Also on CNN: food stamp “hardships”

Last updated on: November 1, 2013 at 3:46 pm by Jane the Actuary

Also on CNN: food stamp “hardships” 2013-11-01T15:46:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Beginning today, the temporary increase in food stamp benefits ends, causing recipients to see “cuts” in their benefits. (“Cuts” in quotes because of this game that politicians play about what’s temporary vs. permanent.) And CNN is profiling families who will face hardship — or, should I say, “hardship.”

The first family receives $800 a month. The head of the household is 55, and disabled on account of emphysema (due, the story says, to a lifetime of bartending in smoke-filled rooms, not smoking herself), though she’s only just now beginning to collect disability benefits. She has two daughters, one pregnant, one with an infant, neither of whom can work, and had to pawn her wedding ring, just barely able to retrieve it before it would have been sold. They eat a lot of rice-based meals, and rarely have meat, and, even so, the benefits don’t last the whole month, sending her to food pantries.

Is this the best CNN could come up with? The story says there are four adults in the household, but the fourth is left unmentioned — her husband? The boyfriend or even spouse of one of her daughters? One suspects that CNN ignored this person because his story is less sympathetic in some way — a drug user or alcoholic or just not even trying to find a job? Of course, the story also doesn’t mention the age of the grandson, just identifying the daughter as a “new mom” — but it seems improbable that the child is truly so young that the mom simply can’t be looking for a job (especially since the family’s portrayed as having been on food stamps for a long time).

Actually, it says that the family consists of ” four adults and a grandson who live with [her]” so we may even be talking about two extra, unidentified adults.

The second family consists of a family of three where the 54-year-old father, who formerly earned $25 an hour, was unemployed for a long period, and recently returned to work with a job paying $12 an hour. In order to avoid losing benefits, including Medicaid, he asked his employer to reduce his pay to $9 an hour. Now, granted, this certainly exposes a major flaw in how our welfare system works, for it to be to this family’s advantage to earn less and get more benefits (and, incidentally, as I’ve said before, the basic concept of the graduated subsidies that Obamacare provides is perfectly reasonable, just implemented very poorly). But there’s clearly more to the story here, too, given that there are two other people in the family, and, though neither of the others are described, it seems unlikely that they’re both children. At the same time, they sacrificed $3/hour because the cost of a health insurance policy would have been $900 per month; did one or more of the family members have a health condition that meant that going to free clinics and taking their chances wasn’t an acceptable alternative to Medicaid? Inquiring minds want to know.

What it comes down to is this: I’m sure there are plenty of truly hard cases out there, and I would genuinely be interested in an article reporting on the finances for a typical food stamp family — how much they spend on food, and how diligently they economize, how much, in the food stamp calculations, they’re, in principle, supposed to be paying out of their own pocket, etc. But so often, when you read about these stories, it’s very sloppy, unconvincing reporting.

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