Food Stamps: Do Unemployed Workers Deserve to Live Hungry?

Work requirement changes to the Food Stamp program will lead about 700,000 people to lose food stamps. Some data from states that imposed a work requirement several years ago is now available. GOP lawmakers who imposed a work requirement in West Virginia claim the change has been a success. People who run shelters and food pantries in the state claim it has been a failure.

The New York Times writes: “While around 5,410 people lost food stamps in the nine counties, the growth in the labor force in these counties over the ensuing three years significantly lagged the rest of the state. Average monthly employment growth in the counties actually slowed, while it nearly doubled in the rest of West Virginia.

‘We can prove it from the data that this does not work,’ said Seth DiStefano, policy outreach director at the center. The state Department of Health and Human Resources initially acknowledged as much. ‘Our best data,’ it reported in 2017, ‘does not indicate that the program has had a significant impact on employment figures.’

One of the first signs of the change came in the dining hall of the Huntington City Mission, about half an hour’s drive from little Milton. Suddenly, the hall was packed. ‘It was just like, ‘Boom, what’s going on here?’ said Mitch Webb, the director of the 81-year-old mission. In early 2016, the mission served an average of around 8,700 meals a month. After the new food stamp policy went into full effect, that jumped to over 12,300 meals a month. ‘It never renormalized,’ Mr. Webb said.

[A GOP lawmaker comments:] “The information I have is that there’s been significant savings over all,” he said, coupling that with a low unemployment rate as evidence that the policy was working.

‘If a person just chooses not to work, which those are the people that were targeted, they’re not going to get a free ride,’ he said. Of people who are facing concrete obstacles to steady work, like a lack of transportation, he added: ‘If there’s a will, there’s a way.’”

A 2018 federal study came to the conclusion that work force participation didn't change much after the work requirement was imposed:

We perform a regression discontinuity analysis of the impact of work requirements for able bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) on labor supply and participation, exploiting the fact that the work requirement applies only to individuals under 50 years old. Using a novel dataset containing ABAWD work requirement waiver information merged with SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] administrative records and American Community Survey (ACS) data, we find the work requirements have no impact on labor force participation and the number of hours worked. We do find that the work requirements reduce participation in SNAP. There is some evidence that those with worse job prospects are especially less likely to participate in SNAP as a result of the work requirements.

It’s their own fault

A common human trait to shut compassion down is to blame shift. People deserve their unhappy situation. The data indicates that even when there is a will to work, there isn't always a way to do so. If there aren’t jobs, there just aren’t jobs. Nonetheless, blaming people for laziness or whatever else works nicely to justify work requirements and the increase in hunger that can lead to. Even people receiving food assistance fall back on this tactic.

The NYT writes: “At dinnertime at the city mission, men complained about people who were too lazy to work, who were sponging off the system. ‘Not giving people food stamps because they don’t work is probably the best course of action,’ said Zach Tate, who had been at the mission before, but now, with a place to stay, was just back for a meal. ‘It’s like training a puppy.’ He returned to his turkey Alfredo for a few moments and then clarified. ‘But taking it away indefinitely doesn’t work either,’ he said. ‘It creates a sense of despair.’”

Even poor people without enough income to feed themselves attack food stamps as undeserved. It doesn't matter that most working-age adults on food stamps have a job or are between jobs, and often don't even have transportation to get to a job. Realities like that just don't intrude on the blaming mindset. One man lost his job when his employer checked and found he had a bad credit rating. he wound up on food stamps. Some disabled adults are dependent on relatives but are still not considered dependents for food stamps. It’s all their own fault. Let ’em starve because they deserve it.

Human compassion is a fragile, very easy thing to shut down. All it takes is some rigid ideology or a little ignorance of the logistics of poverty and, poof! Like magic, compassion is gone. Contrary data be damned.