Food Stamp Queens?

I’ll start with a brief bio.  I’m newly retired.  Social Security leaves me a couple hundred dollars short each month, so I applied for and was accepted into the SNAP program – that is, food stamps.

The instinct of some to condemn SNAP participants as freeloaders is troubling.  I’m neither.  I have a Master’s degree in Computer Information Science.  I taught for over 20 years at various institutions of higher education, in Pennsylvania and Canada.  The lack of a doctorate cost me jobs, though, and now causes me to have to rely on food stamps to supplement my income.

Despite millions of SNAP participants having stories like mine, we still see a disturbing trend.  When the poor or middle class object to preferential treatment for the rich, it's called class warfare.  But when the very-well-to-do call food stamp recipients welfare queens, it’s okay.

Caricatures of food stamp phonies created by conservative media are bogus.  Here’s the reality.  On average, an individual receives about $133 per month in food stamps.  That works out to about $4 per day.  As the Baltimore Sun put it, Blow it on a frappuccino, and that's one less day's food.

Any government action that discourages fraud is of course worthwhile.  But there's no evidence SNAP is out of control.  It helps feed more than 40 million Americans at an annual cost of $64 billion, or about $1600.00 per person per year.  That’s hardly exorbitant.  Rather, it emphasizes the hardships still created by the aftershocks of the worst recession in several decades.