The Shutdown Means Millions Will Go Hungry

I hope that all of my readers, especially if you’ve been blessed with a good income, are keeping track of how the government shutdown is hurting the poor in your community.

I can’t possibly keep track of all the information for all fifty states. Awhile back I reported on what is happening with WIC, a program that provides healthy food and formula for babies and pregnant women. The last information I have about that is that WIC benefits may last until the end of October. After that, it’s every state for itself and I don’t know how that’s going to go. The end of October may also be the end of reliable EBT payments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And if that happens, that will be a catastrophe.

For those who don’t know, let me remind you how the SNAP program works.

SNAP, which is often called “food stamps” by the people who use it, is a government program that provides grocery money for people who make under about 130% of the federal poverty line for their family size ($2888 a month for a family of three, for example). In states with a higher cost of living, there is some wiggle room for people who pay their own bills and rent, but that 130% income limit is pretty uniform across the country.  Nobody gets signed up for SNAP automatically because they’re poor. A poor person has to fill out paperwork, prove their income, pass an interview and so forth to be eligible for SNAP, and then they have to do it all again every so often to prove they still qualify. If they accidentally get a disbursement of SNAP benefits they don’t qualify for, a family might have to pay the government back in cash.  It’s not an easy program to qualify for because of the constant avalanche of paperwork and the strict income limits. It’s hard to get SNAP for more than a couple of months if you don’t have an income at all, unless you are a child in school or can prove you’re disabled. The majority of people who get SNAP benefits already have a job but don’t get paid enough to make ends meet.

If a poor person manages to jump through every single hoop applying for the SNAP program, they’ll be mailed an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card, which is essentially a debit card loaded with about$200-300 per person who lives in the household every month. That money can ONLY be spent on food, and only at the grocery store– not for hot food from a restaurant except for some very narrow exceptions for homeless people in a few states. If you go to Kroger and buy $25 worth of milk and bread and also $10 worth of toothpaste and diapers, the EBT card will pay for $25 of your purchase and you’ll have to pay for the non-food items another way.  If you buy something expensive and run through the money too soon, you still don’t get more until next month. That’s all you can do with food stamps.

SNAP benefits account for only about 2% of the governments annual budget, and of that money, 93% actually gets sent to the EBT cards for poor people to spend. It’s an extremely efficient program. And it benefits local economies, because when a person spends their EBT card at a grocery store, the store gets money in the till right away. That means that grocery stores can afford to stay open in poor neighborhoods where they couldn’t make a profit if people could only spend cash. Many of the people who work in grocery stores would lose their jobs if not for SNAP.

And just now, all the good that SNAP does is in jeopardy.

Because of the government shutdown, it is possible that a whole lot of families will find themselves with no SNAP benefits in the month of November. There’s no more money left to fund the program. And none of us has any idea how long that interruption of benefits will go on.

States are announcing the delay piecemeal. Right now I know that Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia have made a formal announcement.

About twelve percent of the people in the United States depend on SNAP. All of those people are about to get their benefits yanked just before Thanksgiving. They don’t have time to plan ahead. Being poor means it’s usually impossible to plan ahead anyway. And remember, this is happening at a time when food pantries are already strained and losing funding. Food pantries were designed to supplement people’s SNAP benefits in the first place. They can’t possibly take over if is SNAP taken away.

If something doesn’t change fast, millions of people are about to go hungry, just before the holidays. And none of us knows how long this shutdown will go on.

I’m sure some people are going to respond to this with “maybe they should just get a job,” so I’ll remind you that the program is deliberately designed to force people to look for work if they aren’t in school or disabled. Most families on SNAP do have adults who work in the household; their income just isn’t high enough to afford food.

I know somebody else is going to respond with “churches and private charities should feed the poor instead.” I’m not even going to try to convince you that in in a country the size of the United States, we simply need a government safety net paid for with tax dollars to cope with all the poor people instead of individual churches each trying to help, because churches just don’t have the money and bureaucracy to help all of America’s poor. I  won’t even take a moment to remind you that many churches all over the country are ALREADY working as hard as they can with the resources they have, to feed their poor neighbors in order to supplement SNAP benefits.  I’ll just challenge you: if you think that churches should be doing all this work themselves, you and your church had better start doing the work. Feed the poor so that the United States doesn’t need SNAP. I’ll be happy to have my cynicism proven wrong if you can do it.

As a matter of fact I’m challenging all of you, no matter what you believe: do something.

Check on your neighbors. Donate cash or cans or volunteer time to your local food pantry. Invite some less fortunate friends to Sunday dinner. Put a Blessing Box on your property and stock it with tuna and crackers. And I fully realize, that’s not going to fix this. There’s going to be a whole lot of suffering that our volunteer efforts can’t possibly avert, for quite awhile yet, even if this shutdown ends. But we shouldn’t let that dissuade us from what little good we can do.

And just as importantly: talk about this.  Call your friends and tell them how outraged you are. Call your representative in case Congress ever goes back in session again. Write to the newspaper. Share memes on social media. A gigantic public outcry still has a lot of power right now, even though I know a lot of us feel helpless. In fact, I think a giant public outcry might be one of the only tactics we have left.

Millions of Americans are in danger right now.

Everything we do or choose not to do for them still matters, immensely.

Let’s all keep fighting to make this a better country.