requirements and food stamps

 




Oddly, the debt ceiling debate became linked in the mind both of legislators and the public with modifications to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-- i.e. "food stamps."

The literal use of pieces of paper as food "stamps," has gone by the boards and SNAP transactions now involve plastic cards that look a lot like credit or debit cards. Politicians still once in a while spout off about how they saw someone buying (insert name of a luxury food item here) at the grocery store with food stamps and they were indignant because SNAP should be used for basic nutrition, blah blah blah. 

I think the salience of that as an issue has declined in recent years. The plastic cards may have something to do with it. It is difficult to tell whether the person ahead of you in line is using "food stamps" at all. Heck, automated checkout kiosks probably worsen the opportunities for such on-site oversight even further, since you'd literally have to be looking over the shoulder of the person in front of you, not at a beltway going past both of you. 

Anyway: there have been work requirements in place for Food Stamps for a long time. Able-bodied adults 50 years old or younger without dependent children have to work at least 80 hours a month to be eligible. "Working" here means responding to the referrals from the relevant state bureaucrats. 

The debt ceiling has been suspended in part because President Biden agreed to an increase of the age of the applicability of this work requirement from 50 to 54. This is supposed to generate savings because ... whatever. One hopeful possibility: the assignments will help the 51 to 53 year olds make contacts, prove they are good at productive activity, and so learn how to earn enough money not to require public assistance any longer? And so pay taxes off their future payrolls and limit the continuing build-up of debt? Is that it? It sounds like a Rube Goldberg contraption to me. And I am not inclined to be optimistic. 

A more likely route for savings is that some of those newly subject to the work requirement won't comply with it. Which is their choice, of course, but it does mean that powerful (and very well-fed) people in Washington are demanding a contribution from marginal folks who use SNAP. They are saying "if some of you stop using food stamps, we will be able to avoid a catastrophic debt default."The CBO scores the new work requirements as a net money LOSER for Uncle Sam.

This is all purely symbolic from the point of view of the corridors of Congress, but may be of great pragmatic import for some 51 year old folks. You don't have to be a fan of the welfare state (I surely am not), to see something off-kilter here. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more