Marching along ‘grocery store alley’ in protest of possible cuts in food assistance.
When I hear people blame ‘bad choices’ for someone’s needing to receive food or other public assistance benefits, the only actual bad choice I can think of is whom those self-righteous critics probably voted for in the last presidential election.
For some people, the scariest part of Halloween might have been news about pending cuts after Nov. 1 to SNAP – Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Trick or treat bags of candy won’t make up the difference. On Saturday, Nov. 1, we joined a group marching near local grocery stores to raise awareness of the issue. Among passing motorists, it was encouraging to hear car horns and see far more thumbs up than middle fingers.
Children, people with disabilities, and the elderly comprise about two-thirds of SNAP participants. Most of the rest work, but with low pay they need a little help. Today, with grocery prices increasing about 29 percent since 2019, maybe everyone who is not wealthy could use some nutritional assistance.
Not a choice
Most people who need food assistance didn’t deliberately choose to be in such circumstances. I think it’s more accurate to call it ‘no-fault misfortune’. The various forms of misfortune are almost countless. Job loss, ill health – physical and mental, disabilities, and for children, their family circumstances. Children do not choose that.
The no-fault perspective could apply to any form of public assistance. It’s a good guess that many of the people who blame ‘bad choice’ also profess to be Christians. Instead of indulging in judgment, they should try to understand and follow the teachings of Jesus. He forgave, offered compassion, and admonished us to help one another, not to pass judgment.
Instead, the critics rely on the usual logical fallacies they employ to denigrate the less fortunate. The hasty generalization lets them single out a small number of fraud cases or other abuses and make a sweeping generalization about the entire group. Or they cherry pick bad examples to highlight. It becomes very emotional and almost impossible to have a rational discussion. By the next election I hope they snap out of such misguided thinking.
‘The Other America’
Everyone should read The Other America, by Michael Harrington. He makes a strong case arguing that people in poverty are trapped in a culture of poverty, left behind by structural economic shifts, automation, and social neglect, an “invisible” underclass—rural poor, urban slum dwellers, the elderly, and minorities—excluded from the nation’s affluence.
“To those who were raised in middle- and upper-income families, it is incomprehensible that having goals, aspirations, and work ethic are totally foreign to those who have grown up in the meanest poverty. They suffer psychological and economic depression, and they lose any sense of human dignity,” I wrote long ago in a review of the book for a college class.
Published in 1962, Harrington’s book helped spur society and government to address poverty. It influenced the policies in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, coalescing into the “War on Poverty” launched by Lyndon Johnson in the “Great Society” initiative. Key initiatives included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Unfortunately, the ascending Vietnam War drained off necessary funding.
Today’s war on poverty seeks just the opposite: Reduce spending on social programs, cut taxes, and let everyone fend for themselves. The extreme right and tax-dodging billionaires are waging war, not to defeat poverty, but to further entrench it. They are deaf to the words of U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone’s (d. 2002) well-known quote, “we all do better when we all do better.” That is the truth.
Bi-partisan beginning
In the beginning SNAP, formerly called food stamps, received strong bi-partisan support. Part of the farm bill, it provided a market for farm products and bolstered the prices received by farmers. To qualify for SNAP benefits households must be at or below 130% of the federal poverty line, about $2,800 a month, $33,600 per year, for a family of three.
In 2024 the program served an average of 41.7 million people per month, about 12.3% of the U.S. population. Federal spending on SNAP benefits totaled about $99.8 billion in 2024, and the average benefit per participant each month was around $187.20. In 2023 about 39% of SNAP participants were children, 20% were elderly, and 10% were non-elderly individuals with disabilities.
Talking about SNAP, House Majority Leader Mike Johnson should be contrite, seeing his state in the top ten of something, other than festive occasions in February. Among all states, Louisiana ranks 10th in the percentage of population using SNAP. An average of about 847,100 people received monthly SNAP benefits in 2024, or about 18.4% of the state’s population.
Each day, Johnson’s government shutdown continues the threat to the nutritional needs of nearly 300,000 children in the state. So much for the image of Jesus welcoming the little children, a scene in the Bible with which Johnson is familiar and should put into practice.
