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Selling Food Stamps for Kid’s Shoes

Cara

I’m incredibly far behind on the recent Colorlines investigation into the practice of poor U.S. families selling food stamps for cash. But now that I’ve finally gotten to reading it, it’s certainly worth the time to bring it to the attention to those of you who have not.

Due to the welfare “reform” of the 90s, which placed time limits on how long one can receive cash welfare assistance, a substantial and growing number of families who have already used what the government is willing to supply literally have nothing else left. More still simply do not have enough for what they need. In order to buy basic necessities (soap, toilet paper, laundry detergent) and pay bills, they’re forced to illegally sell their food stamps as their only option for making ends meet. According to the article, not only were a staggering one in eight Americans (one in four among children) using food stamps in November, but about 6 million Americans receiving food stamps say that they have no other income.

And yes, women, and particularly women of color, are by far suffering the greatest impact:

Blacks, Latinas and Asians nationwide are about two times more likely than whites to have been pushed off cash assistance as a result of time limits, rather than for another reason, according to a ColorLines analysis of 2008 data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. Because women-led families make up 90 percent of TANF cases that have been closed, women of color like Eva are now more likely to be living without access to any cash assistance.

For many people then, food stamps are all they have.

Not discussed in the article is the conundrum of the legions in the U.S.’s bootstraps obsessed culture who will insist that women selling food stamps is not a sign that our system is broken, failing desperately, inherently cruel, and on the brink of collapse, but evidence that those receiving any assistance at all are “scamming” the system, and do not even deserve the scraps the middle-class is willing to throw their way. After all, this situation didn’t occur by accident; it was predicted and chosen.

But what the Colorlines investigation does do is follow the life of a woman, called Eva, who is unable to find a job, and must both sell her food stamps and run up a tab at her local store every month in order to ensure that she and her daughters can survive. It’s also the result of interviews with several other women in similar circumstances, as well as service providers. If you haven’t read it yet, go do that.

via Racialicious

46 thoughts on Selling Food Stamps for Kid’s Shoes

  1. This makes me really, really furious.

    Are there any charities people particularly recommend for addressing this particular problem? Since government redistribution has failed, as someone who does have some money, I see no choice but to try to be a drop in the bucket for other people…

  2. I think it can’t be psychologically healthy for people to be on welfare for that long. There’s something soul-killing about getting handouts for doing nothing. Now I don’t know what is the time limit after which cash assistance ends, but I don’t see why that idea is bad in itself. At some point, people should work to meet their needs or learn to do without.

    1. Seriously, Sonia? You’re playing the “people on welfare just don’t want to work and just aren’t trying hard enough” card? Also, they should learn to do without? Yes, those greedy poor people really should learn that they don’t need heat in their homes, or soap with which to bathe themselves, or toilet paper with which to wipe their asses! After all, these are my tax dollars we’re talking about! If people can’t eventually learn how to live off of the minimum wage with no outside assistance, then dammit, let ’em live on the streets!

      Did you just fail to read the linked article, or did you go through it all and still decide that women like Eva aren’t really human?

  3. @Sonia:
    I kind of agree with you that I think that it’s got to be tough on those on welfare to not be able to work due to being unable to get a job due to racism or any number of reasons. Which is why I don’t think people are abusing the system in the numbers most people believe.
    But I think you’re totally wrong about them having to ‘do without’. They’re already doing without a lot of things. They’re already doing without the comforts, like cable tv or internet or whatever. You’re asking them to do without the necessities (don’t worry, so is the government). Like childrens’ shoes. Or toilet paper. You can’t spend food stamps on toilet paper.
    That would be an eye-opening premise for a Survivor series. Survivor: Food Stamp edition. Oh, wait, that’s just dehumanizing and insulting, sorry.

  4. i’d also challenge the assumption that living off welfare is “doing nothing.” having observed numerous folks struggle to provide the endless documentation and jump through the often arbitrary hoops created by welfare administrations, staying eligible for continued welfare benefits often seems like a full time job. add that to trying to get a landlord to comply with health and safety code requirements, figuring out how to use benefits to meet your actual needs (like exchanging food stamps for shoes, or figuring out how to pay for diapers which aren’t covered by benefits for newborns/infants), navigating yourself and your children using exclusively public transportation … that’s more than a full time job. the stereotype of women lying around their apartments eating bonbons purchased with welfare benefits is nothing more than a right wing talking point to further dehumanize and punish the poor.

  5. @Croobie – ooh, you have hit on my favorite idea for a reality show series: Show Us Your Bootstraps! wherein CEOs or other rich people are placed in downtown LA skid row, sans credit cards, bank cards, cash, cell phones, ID, or fancy clothes. they get a month to pull themselves up by their bootstraps! 🙂

  6. The article was quite long so I admit I only read the first few pages. It indicated that Eva, dropped her education once she started having kids in the 10th grade. Now, if you have little in the way of skills, and aren’t financially secure why exactly the hurry to have kids? Its not like her biological clock was running out or something. It appears that a lot of her present situation has to do with that single decision. I am not saying she’s living high or anything like that, in fact, she is in a lot of pain, but I don’t understand the idea that someone else is obligated to support you in perpetuity just because you happen to be around.

    1. Well Sonia, this is a social justice blog. If you don’t think that every person is deserving of basic human rights — like food, shelter, medical care, the right to not be forced into using contraception or having an abortion, wtf?, etc. — then I’m not sure how it is that you ended up here. But your right-wing talking points are all over the internet. I’m sure you can find plenty of other places where people will not be revolted by them. But on a farewell note here’s a book recommendation for you. It might help you to actually know what you’re talking about, instead of making false, prejudiced assumptions.

      /but poor people really ARE to blame for their own poverty! derail

  7. @abbyjean

    I think it would be more interesting to have spoiled rich libertarian kids on the show 😛

  8. Now, if you have little in the way of skills, and aren’t financially secure why exactly the hurry to have kids?

    Because, of course, the average impoverished woman who waits until she’s 27 to have kids will be in great financial shape to do so.

    Systemic poverty, of the kind where you can work two jobs and never get ahead, where going to college was never an option offered to you or anyone you know, where the government devoted exactly no resources when you were a kid into making sure you had a quality education… does not get better with age.

    Eva is probably healthier, stronger and better able to deal with the various injustices life throws at her because she got her pregnancies out of the way when she was a teen. If she had waited until now, she wouldn’t be any more financially secure and she could probably have drawn on fewer family resources. Unless you want to say that poor people should never be permitted to have kids, the argument that she should have waited until she was older doesn’t hold water; waiting until you are older and more successful is a great strategy for the middle class, who capitalize on a decent primary school education and turn it into an opportunity to go to college, get a career and get ahead in that career, but if your best job in your life ever is going to be working as a cashier, it’s no disadvantage to you to have your kids when you’re young.

    That being said, I too think the welfare system is broken… the problem is that we are failing these people *everywhere*, from their childhoods through their old age, that the capitalist system doesn’t pay people a living wage if they didn’t have the money or resources to get a college education, and fixing this problem by throwing money at the people it affects is kind of a band-aid. I mean, it’s a necessary band-aid; if you’re bleeding to death by all means put on a band-aid until such time as society can figure out how to do surgery to stitch up the giant sucking wound in your chest, but I feel that making the entire problem be about “welfare” demonizes the people who need the welfare because the system, as it exists, failed them horribly everywhere along the way. But solving the systemic problems is hard, and people need things right now, so… I guess it’s necessary.

  9. I don’t understand the idea that someone else is obligated to support you in perpetuity just because you happen to be around.

    translation: “human, schmuman, let ’em die in the street.”

  11. Why hasn’t Sonia’s poor-shaming and slut-shaming been banned?? On a feminist blog of all places. Jesus fucking god.

    1. Kristin, I guess that I was unintentionally being too subtle: when I bid farewell to a commenter who has not announced their own departure, it’s because they’re not allowed to comment here, anymore.

  13. In context of the Republicans howling that using the reconciliation process to forward major legislation — to wit, health insurance reform(ish) — is ZOMFG COMPLETLY UNPRECEDENTED!!!!1!!!eleventy!!: During Clinton’s first term the Republicans enjoyed a majority in the the House and a majority, but not a cloture-proof majority, in the Senate. Welfare Destruction was part of their Contract with America. They used the reconciliation process to get it passed, avoiding filibuster threats and cloture votes altogether.

    Scheißkopfen.

  14. I am told repeatedly, and in no uncertain terms that if I sell my food stamps I may never be eligible for them ever again. And this goes for everyone else, too.

    1. Kevin, I believe that those who sell their food stamps because they do not have any other income are well aware of the illegality, and the risks. There’s a reason why Eva is not the subject of the article’s real name, and other identities were also concealed. But that’s what having no other options means: you don’t have any other options.

  15. I think its disingenious to argue that nobody on welfare abuses the system- because some do. At what point would there be a cut off point or how high should taxes be raised to ensure that EVERYONE who needs the assistance gets the assistance until THEY (the persons recieving assistance) decide they no longer need it?

    In Washington, DC alone there are a substantial amount of people on welfare and many of them have had assistance for very long periods of time. No one but them really knows how they use their money or whether or not the benefits received are being abused or simply being used to their greatest advantage.

    Something has to change and I think free education beyond high school is a GREAT start, employing low-income people within the government (federal and local) would be a great start, free or reduced childcare for low income people would be a great start.

    1. I think its disingenious to argue that nobody on welfare abuses the system- because some do.

      No one argued it. If anything, what was argued is that the cases where the system is abused are exaggerated, and the majority of cases where people who need assistance aren’t getting it are glossed over. Or, perhaps, that it’s an ugly thing that we’re more worried about the fact that some people might be getting several hundred dollars a month that they don’t need, than the fact that there are millions of families in the U.S. at risk of homelessness. A really, really ugly thing, in fact.

      And yes, absolutely, indeed, and co-sign times a million to everyone who points out the simple fact that welfare itself is not enough, and that structural change is needed to get at the root of poverty.

      1. I think its disingenious to argue that nobody on welfare abuses the system- because some do.

        OK but seriously, WHO ARGUED THIS? Every discussion of welfare we’ve ever had on this blog turns back to this argument — some dingbat goes, “But SOME PEOPLE ABUSE THE SYSTEM!!!!”

        Ok. Guess what? Human beings abuse any system ever invented. Someone, somewhere will abuse a system. Humans are very crafty! We figure out right quick how to abuse things. No matter what the system, someone will abuse it, while most people will play by the rules and do their best. But that isn’t an argument against having a social welfare system to make sure that people don’t starve, you know?

        And as others have said: Have you ever been on welfare? Have you ever even talked with someone about what it’s like to be on welfare? Because it’s no cake walk. We’re talking about a pittance — the very basics, not enough to support a family — that you want taken away because someone, somewhere, “abuses the system”? Someone, somewhere who isn’t getting much of anything, whose “abuse” is, in the grand scheme of things, peanuts? This is what we’re worried about?

  16. Welfare has to do more than just supply food and cash assistance. Yes, that’s part of it, but it also needs to address education, employment, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and so forth.

    The problem resides in the fact that the United States is a “sink-or-swim” society. Put simply: if you can’t take care of yourself, then you’re ass-out, and when that happens the government–and most everyone else–won’t give a fuck.

    More money and a new way of conceiving what welfare can and can’t do for people is what we need. But it will never happen.

  17. Thanks for blogging this, Cara; it’s a great article that deserves the exposure.

    There’s no way to describe the sheer blank desperate dread when one calculates the gap—and there’s always a gap if you’re on social assistance—between income and expenses. Tiny changes (a worn-out shoe, a bus fare hike) can unbalance the whole thing. And when something big happens like, say, welfare “reform”, it’s a catastrophe that affects an entire population.

    (I just got done reading Pat Capponi’s Dispatches from the Poverty Line, charting the effects of widespread social services cutbacks some five years ago in my province. It’s heartbreakingly similar.)

  18. What kills me is that it’s illegal. As someone who did the food stamps thing for a long time, this was one of the tools I had that kept us above water. And now that the rust belt’s job market has taken a dive, I know more and more people doing this to stay afloat. You do what you have with what you’ve got.

  19. Thank you for blogging about this. The linked article was heavy stuff, but totally worth reading.

    I don’t have the answers, but I know demonizing people just trying to get by isn’t it.

  20. @Cara: the “Some people abuse welfare” argument reminds me of how everyone always knows someone who is receiving SSI or SSDI and doesn’t deserve it.

    In the bit of reading I’ve done on welfare fraud, the most common kind of fraud is unreported income, so that people can stay under the asset limits.

    I also don’t think people realize how low those asset limits are and that as far as I know,. they haven’t been adjusted in quite some time.

  21. The following is (sigh) an extremely provincially USian musing on poverty and the politics of poverty. My apologies to those from nations who have done better than us at ensuring that most people have at least something. We suck. And we like to talk about how much we suck.

    There’s also not much awareness of how broken the systems for measuring poverty are. And they are deliberately broken; a large underestimation of the true scale of poverty in the US serves a lot of interests. Existing programs would be required, by statute, to expand access to serve more people if the poverty level were recognized to be higher than it actually is. If more voters recognized that they were actually among the poor certain people keep railing against it might have adverse effects on those people’s election prospects, especially in the rural areas they tend to represent. There would likely be more pressure for programs like universal health care. We might even be able to get rid of the horrifyingly abusive nightmare that is Temporary Aid to Needy Families.

    TANF kills people and those fuckers still spout that Cadillac welfare-queen line that was bullshit back when Reagan was saying it and people could actually get welfare that kind of helped without having to work (not attend school or work training: work) thirty hours every week and do the full-time being a poor person work abbyjean mentioned above. If you have to pay someone to look after your kids, there goes your your paycheck or your TANF check. So what good is it doing you? If the economy has gone to shit and you get laid off, they cut off your TANF. You can get five years of TANF total, ever, over your whole life. Your kids live longer than five years? Tough shit. Should have thought of that before you went and chose to be poor and get pregnant, you [racism, sexism, classism, and shaming elided].

    Sigh. Sorry. It’s a thing with me. I was working in public housing and social service delivery when welfare was gutted and it hurt so many people so very badly. Just so Republican politicians — wealthy white men, most of them — could brag about how they’d helped poor people by giving them an incentive to get off welfare and work. It’s so hateful. It makes me feel like I’m going to cry any time I think about it.

    I don’t understand the idea that someone else is obligated to support you in perpetuity just because you happen to be around.

    translation: “human, schmuman, let ’em die in the street.”

    “Are there no prisons? Are there no poorhouses?”

  22. Funny how in these types of articles nobody EVER mentions corporate welfare fraud, or politicians who live on pork bellies and hand-outs just for ‘existing” or the fact that 14 years after ‘welfare reform’ NOTHING has gotten better for poor people. There’s just many many more of us than there used to be. You’d think at some point there would be less finger-pointing and smug blaming, but nope, still hasn’t happened.

    Yeah, women sell food stamps for the necessities. Before we had cards (remember the days of actual paper stamps?) we kept the change from our stamps in a jar or a can and used the change for little things like toilet paper and dish soup. Now we sell them. So the fuck what? Politicians sell votes too. Where’s the outraged comments and articles about that?

    Unless you are fortunate enough to be on a fixed, government guaranteed income you might find yourselves in exactly the same situation. And any one of you who thinks that you are better than that because you didn’t have a teenage pregnancy, or because you went to college, or you worked blue collar jobs from the time you were old enough, just might wake up with a little thing called poverty breathing down your lily-white necks.

    Get over yourselves. Shit happens to all of us and in the end mothers do whatever it takes to get the job done. If that means selling your food stamps, selling weed, selling pussy–all that matters at the end of the day is that the kids are fed.

  23. Oh and might I ask, oh so politely, where is the father-blaming in all of this? You know, the guys who helped conceive those children? I know things are rough all over but it takes two to tango. Women don’t get pregnant and poor all on their own.

  24. the fact that 14 years after ‘welfare reform’ NOTHING has gotten better for poor people. There’s just many many more of us than there used to be. You’d think at some point there would be less finger-pointing and smug blaming, but nope, still hasn’t happened.

    That’s because neither welfare nor ‘welfare reform’ is intended to improve people’s lives in the long run. They are fine in the short term for someone landing in a hard spot and bridging them between jobs but as a solution to long term unemployment it is horrible. Food stamps are largely a sop to agricultural states and they lobby for the continuation and expansion of the program.

    What’s needed are good jobs, employee rights (right not to be fired for an occasional absence for a sick kid, a reasonable notice period before you are fired or let go, severance pay, etc.), better education, better child care, and so on. Getting people hooked to welfare is ultimately community destroying.

  25. Rereading comment #19 more carefully, much becomes clear. Azalea has clearly been getting ou talking points from the conservative hate-on-the-poor-folk crowd. We’ve got the tax scare. (Affluent USians are some of the most undertaxed people in the world and whine more than anyone about the taxes they do pay. Meanwhile more of the tax burden is continually shifted onto those least able to afford it as graduated income taxes and property taxes are reduced while sales and use taxes increase, government fees and charges increase, and roads don’t get built without them being public/private partnerships which means they’re toll roads.) We’ve got vague and false assertions about people on welfare. (Welfare — in the form of cash assistance — ended years ago. There’s food assistance and utility assistance and if you are very, very, very lucky you can get rent assistance.) There’s the implication that people are using food stamps to buy PlayStations and heroin.

    And finally there’s the assertion that if poor people just tried harder they’d be able to bootstrap themselves from poverty. The acknowledgement that child care is needed is nice, and rare. But even if we had an education system that delivered a quality fundamental education to everyone, which we don’t, it still places the responsibility for poverty and for ending it on individual poor people and not on the structures that create their poverty and the people who benefit from it.

  26. I hate it when people belittle those who are on any sort of support as if that means they are doing everything wrong with their lives. My mom got an Assoc. degree in nursing and married my dad before having me. After a while, the pay for her job didn’t increase enough with respect to the cost of living, so she went back to college while still working and my dad, who has disabilities and was solely a stay at home parent before this, got a nighttime job. Guess what, the job made his problems worse, so he couldn’t keep working and he needed shoulder and bowel surgery. We were on food stamps for a while after that, and it was difficult even with mom’s salary. I couldn’t imagine being on them without other income, and there’s no way I’m going to unnecessarily criticize someone by pretending that food assistance is some sort of luxury that we should yank out from underneath people.

  27. Cara, thank you for that book recommendation. I’m going to buy it ASAP — partially so I have facts at my command to counter the usual Repub talking points about “bootstraps” etc.

  28. The acknowledgement that child care is needed is nice, and rare. But even if we had an education system that delivered a quality fundamental education to everyone, which we don’t, it still places the responsibility for poverty and for ending it on individual poor people and not on the structures that create their poverty and the people who benefit from it.

    To be fair, part of the systemic structure that creates poverty is the poor quality of the educational system and the lack of child care. Free child care for every child six weeks older and up would go a *long* way toward getting families out of poverty.

    Better education, all by itself, is a chimera, though, because what employers look for is not “a good education” but “a better education than the least educated”, and that’s a moving target. At one point you didn’t need to be literate to work in a warehouse. Now you probably need a high school diploma or GED. For that matter, illiteracy is now defined as difficulty in reading any but the simplest words, whereas it was once defined as such a profound lack of knowledge of writing, you’d have to sign contracts with an X. If every single one of us got a college education, office worker jobs would probably start requiring grad school, because the education requirements are themselves part of the class system.

    But there is a minimum level of education you need to become an entrepreneur, to use the Internet to sell stuff, to understand employment contracts, to have enough historical knowledge to know when your rights are being trampled on, and giving everyone in America a good quality education would at least free up a lot more people to go into business for themselves and to understand when they’re being exploited.

    Free health care for all Americans (not health insurance, health care) would also be a huge help. I know people, personally, who want to work, but are forced to remain at home on disability, not because they can’t work but because they can’t qualify for Medicaid if they do work and they can’t get health insurance from an employer at the level of jobs they can get. And lack of health coverage would kill them, hence staying on disability.

    All of these things are structural impediments built into the system to *prevent* people from rising up by their bootstraps, and if Republicans weren’t lying liars who lie, and they really cared about go-getters and small business and entrepreneurship and a dollar earned for hard work, they would be in favor of removing these impediments. What they actually want is a servant class of impoverished, desperate people who see the brass ring above their heads and believe it is *possible* to grab for it, so all of their energy goes into the futile jump for the brass ring and none into protesting their dire straits.

    If we removed all impediments from work, if we had free child care and good education and free health care, there are still people who would be poor, who would need assistance. Certainly. But it would have been far more humane to implement a program intended to get people back up on their feet and ease them off permanent dependency on government money if at the time that they’d implemented it, they’d gotten rid of these huge structural roadblocks and perverse incentives. And you know, if the government trained mothers with small children to be day care workers and then employed them in high quality day care centers which were free, at government job pay rates, it would create enormous numbers of jobs (both the jobs of the educators who would train the women, and the jobs the women would have once trained), and then the day care centers would free up thousands of other women to get jobs while they have small children. So the relatively small investment of putting, say, twenty thousand women on the government payroll, would expand to a hundred thousand women who don’t need government handouts because one day care worker can take care of five small children and the impediment those hundred thousand are all suffering from is the lack of child care. But Republicans don’t want to do that, because my god, why should I have to pay for your kid? You should have kept your legs shut, you dirty poor person.

    Welfare “reform” was cruel beyond belief because it destroyed the safety net but didn’t remove any impediments to work. But Republicans actually like it that way.

  29. I like that idea, about training moms as day care workers. Something I’d like to see — and frog knows if it would ever happen anywhere, never mind in the US — is for some of them to be trained further, as parenting coaches, who could spend lots of time with new parents before and after the child is born. We don’t come with instincts that tell us how to raise a child well.

    I’d like this to be available for every new parent who wanted it, but starting with the people who are already farthest back seems like a good idea.

  30. Workfare or whatever they call it now has been a disaster for single parent households (who make up the bulk of welfare families). I agree in principle that a two parent american household on welfare should be using the workfare approach (where the welfare recipient is made to work for their benefits as a public employee – I’m summarizing the system here to save space).

    We need the following to get the single parents back into the workforce (which by the way mirrors what they successfully do in Scandinavia)

    1. Free daycare (children under 13 are not allowed to be home alone – nor should they be for obviouse reasons)

    2. Cash assistance until a job placement occurs via a job training program closely tied to existing industry demands – not arbitrary time limits

    4. Real disability insurance for the mentally ill – Many SSI-elgible people are denied benefits and dumped on welfare which insists that these clearly mentally ill people find work (because tada – the gov’t says they are sane).

    1. Also that welfare abuse is not at all relevant to the conversation. (Again, unless you think that welfare abuse is a good and valid reason to let poor families like Eva’s suffer, go hungry, and get kicked out on the street. In which case, well, GTFO.)

    1. No worries — while refusing to feed trolls is always a good idea, you’re not the one that’s the problem. 🙂

  34. And any one of you who thinks that you are better than that because you didn’t have a teenage pregnancy, or because you went to college, or you worked blue collar jobs from the time you were old enough, just might wake up with a little thing called poverty breathing down your lily-white necks.

    right on, Kactus! (great to see you! how you been?)

    may I also add – there’s no separate line at the welfare office for Nice White Heterosexual Married Women With Straight Teeth Who Went To College. they throw you in with all the rest and humiliate you just the same. ask me how I know.

    I take issue with the whole “we need more, better, free daycare” thing, though.

    as a condition of receiving state benefits, I had to enroll in something that my state calls “Jobs First”. “Jobs First” required that I had (or searched for) a 30-hour-a-week job. If I didn’t have a 30-hour-a-week job, I had to prove I spent thirty hours a week looking for a job, or engaging in appropriate volunteer work, or enrolled in an approved job training or education program. The reason behind this was, and I quote, “It is better for your children to see you working.”

    which, sure. BUT your children don’t see you working. your children see you LEAVING. and returning, eventually…but mostly leaving. your children don’t see you working at all. your children don’t even see you.

    I think this is a problem for children under the age of two or three.

    the fact that the state pretty much coerces you to leave your kid with someone who’s not you as quickly as possible (selling you shit and calling it sugar) has some serious consequences: it disrupts the parent-child bond, discourages breastfeeding, and sets up this weird mommy-wars thing – which is really, in my opinion, serious class warfare disguised as silly women arguing over silly things.

    why stop at free daycare? why not set up universal jobsite daycare, with frequent nursing breaks and maybe some humane treatment of new moms? why not make daycare less like a “just-barely-better-than-home-alone” choice and more like a “wow! hey! this is terrific!” choice? or, let’s get really radical – why not create jobs where it’s not such a trauma to bring your baby to work? just sling ’em and go?

    this actually works. at least for about 20 hours a week. the store where I worked the last two years made it so I could almost fill the job requirements for assistance without breaking my everloving neck, and still remain close to our son, you know, like a “good” (read: not poor) mom.

    as for Eva – I live near where she lives. it’s just random luck I’m not her. I wonder if she’s still eligible for literacy tutoring…

  35. I’ve never understood the opposition to food stamps. What, exactly, is debatable about FOOD of all things? Is there a serious coalition suggesting that it is better to go hungry than to eat?

    I’ve never gotten it. It’s one of the absolute most basic needs we have. When I’ve moved communities, it often takes a while to get up to speed on which charities I support and which I don’t, but I can always rely on the food banks to be straight-up “turn money into assistance for people who need it” kind of thing so they get most of my money anyway.

    And like Jill said: Sure, some people get help who don’t “need” it. Food stamps, food banks, you name it. Some criminals also get off without a conviction: should we change the rules and start screwing over everyone else in an effort to convict them? Of all the places to enforce things, why FOOD?

    And of course don’t even get me started on food for KIDS, i.e. “free school-provided breakfast/ lunch” programs, the governmental treatment of which is arguably even more depressing than the treatment of food stamps.

    Anyway, consider this a plug for your local food bank, a/k/a the “food stamp backup” for a lot of people I know. Food is good; money is even better because they can buy what they need.

  36. “the fact that the state pretty much coerces you to leave your kid with someone who’s not you as quickly as possible (selling you shit and calling it sugar) has some serious consequences: it disrupts the parent-child bond, discourages breastfeeding, and sets up this weird mommy-wars thing – which is really, in my opinion, serious class warfare disguised as silly women arguing over silly things.”

    – I want to second everything antiprincess is saying here. YES. How about we have childcare options, BUT also, options that encourage breastfeeding in a way that does not hurt the women’s career/ability to feed older children. We cannot pretend to be a society that supports kids when newborns are separated so easily.

  37. Just in case anyone else is thinking that cash welfare benefits allows people to live the high life for years and years…In Indiana, where I live, the highest income at which you can receive TANF benefits if you are a single parent with 2 kids is $4536 per year. Before taxes. If you make $5000 per year with your two kids, you’re too rich for TANF.

    Then, of course, the closer you get to the income threshold, the lower your monthly TANF benefit is. The highest monthly benefit in this state is $288 per month. Of course, to get that whopping sum, you’d have to be far below the $4536 per year – probably near $0. And you have to work while on benefits unless you’re pregnant…but don’t you dare get a raise to $5000 per year, or you’ll have your cash assistance cut off! Oh, and you can go to school to get your GED…but college courses don’t count as “work” for welfare eligibility in this state. We can’t have the poor people BETTERING themselves, after all!

    But let’s pretend that the system would give you the full $288 per month if you were at the income limit ($4536/year). That’s $651 per month, total family income. I live in a community with a relatively low cost of living, but a decent one-bedroom apartment will still run you about $400 per month. More than that, if you actually wanted a bedroom of your own. And sure, you might have a housing voucher, but can you imagine how much it costs to feed yourself and two kids? (I don’t have kids, so I can’t speculate, but I can’t imagine it’s $50/month). And sure, you’d have food stamps. But what about non-food items? Clothes for your kids? Transportation? (Bus passes around here are $30/month for anyone over age 5. With 2 kids over 5, that’ll eat up $90/month!) Or how about daycare?

    Then, of course, the benefits get cut off after a few years regardless of whether you have a job or not. Indiana lets able bodied adults keep benefits for 24 months. Kids can keep theirs for 5 years, which obviously gets them about, oh, 1/3 to 1/4 of the way to adulthood.

    Given all of those facts, who the hell WOULDN’T try to game the system? I know I would…no questions asked. The most abhorrent myth in American society is that welfare is too generous. In reality, it’s probably the most inhumane program in our country. I’m bothered by a lot of things, but not by the idea that some woman making $4500 per year to feed her two kids might make some under the table income. And if you are, frankly, you’re a cruel, cruel person.

  38. KACTUS!!!!!!

    I have so many words on this subject, but I don’t have the time or the strength right now 🙂 Suffice to say, if someone is going to the trouble to abuse this system, they’d be abusing any system that exists.

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