Food Stamps Back in Fashion

According to the NYTs, “One in eight Americans now receives food stamps, including one in four children.” For at least six million Americans, food stamps are the only reported source of income. Food stamp enrollment is so high in part because food is a relatively low-controversy handout and in part because, although states administer the program, the federal government picks up the entire tab.

In the article, a Republican Congressman (not from Dalton, I checked) sang the old refrain: “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”

An article that ran the day before the food stamps piece described rising homelessness among New York City’s population of mostly undocumented day laborers. (About 75% of day laborers nationally are undocumented workers.) These guys do not collect any entitlements. They will take any job. But they’ve stopped sending remittances, and they’ve started moving out onto the street. To me, that’s a testament to the current scarcity of jobs that resonates even more than the stark unemployment figures. In this (slumping and/or capitalist) economy, a portion of the population will be unable to support itself. That will include a large number of documented people who have no desire to live on the government dole.

I’ll conclude even more didactically. The degree and mechanisms of support a society offers to its most vulnerable, down-and-out citizens constitute decisions that involve calculations of both efficacy and ethics.