Food insecurity, hunger expected to soar if SNAP benefits cut
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Food security advocates, policymakers, and others had been warning of the dire consequences to those most in need if Congress chose to halt the extra allotments of SNAP benefits. Still, the Republican-led House let the COVID-era supplemental payments wind down at the end of February.
The abrupt benefit cuts are estimated to affect more than 30 million people in 35 states, including Missouri.
Still, Congress, other elected officials, and society at large lack the political will or the compassion to eliminate what is essentially a man-made problem.
Although the SNAP extra allotments, stimulus funds, and other assistance from the federal government helped stave off hunger and homelessness during the COVID crisis, the politicians have inexplicably allowed a critical lifeline to expire, said Kymone T. Freeman, a social justice activist and co-founder of WEACT Radio in Washington, DC.
This sounds like more austerity to me. The fact that they are cutting anything now is obscene and immoral. All it means is more hardship for the poor. This will increase crime, poverty, distress, and misery. A budget is a moral document, and this is where their morality lies.
Anne Miskey, executive director of Union Station Homeless Services in Los Angeles, California, agreed.
Much of the inflation and high prices were seeing is because of corporate greed. Were expecting homelessness to skyrocket, Miskey said
Miskey contends that separating food insecurity from gentrification, low wages, displacement, and homelessness is impossible. COVID-19 has laid bare the structural, institutional, economic, and racial inequities that separate African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans from their white counterparts, she said.
The SNAP emergency allotments were designed to alleviate food insecurity and stimulate the US economy throughout the COVID pandemic public health emergency.
According to DC Hunger Solutions, the cuts to SNAP benefits will affect more than 90,000 people in the District of Columbia. On average, when this hunger cliff hits, each SNAP participant will lose over $90 a month
SNAP benefits will fall to a meager $6 a person a day. The hunger cliff will hit all age groups and all parts of the nation. The steepest cliff will be for many older adults who only qualify for the minimum SNAP benefit dropping from $281 a month to $30.
All over America, Miskey said, people are vulnerable, have health problems and, are aging, have been homeless for a long time, including seniors.
It doesnt take much: a single income, losing a spouse, an increase in the cost of housing. People are precariously housed. People have to put themselves in danger sometimes, said Miskey.
People are stealing to survive. People need help, but needing help is seen as something weak or bad. Of course, the Republican Party sells the lottery mentality. People figure theyre going to be up there one day and dream that theyre going to get there.
Daniel del Pielago, organizing director of Empower DC, said these cuts and Republican plans to disembowel the social safety net including Medicare and social security is a deliberate policy choice aimed directly at the working class, low-income households, and the poor in this country.
We have a bunch of people making these decisions which dont benefit low-income residents and Black people. They were attempting, and now theyre having success, he said.
Miskey said as she views the challenges and devastation food insecurity has wrought on poor, near-poor, low-income, and middle-class Americans, she feels anger and frustration because most of this is and was avoidable.
I think our systems have massively failed people.I shouldnt say that. I dont think our system has failed. I think our system was set up to fail. They are set up to keep up the status quo, ensuring that those people of privilege and wealth maintain their privilege and wealth.
Matthew Desmond, a Princeton University sociologist and the director of the universitys Eviction Lab, said America has a poverty problem, and poverty and food insecurity are deeply intertwined.
Housing assistance and food stamp programs are effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year, Desmond wrote in a March 16 column in the New York Times.
But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.
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Monday, April 10, 2023 at 12:15 pm