The average SNAP recipient receives about $4 a day and sees their balance run out after just 17 days.

This is not enough.

I don't think SNAP is supposed to always cover 100% of food expenses. If you're near the cutoff point for benefits, you get some allowance, but you're expected to cover some of the food cost from your income. You would of course use your SNAP benefits first, since they are not fungible, so it is not surprising that you would run out before the end of the month. This does not mean that such households are unable to afford food for the remainder of the month, it just means that they have to pay for it themselves.

I just went and put some really sad numbers into a calculator and it told me I qualified for $500/mo in benefits for a family of three. This is definitely sufficient to provide three nutritious meals per day for three people anywhere in the country.

That's the point. It should.

If we remove the fear of starvation (we can afford to feed everyone twice and barely put a dent in our military budget) a lot of people will have a HUGE improvement in their day-to-day happiness. This is one of those obvious huge moral positives we can do.

The only "down side" is there will never be fear of starvation.

Edit: The one progress I can see in a society is when we can basically say that certain problems that people may have... those problems just literally won't exist.

- basic housing

- 3 meals a day

- a basic level of health care

with the amount of cash flow in the US there shouldn't be a single person who has to worry about one of those 3.

edit 2: I mean any person who "struggles with hunger" which is ~40 mil. Also, that is in itself a terrifying number.

I agree with this general goal, but it is much more complex than it seems from the outset. Any program at this scale has to be thoughtful of the larger societal, moral, and cultural consequences it brings with it.

Just looking at free food, a fundamental question is: Is this expected to be a baseline that all people receive and then people buy additional/better food, or is supposed to be an option where many/most don't take the free food option at all?

If the former, then you risk massive waste. If the free food is mediocre, people will just take it, buy better stuff, and then throw out the crappy stuff. If you solve that with better food, you run into hard questions around the cost and quality ceiling. Food is one of those product areas where you can spend nearly limitless money on it, but it's not feasible for a country to give 100% of its citizens foie gras and cavier every day.

But, of course, deliberately drawing the line somewhere lower has connotations that people who use that food are "bad" because otherwise don't they deserve better food?

If the latter, then you run into the current problem with welfare that the people in power don't use the system at all, which gives you the principle-agent problem we see in welfare today where many people hate funding it because they don't benefit.

Then there are questions of how you manage this logistically. How do you reduce the risk of exploitation? If the government, say, gives out free bags of rice, how do you prevent a restaurant from just grabbing dozens of them and then using them for their food service? But if you spend too much effort on enforcement, then you waste resources on enforcement that could be better spent elsewhere.

It is a hard, complex problem. SNAP today is basically our current stab at it. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that could be swept away and easily replaced with something simpler and clearly better. Problems aways seem much easier when you are far away from them.

It seems like you are arguing against a couple of straw men here.

First off, no one is saying that we should give 100% of citizens foie gras and caviar.

While I understand your point about there being some stigma attached to funding and/or receiving food assistance, I think it would be lessened if it were freely available to everyone at their discretion. People (rich and poor alike) have certainly had no qualms about receiving unemployment in the current crisis and I think you will see a similar reaction to this food assistance program in New York.

Second, your example of a restaurant taking bags of rice is clearly not an issue with SNAP benefits as they exist in every state, nor is it a possible issue with the program in New York, since they are giving out full meals.

In fact, I expect that the system being trialed in New York will actually solve the issue of people selling or trading away their SNAP benefits, since poor folks just above the cutoff for snap, who would still benefit from food assistance, can just go and get a free meal themselves, rather than trading or buying discounted food from someone selling their SNAP benefits.

Trying to means test these kinds of programs just adds administration costs. "But a rich person might get some of the food!". So what, that rich person is paying taxes to support the program. Make it simple.

> If we remove the fear of starvation (we can afford to feed everyone twice and barely put a dent in our military budget)

327,000,000 people * 365 days * $5/person/day = $596,775,000,000 yearly Or $596 billion

$693 billion is the Wikipedia number for DoD budget, so that actually checks out.

Of course, that's more than "put a dent in the budget," but I'm sure you meant those in need, and not every American (which is the calculation I did).

> but I'm sure you meant those in need, and not every American

I personally despise means testing. There has been so much hatred spewed over "welfare queen" that I am amazed we still do means testing and we have pulled it forward to things like the New York state Excelsior program (college education for first-time college students) and even for the $1,200 COVID-19 stimulus. It is very sad. We don't less means testing, not more.

I despise means testing as well. I also believe the moral hazard argument is over blown most of the time. I would like to see a guaranteed employer of last resort that pays enough for someone to live. This employer (federal agency) could adapt the work that is done to a situation. Provide opportunities for retraining and so forth. This could also provide the psychological safety many are in need of and reduce desperation. Means testing is expensive and causes many to not get the help they need.

Agreed. "Job guarantee" program. There's a write-up here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee

I also like the idea of UBI combined with a flat tax (losing progressive taxation) for it's simplicity, but imagine all the tax lawyers and accountants that would be out of a job.

It seems like a Job Guarantee program would be something that both Democrats and Republicans could support. I'm surprised it hasn't been done already (other than in the Great Depression).

Questions...

1. How would that program handle people who were unwilling to work? Possible answer off the top of my head: maybe they get sent home or terminated from the program for a period of time, and the pay for the "Job Guarantee" job would need to be somewhat more desirable than the benefits received for not working at all (assuming the person is capable of work).

2. How would the program prevent managers with personal bias against particular people on the Job Guarantee program dismissing them so they are sent home to receive the lower paying "able bodied but unwilling to work" pay? Possible solution: Any dismissal is time limited (or exponential, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, then in yearly increments), and also the first 3-4 steps would simply involve a transfer to a different manager. To reduce the likelihood of bias, managers should be representative of the general population in any potentially important characteristics such as gender, race, and also political orientation (Democrat, Republican, or other).

3. What would prevent minimum wage employees from moving to the government jobs program instead? (I'm anticipating a potential Republican question.) Possible answer: the pay would be lower.

4. Does this create any kind of perverse incentives for the government or corporations? "Well, we don't need to care about access to college, or jobs in the US, because everyone has a guaranteed (below minimum wage) job".

Those unwilling to work would be sent home and temporarily suspended.

A reasonable appeal process and the ability to change managers or move to a different site.

I would build vocational training into this. You are in training either at your choice or as an assignment. Looking for another job would also be acceptable. If you don't have a GED, your only option would be training. I view unemployment as mismatch between the skills you have and the work that needs to be done or there is a slack in demand and we are trying to figure out what to do. I would build a strong scholarship program for those who demonstrate the ability for university level education. You would demonstrate that by your efforts in other training.

Making the pay less than minimum wage I think would be counter-productive. I would eliminate minimum wage and use this as a counter balance to compete with businesses that rely on minimum wage workers.

Jobs guarantee could be popular like awful "workfare", but it's oftenstill stupidly resting on the assumption that full employment is good, and UBI without full employment is inherently inflationary.

That would be great. But it could also be that the privately-employed majority makes the guaranteed jobs worse and worse over time.

I am hoping we get a non-means-tested corona $1000 after the shitty one, and then things for UBI pick up for there. If we need a mix of UBI and JG for some time, so be it.

You still need production at times and you don't want people losing momentum. It is hard to go from not working to working at a good pace. Keeping people in a working mind set I think is important.

This seems to be a difference in philosophy. I see your comment and, if I read you right, see a desire to support people by encouraging them to participate in capitalism by paying companies to hire them.

My view is different: public money should go to public good. I don't think that good is served by interfering with markets. If they need $10/hour to justify hiring someone, what is that person going to do for those hours? I think public good is served by training and paying people to deal with collective action problems: failing/at-risk infrastructure, poverty, health care in places with little or no access to it under the private health care and insurance systems, and things like that.

Private companies can be part of that, but the initiative has to be led by the public and the people they elect to lead them, not private interests.

I didn't read this comment as promoting means testing. I read it as "Even if they make the meals available to everyone, mostly just the people in need will use it". It was addressing the moral hazard risk that people often associate with these programs.

NYC will be able to publish just how many people took advantage of the meals. That's the baseline to price the program out nationwide, not the total number of US citizens.

Think of it like banking reserve rules. The program is officially open to everyone, but how much we cook in a day is based on demand.

I agree completely. I wasn't trying to make any judgment in my post though, I was just acknowledging "barely put a dent in our military budget," because my math assumes the extreme case that every American takes the $5/day.

I think the suggestion is that we can afford to oversubscribe a program like this, because it'd be a guarantee that you'd be able to eat (i.e. food on demand), not a push-based delivery of the resources (money/food stamps/etc.) required to be able to eat, that people would then feel that they "should" use up, thus using less of their own money.

Any American who didn't take advantage of a demand-driven food supply program on a given month, wouldn't be costing the program anything. It just means that they'd be able to instantly access food when in need, without first qualifying into the program.

Think less "food cash" (like food stamps essentially are), and more "no-limit food credit card" (with the government as the account holder.) You'd just go into a grocery store and buy whatever, and if you couldn't afford it, you'd pay for it with the food credit card (= the government would pay for it.) But if you don't use the card, it isn't accruing or expiring a balance. It's just there, waiting to be used.

One can think of this another way, with a different moral color but the same in-practice effects: imagine if they made shoplifting from grocery stores legal (i.e. every grocery store is now also required to act as a food bank), and the government promised to pay the store back for any shoplifting-related shrinkage. That's essentially what this program would be, except with the store able to track inventory through the till, since the food would still be being "purchased."

Presumably we could come up with some sort of middle ground policy. For example, there could be certain foods that are excluded from the system or maybe only certain products are included. Or perhaps different products could use up more of a person's "food credits".

This is basically Cuba's policy (well, Cuba in better times, their rationed food has decreased massively in quantity over time). Everyone has an allotment of basic staples (rice, beans, limited meat, coffee, etc.) that covers your basics with little / no extravagance, or you can go to a grocery store for a wider variety.

I think you wouldn't need to actually do any work to get this effect. Consider what happens if tons of people suddenly decides to take home a particular "fancy" food for free. The government pays the grocery store, but the grocery store also runs out of the food and buys more from its supplier. This is driving up demand for the fancy food. Now the fancy food is going to get more expensive, even though people are getting it "for free."

If you take my sibling comment about tax effects into account, this means that, as people over-consume a "free" food, and its price rises, they're effectively making larger and larger "purchases" which will have an effect on their taxes.

On the other hand, if it turns out that the food was only expensive because few people were buying it, in a sort of vicious circle—then when everyone buys it, and forces demand up, it'll force supply up, too, and the food will get cheaper for everyone, not just for people who get it "for free."

For example, if it turns out that we only weren't factory-farming caviar because of the low demand, but it's perfectly possible to do so, then we'll just turn into a society that farms and eats a lot of cheap caviar. No market distortion; just "unlocking" market efficiencies we couldn't previously reach, because the demand side didn't previously have the dollars to vote with. Everybody wins!

this seems needlessly complicated. it would be a neverending game of whack-a-mole to get the whitelists / credit multipliers adjusted for every food sku.

if we're already assuming people can budget reasonably well, why not go with a UBI-like food stipend and enroll every citizen? calibrate it so people with zero income get a reasonable (possible COL-adjusted) amount to afford a month's worth of healthy meals and phase it out smoothly respective to income. can't really be abused unless you hide your income and also avoids the fiscal cliff.

maybe I'm just too cynical, but I have a hard time believing it would work out that way. the difference between the cheapest and most expensive brand of pasta is at least 4x. why wouldn't you buy the nicest brand every time? if the tax bracket adjustments had any bite, you would end up with poor families owing more tax than they earned income. this ends up basically equivalent to means testing anyway.

> if the tax bracket adjustments had any bite, you would end up with poor families owing more tax than they earned income.

I mean... they'd be told that that would happen in advance. Wouldn't that then serve as an incentive to avoid making a pattern of taking home the more-expensive food? (They could still do it rarely, though. A one-time $50 bump in spending isn't going to affect your taxes.)

if you're really willing to allow that outcome, then your proposal is just an implicit benefit limit that's a bit harder to calculate. how is that different from / better than saying "here's $xxx to feed your family this month; budget appropriately"?

Again, because if you give someone $xxx, they feel compelled to use it, and therefore to put $xxx less of their own money into the economy.

Here, people don't have any money or food stamps "burning a hole in their pocket." They just have their own money, and an unlimited line of credit for grocery stores that would "come due" in the form of taxes at the end of the year (but which would only end up costing them anything-at-all if they tried to live beyond their means.)

The only real presumption I'm making here, IMHO, is that people would be too ashamed to buy the "below your means" items (e.g. rice and beans) on this credit, if they didn't have to. Just like people are usually too ashamed to go to food banks if they don't have to.

okay, I think I see your point now. it's less of a no-limit credit card paid by uncle sam and more of a contribution matching / loan combo. I do think the tax interaction is overly convoluted, but I see the core of something viable here. people can get extra purchasing power when they need it, but they still have at least a little skin in the game to discourage abuse.

I will say I'm not a big fan of using shame to gate off this benefit. my intuition is that shame alone is not enough to stop most people from seeing a way to stretch their grocery budget, if they can use it to buy anything they want. if it is effective, then that's only in proportion to how dehumanizing the experience of using it is, which is also kind of shitty.

In a couple days, New York will probably release the number of meals served. Divide that by the population of New York and then multiply that by your $596 billion. Even if it's 10% (no way it will be this high), that's $60 billion, or around 9% of the budget, otherwise known as a "dent".

I wish i could reply to the comment below about means testing. The reality is even if this were means tested, many people wouldnt opt into it...so short story, I agree with you, it would be much cheaper than you're describing.

$5/person/day is more than this should require.

Feeding America claims to deliver meals at $0.10 each by rescuing food that would've been wasted, and they claim even buying at wholesale would run about $2/meal ($1.67/lb * 1.2lb/meal).

https://www.feedingamerica.org/ways-to-give/faq/about-our-cl...

> $2/meal

So, $5/day ?

Rescuing wasted food doesn't work once you scale it to a hundred million people.

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely in favor of a food/housing program that's available for everyone. I am also a communist though, so it's an easy sell for me.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never been poor enough so I don’t get it, but I’m a lot more worried about losing housing and healthcare than food. Food’s super cheap compared to those (unless you’re a meat-with-every-meal type, and picky about which meat) and there are tons of government and community programs to provide it.

You're implicitly arguing that SNAP should have fiscal cliffs. Fiscal cliffs are a symptom of a poorly designed welfare program.

The "S" in SNAP means that if you have income, you have to cover some of your food expenses. What's wrong with that?

If you have no income/assets, you can get $600+/month for a family of 4. https://aix-xweb1p.state.or.us/caf_xweb/SNAP_Estimate/actCal...

There are logistical complications around ability to complete the red tape, and personal irresponsibility or access to low-cost options when spending the SNAP money, but big-picture SNAP is fine.

Should people be entitled to spend all their post-tax income on luxuries and get welfare support for basic needs? That's a more extreme position than supplemental support for people with some wealth.

To add to your basics, don’t forget clothing and education. I think those are the 5 basics that are necessary to ensure every person can participate in society without fear or shame.

Pollution and inefficient consumption of resources are much more important factors in climate change.

Are you suggesting that overpopulation has nothing do with this?

To be clear, I am against any attempt at population control. I want to keep awareness on the fact that many others do, though.

If you mean in term of energy and space because of extra mouths to feed, not really.

But we do have a great potential to poison our environment if we don't rein in the pollution.

I think it's a lesser concern, true, but it's still an issue, particularly with high-consumption wasteful 1st world countries.

In my opinion, the US military and the manufacturing industries of China and India by far do the bulk of poisoning the environment and impacting climate change.

I'd much rather have, as a US taxpayer, those assets diverted to healthcare and basic subsistence, too. I'd rather that charities do it, though, and wish it was easier for philanthropy to be more efficiently implemented. We can't even get enough masks out, for cryin out loud.

But damn if we can precision kill someone on the other side of the planet without due process of law! Or find all your domestic social media traffic in October 2016

You are absolutely correct, but it can sound to a reader lacking nuance as if you were arguing that other factors (outside the mind) aren't important. Many people suffer from the prison of two ideas, and wrongly misinterpret this argument as a denial of important social, cultural, historical factors.

> If poor people are to become middle class people

If this is the goal, you need to be pushing to radically restructure the way society and the economy functions. You cannot have everyone employed at, say, $60K a year in the one we have.

Most of the time when people say this, they prefer to focus on individuals rather than systemic issues - "this one person pulled them self up by their own bootstraps - surely others can, too. And "others" can, and do. That leaves people who can't. Now what?

> I think it's better if we strive for a minimalistic government

The problem is capabilities. Libertarian fantasy-states work in frontiers and sometimes in low-population, high-homogeneity areas. As population increases, many public goods need management[1] and public management means the state necessarily takes on more functions. So you need to work on your plan to massively reduce population or get yourself a new planet if this is your goal.

Your desire to drive self-sufficiency by intentionally depriving those in need cannot work in our current world and simply results in performative cruelty.

> Half of being poor is in the mind

Have you been poor? I have have been very poor. I grew up that way. I know what you're talking about, and I suspect you honestly don't understand how condescending and insulting it is.

[1] Growing up in a very rural town in Tennessee, people used to routinely burn their trash. Try that in San Francisco.

In this case, the insult is in how one chooses to perceive it. It's not present in the words themselves.

Also, if a family qualifies for snap, their kids almost always automatically qualify for free school meals already, in addition to snap.

which is great when schools are open. this also means that parents aren't going to go hungry, and that neither will go hungry over the summer/prolonged school closures right now.

These free meal programs are the schools providing meals to their students during school closings.

And the bigger point is that (during normal times) SNAP doesn't need to cover 100% of kids meals per month; most meals in a month are already provided for free through school.

Many school districts do offer supplemental feeding programs during breaks, and our local district is still distributing free lunches to students in need. But this isn't universal across the country and a lot of people do fall through the gaps.

If you buy mainly beans, rice, flour, frozen chicken, etc for your monthly food you will be far under $500. It's all the other distracting items in the grocery store that add up.

> Okay now try to eat like an actual human being and make it work for $500 over 30 days.

what exactly are you saying here? I spend about $300/month on groceries and I eat pretty well.

edit: maybe you're still talking about feeding a family of three?

Yes. $500 doesn't go very far if you're feeding two teenagers and want to have food variety. Spices are expensive and the price of vegetables goes by the season. That's why I think they should have a supplied commodity benefit in addition to the money.

I lived on $200/month in SF (single person) and I definitely didn't "eat like an actual human being". But the problem was definitely me and not that it wasn't possible.

Usually in those financial conditions you also know your time is better spent elsewhere. An extra hour per day practicing for interviews is much better use of your time than cooking. So you do the most efficient thing possible, which is just throw whatever is cheapest per lb into a slow cooker and eat it for the rest of the week. Most stuff is pretty disgusting after a few days in the fridge.

It's probably possible do meal prep cheap/fast/delicious, but I definitely never learned how. Tips appreciated!

$16 a day is the minimum to eat like an actual human being?

You could eat a steak a day at that budget

That's $16 a day for 3 people.

I mean, I cook for my family so I have some idea what goes into each meal. Typical dinner will be rice, some protein, and some vegetables. By far the most expensive bit is the protein. Our staple is chicken thighs which can be had for $2-3/lb. We use maybe half a pound per person (generous estimate), so the protein cost is on the order $6/meal. The rice costs next to nothing, maybe 20c. And the vegetables might be a dollar a head. Spices and such are de minimus. Adding it all up we have about ~$10 to feed a family of four dinner, plus maybe 20-30c worth of milk for each child.

So, that's in the neighborhood of $300 a month for dinner. Again, a generous estimate, because really wifey and the kids don't eat half a pound of meat each. Breakfast and lunch are vegetarian, so much cheaper. This is in inner Brooklyn, so not far off from the most expensive food locale in the US. Hawaii is significantly more, but few other places are. We could make it work on $500/month if we had to, for sure.

Same. Live in a medium COL area (Portland, OR) and we feed the entire family on about 300/month, and we eat generously, with pastries, sweets, and other 'luxury' items. If we went to a more modest diet, we could probably do it on 200/month.

Thank you for posting this. Long ago I investigated how cheaply I could eat. I researched nutritional needs, created a spreadsheet, priced items at the supermarket.

It was easy to keep myself well fed at a cost far below standard assistance levels.

When I encountered poor people complaining their money ran out, I discovered that some were hostile to the very ideas of thrift, self reliance, or any principals of stoicism.

Many people were never taught this stuff and the world does not exactly go out of its way to make it obvious how to play the food game properly. All the advertising and all the media point you to inefficient purchases. And really, I guess most poor people are doing exactly what I talked about -- buying and eating efficiently. It's the counterexamples that make the news.

Also FWIW I'm not saying it's easy to be poor. In many domains it's extremely painful and difficult. But I think we can acknowledge that while also pointing out that meeting food needs using $500 of SNAP benefits is an eminently doable challenge.

I agree regarding obviousness, marketing, difficulties of poverty, and doable challenges. I'm not convinced about "most poor people" and exceptions making the news. I've lived in several very poor communities in several parts of the US, and observed widespread cultural norms undermining the very ideas of cost efficiency and self restraint.

I realize I'm too ignorant to confidently propose systemic solutions, but on the education front I do wonder if it would help to offer government financed courses in shopping and budgeting (along with nutrition) bundled with SNAP benefits.

I too would be interested in empirical research about the efficiency of existing purchase patterns by people with limited means, and, to the extent they are inefficient, research into interventions that might improve things.

I'm able to feed a family of 4 for <$500/mo. We eat lots of rice, pasta, etc. which you can get large quantities of, for cheap. Add in some proteins and veggies for variety and nutrition and we are well under $500/mo.

I can vouch for this, having grown up on 'food stamps' as well as most of friends it really isnt enough for a family.

A few times as an adult I've also fallen on hard times and used snap benefits, it was enough for me as a single guy who can cook and knows to eat cheaply, but its hard and not fun.

However where I lived you need a mailing address to get benefits so when I was really down and I was homeless I got no benefits.

That's why this meal program in NYC is so great, it says right at the bottom there is no need for registration, it's actually accessible to everyone.

When someone runs out isn't the relevant stat. A person could receive $100/day and still run out in 17 days if they are ridiculous. The real question is can a person reasonably feed themselves on $4/day. I would submit the answer is 100% yes for the vast, vast majority of locations in the US. You can do your own web search for the litany of sites/postings on how to eat on < $1/day. You have 4x that amount in your budget.

Here's one sample site: https://www.budgetsaresexy.com/how-to-make-nutritious-meals-...

You can feed yourself for $4/day if you already have: - Cooking supplies (pots, pans, plates, silverware, etc) - 1h+ / day of free time to spend on cooking and shopping for food - A fridge and pantry to store food in - An oven and/or stove to cook your food

For a significant number of people that cannot afford to feed themselves, one or more of these are compounding factors.

By providing meals instead of $, this program is much more equitable.

I genuinely don’t know: how common is it for an American that lives in a home (rented/owned/subsidized) to not have a hotplate, fridge/freezer and random assortment of plates, cutlery and pots?

Rentals usually include appliances in N. America.

Thrift store are usually full of small appliances (people shy away from used blenders or used kettles), unmatched cutlery and plates. Pots may be harder to come by, but a large and small one covers most use cases.

Used appliances are usually cheap because of the upgrade treadmill. I understand that coming up with $150 for a fridge or $25 for a hotplate. Maybe we need a better system for those capital costs.

This is an awful "gotcha" straw man. It's not reasonable to expect every person in every response to cover every case. No communication would occur if we held everyone to that bar.

If a person needs a prepared meal they can go to a soup kitchen which is also funded by taxes. Forcing everyone to that model would be really authoritarian. I'd much rather let people get what they want to the extent possible.

And from that sample site, they seem to have an abundance of time to exploit sales and an excess of freezer/storage space. I'm sure there are counterexamples, but I have always gotten the impression those "eat cheap" sites are run by stay at home parents with an excess of free time or people using them to generate income.

I don’t feel like time is the major issue. But fridge/freezer space definitely is.

You can prep in bulk and fridge/freeze, but you need that space to do it.

Then again, I’ve been eating a lot of rice, dried pulses and stew of whatevers left/on sale lately.

This is somewhat misleadingly worded: it makes it sound like what they receive each month is 17*4 = $68. The actual average per month is $127/recipient.

Arguably this is still insufficient, though.

yeah they get 31*4, but they can only make it 17 days with that. I doubt I could make it even 17 days with only $127.

I ate plenty well as a grad student on $120 a month. If that’s $127/person that’s plenty for just food. If that’s $127 for a family of 3 that’d be rough.

That's the average per recipient. The average per household is higher.

Why would we expect the average of 40M SNAP recipients, over 10% of the US population, have their entire food budget provided by the government?

SNAP is supposed to be supplemental no?

As, a college student with limited funds, I noticed I could keep my daily food costs down to 1$-3$/day range by eating healthily: It's at least 4 times cheaper than eating at mcdonalds. (and this was in CA, one of the most expensive areas) https://kale.world/eating-healthy-is-four-times-cheaper-than...

When I moved to SF, I was probably eating for $2.50 a day. It's totally possible if you buy 20lb bags of rice and beans.

Source?

SNAP is not intended to cover the cost of a recipient's entire food needs. The S stands for "supplemental".

You can argue that is should cover a recipient's entire food needs but it seems a little misguided to criticize the program for failing to meet an objective it doesn't have. Furthermore, federal programs have to be careful not to do things outside their mandate less they run into territory where they don't have political support and lose funding. SNAP probably couldn't get away with providing the full cost of food even if they were able to.

Clearly, the criticism is not of meeting an objective it doesn't have but of not having the correct objective.

They didn't criticize the program, they responded to a post that stated a fact about SNAP and made an apparently associated representation It seems like largely the US has been and will continue to keep people fed.

Saying SNAP isn't enough is pretty clearly a response to the representation.

The cost of the program is not a very good way of evaluating it. the number of people it feeds and how well it does so would be a much better criterion.

Totally agreed. But for those who feel the need to justify costs -- instead of looking at the good it does -- consider the capitalist benefits:

- Hungry people are not productive to the economy

- Hungry people are more likely to be sick and burden the healthcare system

- Hungry people, if desperate enough, might steal from you

- Hungry children do not learn as well, and become a future burden society needs to carry

Are people going hungry in the US? Obesity rates are at an all time high and the highest in the population below the poverty line. What metric should we look at in terms of quantifying people going hungry?

The US absolutely has a hunger problem. I can personally attest to this as I slept hungry numerous nights from age 11 to 16 (until i was on college meals.) School lunch covered breakfast and lunch, but dinner is on you.

If your wages are growing slower than rent/heating/electricity/etc you suddenly have to chip into your hierarchy of needs (as I later found out my parents did)

The problem with programs in the US is often means testing in the US. It is a corrupt system that makes things very difficult for honest people while perpetuating fraud for insiders and friends.

Bureaucrats in NYC (in my case) made it near impossible to get Food Stamps for some time -- then you go to the grocery store and see someone in Nike Air Jordans ($200+ in the 1990s!!!) whip out food stamps. You see people check out with food stamps and go into a BMW in the parking lot. I grew up in South Brooklyn and was constantly infuriated not only at poverty but those who took advantage of systems to combat it -- and corrupt bureaucrats who enabled corrupt users. A lot came down to hidden social clubs of fraudsters.

Obesity is a separate problem. Often the poor don't have access to quality calories, so they fill themselves with the most affordable calories (low priced carbs.) Eating healthy is a luxury.

Just as a note on this - low income have higher obesity rates, because many of them live in food deserts, without access to quality produce, or other regular staples. Further, high-calorie, low nutrition foods are cheaper in the US, and therefore more accessible.

Fat people =/= healthy distribution system of food.

The 'food desert' concept is a fantasy, there is no such thing.

In fact, trying to understand how such an upside-down false narrative could even exist, is the more interesting aspect of the 'food desert' phenom.

The density of fresh food is indeed lower in some areas, but always within reach. More important, this an issue of supply and demand: food is the most ancient of all commerce. Where people want to buy a food, it will be present. The very premise of 'food desert' is fundamentally flawed from the start. Food is a very competitive, very open, very dynamic, very well understood phenom. There are essentially zero places in America wherein there is truly unfulfilled demand at a basic level. Food stores cover every nook and cranny and balance quite well with demand.

Also - fresh food is the healthiest food, and it's also the cheapest. It requires work to prepare it. Processed and prepared food is the most expensive, and generally less nutritious. Though there are some anomalies (ie milk), food is still cheap.

The price of food has been deflating consistently over time. Just 2 generations ago food might have made up 24% of a HH budget, now it's 1/2 that.

Poverty exists, food insecurity exists, and surely there are some people who can't access what they need, but in general, the 'food desert' things is an invented narrative.

Have you ever been to an actual low-income, rural area? Or low-income urban area? Seriously?

Midwest US, not even truly rural, like in the hills of Kentucky, rural, and the closest grocery store to me is 1 hour away. There are convenience stores, full of sugary snacks. No actual 'food' in you would think of it. When I worked in Tenessee, I was 3 hours from the closest grocery store. The only 'food' stores by your definition were gas stations. Full of. . . sugary, high calorie, low nutrition foods.

North corridor in St. Louis, there is an entire swath of hte city without access to grocery stores, bodegas, or whatever else fills the niche. There are dollar stores filled with ---- sugary snacks and other high calorie, low nutrition foods. There are non-profits who have the only goal of bringing in grocery stores. During the Ferguson riots/uprising (depending on your views) one of the main asks was access to grocery stores. Why do you think that was?

You are pushing a false narrative. Food deserts exist. Your hand waving type of claim is just ridiculous.

Curious on this food desert thing. Is access to food less than it was 50 years ago? Access to fruits and vegetables during winter/fall months is a new thing since now we have better supply chains and international trade(winter crop is from Mexico).

Its weird to me since i grew up in Saudi Arabia on a compound, a true food desert and lived off powdered milk, ramen, and other non perishable foods we could buy from the commissary store. There is something like 5000 Walmarts in the US that covers 90% of the population. They have fresh vegetables and fruits all year round.

Everything is available, but not necessarily economically available to the poor. It has definitely changed in the past 50years — notably the buying power has gone down massively because wages have not kept up with rent/healthcare/education.

You need to save somewhere. If you don’t pay rent you become homeless so you focus on less acute cuts — like substituting bread and cereals for salad, etc.

Eating is easy in the US, eating nutritiously is harder if you are on a limited budget.

" notably the buying power has gone down massively because wages have not kept up with rent/healthcare/education."

This is simply not true, it's the other way around. Food has never before been easier to access and cheaper. [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...

The article mentions nothing to your counter. The article talks simply about food. My point was, as you quoted, wages have not kept up with rent/healthcare/education. Food is one only member of what one spends on. (Also note, if you compare wages to cost-of-living, avoid studies which conveniently leave out rent/housing/healthcare/college. If you narrowly define anything you can make it look good.)

You are more likely to skimp on food than rent. If you skimp on rent, you end up homeless. Sure, initially, you can squeeze into smaller and smaller apartments, but eventually you're homeless. You can skimp on healthcare and education, or you can skimp on food -- where you dont see the effect immediately.

Food being a bargain doesnt help if you have barely anything left over to spend on food.

Secondly w/r/t food quality, as the article mentions, quoted below, some foods have gotten cheaper (sugar, soybeans) while others (meat, eggs) have gotten more expensive. This is another problem being discussed on this thread -- what you get for the money is not really what you need nutritiously. Sure, perhaps you dont starve, but you end up obese from eating the worst sorts of foods.

from artlicle: "That may be true in general terms, and as NPR's Marilyn Geewax reported in February, soybeans, sugar and wheat are all cheaper than they were a few years ago.

But as we've reported, there has been volatility in the price of plenty of other food items. And key staples like beef and eggs are actually more expensive these days than they have been."

More nuance is exactly the problem.

This isn't a matter of a specific little bit of math inside a bigger ball of math or highly custom machine that needs nuance.

This is a literal effect we have on other humans by letting them go underfed.

Why do we need more nuance in the rules around apportionment in the well walked context of "people got to eat"?

This is just asinine at this point in human society. Especially with a much more educated society that can argue cogently around it sitting on their hands wanking their custom theories, tacitly enabling this.

Society needs to focus on stable support of our shared human needs first, stores of usable foods, basic products, etc.

It does not need to enable everyone's imagined pipe dreams, and emotional castle building, to become literally true. That's romanticized emotional ideology the others don't have to enable. Free speech does not mean you get what you're asking for.

When you're hording toilet paper and flour, but shelves are full of garbage caffeine tricks, sodas, "craft beer", sugar bomb cereal, you know your society has jumped the shark.

Didn't the federal gov't just cut SNAP benefits? The maximum a single person can receive is 6$/day, the average a single person receives is $4/day.

Yes - the cuts went into effect two days ago on the first.

To piggyback on what siblings point out, focusing on the total expenditure often leads one to different conclusions than focusing on the benefit available per-person per-day. It is much more insightful and meaningful to assess the efficacy of a program like SNAP by recognizing it’s $4 per day, or $1.33 per meal (and assumes an individual only drinks tap water).

More importantly, there’s something wrong when a society is organized and operated in such a way that people have to rely on private charities and religious organizations to be fed. That’s a signal of social failure—especially when food is abundant. I’d suggest a more nuanced conversation should focus on the ways in which offloading a problem to charitable organizations enables people to ignore the problem by means of letting them feel good about themselves for donating time/supplies—which wouldn’t be needed if we ensured the problem didn’t exist in the first place.

> 40 million Americans received more than 57 billion dollars in SNAP.

57bn / 40m = $1425

$1425 / 365 = $3.90

While that's doable, it's really not a lot.

What's enough? We have a grocery budget of $500 a month for a family of 5. That's $3.30 per person per day.

We used to have a much lower grocery bill in a very expensive part of the country... for nice stuff! But now we eat out a lot less and our grocery bill has doubled cooking at home all the time (and no lunches for either of us at work).

I'd say it matters a lot where you live and how you live. It's easy to live on far less than 100$/person_week in NY (or Tokyo, or Paris) with a tiny fridge and single burner stove, when you eat out 15 meals a week, or when you work at Google, or when you live in a rural area where prices are lower. But if you're urban, without a car, buying from tiny expensive bodegas, with growing kids, and can't afford to eat out, your bills will be significantly higher... Dog forbid you're buying pre-packaged or snack foods 'cuz it's easier than listening to home-alone teenagers complain.

How much is your restaurant and eating out budget? Or are you saying that your entire family gets 100% of it's dietary needs from your $500/month grocery budget? If so, that's impressive and you should share you shopping lists somewhere... I know I'd be interested in seeing that :)

I had a look on the whole foods website and found a store in NYC. you can buy 1lb mince, spaghetti, tinned tomatoes, carrot onion garlic, for less than $12. that's a meal for 4. you can get rolled oats for about $.75 a portion with real milk and a half a banana, and as a lunch you can get bread, pastrami, cheese for <$15, for about 8 sandwiches. that's $6/person/day from whole foods in NYC not buying in family quantities.

I would to as well. I can easily have a smaller grocery budget when my kids are in school and I eat at work. But if we are eating at home time is not always there to cook. The poor usually don't have time to cook. I have more time to cook now and eat at home which has lowered my grocery budget quite a bit. My cost of food dropped the wealthier I became.

Economies of scale. A $16.50 meal for five is going to be a lot nicer than a $3.30 meal for one. I get that you can cook in bulk, but having variety is in your diet is very important.

That’s where a freezer and fridge come in.

Make 3 days worth of rice in the fridge. Freeze small batches of stews/soups/vegetables. Scramble eggs with different ingredients. Different spices/sauces. Eat fresh stuff on shopping days.

You're assuming a lot about people's ability to thoughtfully shop at a grocery store once per week. It isn't just about money per person.

But then why criticize money if the issue is that people are not good enough with money to budget it? Either the suggestion will be that we provide people without enough money that even with poor budgeting and planning they will stay fed (and do we really cover everyone, the difference between 99% of people and 100% of people is like the difference in 99% server up time and 100% server up time). Or is the suggestion to remove the need plan by providing them food instead of money? You probably provide more food this way if optimized (economics of scale) and you would get more buy in from some people, but you would face heavy criticism and inertia from others who see this as looking down on others.

We could go for education, but many people do not take education even when offered for free.

So what do you propose?

Including all lunches too?

This average isn't quite right, since it assumes that everyone is in the program for the full 12 months. That's certainly not the case. (In fact, many people without dependents are limited to 3 months of SNAP in 3 years.)

Incorrect, SNAP and other federal/state programs do not go far enough to feed a family. And the poorest families are constantly demonized as some sort of "Welfare Queen" living large on steaks and top shelf liquor.

Which is just as pejorative. Please don't say that we're at the point where microwave meals and canned soda are too much a luxury for people who come home exhausted from work.

Are we really gonna ask someone who's already poor and tired to spend even more energy they don't have to make something from a few kinds of cheap dried grains.

Either give out enough money to buy food that actual humans want to eat or just cook and deliver it. A commercial kitchen and a few trucks would probably do wonders for an area that's underfed because individuals don't have enough time and money to make food cheap.

Frozen foods are cheap and healthy. Freezing is a cost-effective way to distribute vegetables and meat.

"food insecure" may be a relatively low bar: it looks like it includes "reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake." https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

I don't think that's a low bar. The US is an advanced economy. Why would people being unable to get fresh produce or have a balanced and varied diet be acceptable? Especially when you consider the obesity problems the country is facing.

I think that food insecurity meaning literal hunger pains is way too low a bar for the US. That number should be literally 0%. Food security for us should mean food that is healthy and excellent.

"food insecure at least some time during the year" includes people who at some point during the year didn't like the food they had available ("reduced desirability"). For example, someone could be getting their food from Meal Hubs and still be counted as food insecure.

If you surveyed specifically on whether people had access to fresh produce you'd get a much lower number.

I personally don't think that ~10% of people who are in the low food security box are doing great. They still seemed to do horribly in some of the metrics they gathered. For example, 80% of them felt they could not afford a balanced meal.

Then if you look at the very low security group, roughly 4% or 5 million people, it gets really worrisome. 32% of households said an adult had gone an entire day without eating anything.

And I think this is compounded by something like Covid-19. 85% and 95% of the low and very low food security groups said they were worried food would run out. What happens to them when people make a run on the stores like this last month? Their ability to buy food is strongly tethered to the day of the month when their EBT card is reloaded.

I think a lot of this is subjective, and globally the US is doing quite well compared to all countries. But I suspect we do poorly compared to other industrialized/advanced economies.

I'm relatively sure that saying "That chicken was alright, but the brine set in too strong and it was just too salty" doesn't fall within anyone's definition of food insecure.

The USDA definitions are extraordinarily misleading. “Food insecure” includes people who are at no risk of going hungry, but wish they had better food or a larger variety of food.

23+ million Americans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

That's not what that article says

You have to read past the first sentence

"A food desert is an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food,[1][2][3] in contrast with an area with higher access to supermarkets or vegetable shops with fresh foods, which is called a food oasis.[4] The designation considers the type and quality of food available to the population, in addition to the accessibility of the food through the size and proximity of the food stores.[5]

In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5 million Americans live in "food deserts"

What does that have to do with boxed food at gas stations?

Are you just being pedantic?

Either that, or you are being melodramatic.

Giving people money won't solve this problem. The food desert phenomenon is very real and very unsolved.

Hot take: You need a food equivalent of Medicare, where you can walk into the equivalent of a public good supermarket (Aldi would be my example, perhaps adjacent to a library and community center, with a "dine in" meal area), and walk out only with healthy foods or a healthy meal. Regarding food deserts, you need to force the distribution chain where it isn't, even if it isn't profitable (we don't look at the profitability of school lunches, soup kitchens, or food banks, for example).

Citizens also need help understanding nutrition and health diets (existing efforts are woefully inadequate), and direct cash benefits (SNAP) are suboptimal for that, considering food industry marketing efforts (looking at you Coca Cola).

The purpose of Coca-Cola is to sell fizzy sugar drinks. Why would it be to blame for food deserts or people not managing their purse strings?

I mean, if you want to ban Coca-Cola (like many want to ban marijuana), that's sort of a valid belief?

So where’s the disconnect here? SNAP is widely available, so we need to investigate the gap.

57 billion into 40 million people = $1425. That's without any overhead. Say there was no overhead, that's $3.90 a day.

SNAP is $200 per month per person for low income, at least it was when I was on it.