The Food Stamp calculator

It’s not hard to find, actually.  Pretty much the first hit on “Illinois food stamps” is the food stamp calculator.

Here are some numbers:

For a family of 5 with no income at all, and no assets, the benefit is $793/month or $183/week, or $1.75 per person per meal (giving breakfast, lunch and dinner equal weight).

With $1300/month income ($7.50/hr, 40 hours per week), the benefit drops to $676/mth or $156/week.

With $2,600/month income and $500/month child care (e.g., two minimum wage parents with a comparatively cheap childcare solution), the benefit drops to $472/month, or $109/week.

From there, it’s a pretty steep drop, to $151/month with $2,900/month income.

What do I think of this?

First of all, a meaningful “food stamp challenge” would be, not to buy dinner for $1.75, but to genuinely track grocery receipts over a longer period of time (say, a month or two), to factor in buying more in one week, when there are sales, and less in another week, subtract non-food (paper towels, etc), and adjust for meals eaten out of the home.

Second, $183 a week is a bad shopping week for my family of five, when I’ve stocked up, maybe bought cat food or a big package of toilet paper.   To be sure, my youngest son is only 6 and has a small appetite, and my husband tends to buy lunch at the cafeteria, and we generally go out to dinner once or twice on the weekends, so I’d be curious about how the numbers would work out for us.  (At the same time, a food stamp family’s children will be getting their meals provided at school, where I pack lunches for the boys.)

Third, I strongly suspect that people getting the full food stamp benefit do not have a problem, and are the ones with excess that they may be selling for profit, especially if they have children getting WIC, school lunches, etc.  My hunch is that the food pantry visitors, the ones who exhaust their benefits two or three weeks into the month, are those who have income and receive only partial benefits (that is, people closer to the $100/week), but have enough other expenses that they nonetheless perceive food stamps as their full (not “supplemental” as the name implies) source of food, as the rest of their income is spent on housing, transportation, etc.; or are those where one or more members of the household are ineligible by being non-citizens, but the family tries to make the food stamp benefit for the eligible family members stretch for the whole family.