Eli Saslow is really doing a bang-up job reporting stories about how people are faring in the current economy (i.e. this story) and his feature yesterday following a food-stamp recruiter who visits low-income seniors to let them know that help is available, and a man who needs assistance but doesn’t want to be a “taker” is excellent:

“I don’t want to be another person depending on the government,” he said.

“How about being another person getting the help you deserve?” she said.

Did he deserve it, though? Lonnie Briglia, 60, drove back to his Spanish Lakes mobile home with the recruiter’s pamphlets and thought about that. He wasn’t so sure.

Wasn’t it his fault that he had flushed 40 years of savings into a bad investment, buying a fleet of delivery trucks just as the economy crashed? Wasn’t it his fault that he and his wife, Celeste, had missed mortgage payments on the house where they raised five kids, forcing the bank to foreclose in 2012? Wasn’t it his fault the only place they could afford was an abandoned mobile home in Spanish Lakes, bought for the entirety of their savings, $750 in cash?

The bottom line is that people who need food and are eligible for food stamps shouldn’t feel bad about signing up for SNAP—regardless of past mistakes. The piece does a good job of showing why some people who need help are hesitant to accept it.

Over at the Guardian, Suzanne Moore offers up a bite-sized analysis of the nexus between food choice, class, celebrity chefs, and rising inequality in Britain.

By replacing cash grants with paternalistic food stamps, Moore warns, Britain will “re-enter an age of Victorian platitudes, incessant moral lectures and sheer bloody cruelty.” She argues that American-style food stamps are the wrong approach to ending the “entitlement culture” that the country’s millionaire cabinet members are constantly decrying:

In the U.S., one sees exactly the kind of culture food stamps produce. Some states ban them from being used to buy fizzy drinks because of the obesity crisis, but protein and decent vegetables are beyond a food stamp budget. You cannot lecture people about healthy diets when fresh produce is so expensive.

The Guardian has a gripping editorial about hunger that is short, powerful, and a must-read. It opens with the literature of the Great Depression, and its preoccupation with food (“the 1930s really were hungry”), and goes on to explain that in England, right now, the tightening (and elimination) of welfare programs are bringing broad hunger back. It’s happening here too, but you know, whatever, keep calm and carry on, etc.

The previous summer, Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, who was serving, at the time, as an adviser to the McCain campaign, testified before Congress on the need for an aggressive stimulus program. In his testimony, he included a handy chart, based on his own algorithm, that listed the “Bang for the Buck” that various stimulus measures would provide. According to Zandi’s calculations, aid that went to wealthier Americans would not be very effective as stimulus: for every dollar that Congress cut from corporate taxes, the G.D.P. would gain 30 cents; making the Bush tax cuts permanent would boost it by 29 cents for every dollar added to the deficit.

Stimulus measures that gave money to poor and distressed families, on the other hand, would be much more productive: extending unemployment-insurance benefits would boost G.D.P. by $1.64 for every dollar spent. And at the top of Zandi’s list was a temporary boost in the food-stamp program, which he calculated would produce $1.73 in G.D.P. gains for every dollar spent.

This New York Times Magazine feature on how Obama’s early experience in the poverty-stricken neighborhood of Roseland in Chicago kindled his political ambitions for change, and made urban poverty a focus of his first run for president is comprehensive and very interesting—mostly because urban poverty has virtually disappeared as a key issue for the president. The reason it disappeared? The economic crisis caused everyone—the poor, the middle class, the rich—to say, “hey, I’m struggling too, how about helping me?” and the administration had to switch gears in the name of “the economy” instead of what kind of drastic approach it could take to ensure that 1 in every 10 children are no longer living in deep poverty. A few things have become clear: 1) As the excerpt above shows, our dollars go much farther when we focus them on the poor, and 2) We need a new drastic approach to end poverty in the U.S. because pouring billions of dollars into food stamps and unemployment insurance will enable people to pay their rent and prevent them from being hungry, but it won’t do very much to actually get them out of poverty.

After Karina Briski wrote about the time she considered applying for food stamps, we came to a general consensus that if you’re eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and need food, you should definitely apply for it.

The government agrees. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is spending up to $3 million in advertising to encourage more people who are eligible for food stamps to apply for them. USDA records show that one in four Americans who are eligible for food stamps don’t participate in the program. Some Americans are denied because their applications aren’t processed properly, while some face other barriers when applying for food stamps, as we learned yesterday from Janis Adkins’s heartbreaking story. It’s worth repeating: If you’re hungry and eligible for SNAP, don’t be ashamed to apply for it, and don’t let anyone make you feel ashamed about doing it.

Helping people get food stamps is part of my job. I am also on food stamps myself. It’s a very complicated system – the people who truly understand it have MAs in social work – but I know some things about it. Many of the points I’d like to make have been made by other commenters (e.g., accepting aid doesn’t mean denying it to anyone else) ….

..If you are eligible for food stamps, and you do not use them, you’re hurting the economy. Food stamps mean income for grocery store owners, clerks, truck drivers, farmers. You swipe that card; they get actual money, on which they pay taxes. (In most major cities, you can use your EBT card at greenmarkets and greencarts through a token-exchange system, which boosts the local economy.)

I’ll use my case because the data is mine to disclose — without food stamps, I have $104/m after rent (incl. utilities) and transportation to my job. I can make that last all month if I have to, and I have. But I keep that up, it’s not long ’til I’m malnourished. Which means pretty soon I need medical care. Which makes me actually a drain on your tax dollars, because the doctors don’t get more income with more patients.

I give $148/m in food stamps to the grocery store, the grocery store pays taxes on the income, and I spend $65 on taxable sales like shampoo, toilet paper, a ticket to a friend’s play, and having my shoes re-soled, and the drug store got $15, a venue made $7.50, a theater company made $7.50, and a cobbler made $35 — all less tax, of course.

Support your local economy. Get your food stamps.

—Lots of people had lots of opinions about Karina Briski’s essay about being young, educated, and on food stamps. Commenter Jennet Jourdip’s response, however, hit on something that I hadn’t considered before: That food stamps are good for communities, not just for people on them.

One recent Friday morning, I went to work. Not to any glass-blocked high rise, or a sprawl of windowless office buildings, but a corner cafe, four minutes from my apartment. With my $1.50 cup of coffee in hand, I dropped my bag and sat down next to my housemate, also a freelancer-slash-struggling-painter, and a new friend. At some point, our casual conversation turned to the stack of papers sticking out from my seam-busted bag: My application for food stamps. Turned out, this new friend had been on them for a few months. I hadn’t even noticed them tighten, but in a second, my shoulders slumped at ease.

“Go to this grocery store,” she said. “They let you buy beer and toilet paper.” I smiled slightly, less because of the beer, and more out of relief to be talking with someone who’d been through this sort of thing. I’d never been on any form of government assistance. I’d also never been more unsure of how I’d make rent in a few weeks.

As we volleyed ideas for the most obscene items to buy with food stamps (a cheese wheel from Whole Foods, we decided), a woman seated next to us leaned forward, her words darting out faster than we could dodge them. “Excuse me, but you’re all disgusting. And if I had time to spare, I would report you.” We were silent, which was her apparent cue to continue. She got on us about the starving people in the U.S., about the people who live in the projects just down the street from us, about draining resources that are meant for truly needy populations of people.

Our irony had fallen on the wrong ears. “But that’s what this service is for,” my housemate responded, relaying the simple facts of our less than part-time (mine) and nonexistent (his, currently) incomes. “How is it wrong?”

“Because you’re overeducated white people,”  she said. “Just get a job.” 

With a Bachelor’s in Sociology, “overeducated” felt generous. That sociology degree had fed many early curiosities, giving me the adequate chops for things like fighting cultural myopism, defending Marxism, and buying my professors’ books. But this empirical weaponry hasn’t been enough to command any victories on the jobs field.

Post-undergrad, my professional life has played out like a nursery tale. See how I’ve run into and out of dead-end office jobs, blinded more by naivete than bare entitlement. I’ve been an intern more times than I’d like to admit, as unpaid and underpaid as anyone I know. I’ve waited tables whenever I’ve needed to, like when I was three months out of school, jobless, and being considered for a job at Trader Joe’s. After the third interview, the manager called to say I hadn’t been selected. There were 400 applicants for ten positions, he said. Many of them had Master’s degrees or higher. Maybe that’s overeducation, but I can’t say. Three years of chasing entry-level work with Seattle nonprofits, and I decided to take my act to Brooklyn. That was a year ago. I wanted to work in media, but mostly, I’ve gotten really good at scraping the gunk off of ketchup bottles.

On this Friday morning in the cafe, my degree proved even more useless. I could have stared dumbly into my coffee, or attempted to explain three years of resume dumps, networking events and dark Craigslist voids. Instead I left the table to do the work that was to be my only source of income that week. A few strokes of my keyboard later, I realized it wasn’t indignation I felt, it was recognition. I agreed with her. That, with my college education and a working-middle-class-family background, I had somehow failed to keep up my end of the deal, and whatever implicit agreement my privilege came with: to work and contribute to society; to feed and take care of myself; to be resourceful and resolved enough to never accept handouts—especially not from the government.

Not until a friend was laid off from her restaurant job had I even considered applying for food stamps. The whole process had taken her only a few days before she had a shiny plastic card that automatically filled with money at the start of each month. It seemed easy. Smart, even. I knew I would qualify, but was hesitant, for reasons I can only relate to a Midwestern brand of modesty, one that had made the advent of Girl Scout cookie selling—a pinnacle moment for any girl in a green vest—cause for early-adolescent panic. When I was young, the humility of asking strangers to dig out their checkbooks for tiny cookies meant I would never earn a top-seller badge. As an adult, it has meant scrounging up money from whatever recessed savings account or three-hour gig I can tap into before asking for help.

But even there I have personal limits, I realized last summer. I was waiting tables five days a week, but the restaurant had been slow, money was tight, and I needed a bed frame. Sleeping on the floor is one way of saying “I’m young and don’t care about modern home comforts,”  but it’s also a way of making  getting up even more exhausting than collapsing into bed after an eight-hour shift. And so when a pleasant woman named Lauren told me I could make $300 in three hours by donning a school girl’s outfit and working a foot fetish party, I signed up. An hour before I was scheduled to be in the Financial District, I found myself standing in front of my closet, trying to trying to choose what looked most like a school-girl’s uniform. I didn’t have the right kind of skirt, I decided. I also decided the bed could wait.

There is a fair amount of shame in this situation. I can’t deny that. To talk about it is to talk about fear, my own prejudices, my assumptions of what privilege and underprivilege look like, about social and cultural capital, urban and rural divides, about race and its relationship to modern economic class segments. In a post-race, class-absolved society, like the one my university seemed so bent on fostering, acknowledging nuance in any concrete way is beating a dead horse. Instead, privilege is stripped of any nuance, wiped clear of context, then packaged, stamped and sold for laughs. They call it “white-person problems.”

I’m not saying this is new. My parents had the same struggles, maybe worse, as twenty-somethings starting a family and a business in the ’80s, facing a recession and a bleaker economy in the mining towns of northern Minnesota. What is new is the myth of the educated middle class as automatic recipients of middle class incomes. What’s new is the assumption that college is some great equalizer (was it ever?), that  family-of-origin, economic backgrounds, and old-fashioned connections are just extras. These seem to be the same general assumptions that sweep all young, urban, PBR-sipping kids like me into sitcom caricatures of “poor people,” or, with the right zip code and cocktail preferences, aspiring Carrie Bradshaws or Hannah Horvaths.

Being young, privileged, and poor is not a fun twenty-something adventure. I’m not one cheeky fourth of Girls. This is not an audition for the Bohemia life before I return to my family’s house in the suburbs, or get a job at a financial firm owned by my father’s friend. I don’t have a family in the suburbs, and my father doesn’t have those friends. Moving in with my mom or dad is less an option than it is a death sentence for my professional life, barely existing as is. For me, my need is simple numbers. It’s not the social poverty we know from textbooks and nightly news. It’s transitional and temporary, though there is no guarantee I won’t again find myself in a similar spot.

I don’t hear a lot of talk about food stamps. I guess because it comes down to money, and that’s always taboo, even if it doesn’t share space on the “sex, politics, and religion” creed. People do seem open to talking, though, about what food stamps isn’t. Who it shouldn’t help. They’re the same people who talk about American welfare as a socially if not racially contingent right. Where are these conversations happening? Where are people talking about what it’s like to be educated or from a middle-class family or any other form of privileged and poor, at the very same time? If it’s happening, it’s likely to end when someone says, “Go get a job,”  perhaps responded to in 140 passive aggressive characters, spewed quickly in the back of a coffee shop.

As for myself, I now have two jobs, both in the service industry. My food stamps application is still on my desk, filled out, more ready than me to be taken to the office that’s just a few blocks from my apartment. I guess it’s there, in case I need it again. And to be clear: Cheese wheels are off the table.

Karina Briski is a writer (and waitress) in Brooklyn. 

The New York Times’ Jason DeParle spoke to some single mothers who “graduated”/were cut off from welfare in Arizona, and found out what really happens when states stops being polite (and giving payments to the country’s most needy folks/allowing people to stay on welfare until they get jobs) and start getting real (cutting their welfare rolls, limiting cash payouts to two years, and diverting their federal dollars meant to help welfare recipients find jobs — what jobs, right — to other programs).

“Esmeralda Murillo, a 21-year-old mother of two, lost her welfare check, landed in a shelter and then returned to a boyfriend whose violent temper had driven her away.”

“…To keep her lights on, Rosa Pena, 24, sold the groceries she bought with food stamps and then kept her children fed with school lunches and help from neighbors. Her post-welfare credo is widely shared: ‘I’ll do what I have to do.’”

“[Another woman] counts herself fortunate, she said, because a male friend lets her stay in a spare room, with no expectations of sex.”

“One woman said she sold her child’s Social Security number so a relative could collect a tax credit worth $3,000.”

“Asked how she got cash, one woman said flatly, ‘We rob wetbacks’ — illegal immigrants, who tend to carry cash and avoid the police. At least nine times, she said, she has flirted with men and led them toward her home, where accomplices robbed them. ‘I felt bad afterwards,’ she said. But she added, ‘There were times when we didn’t have nothing to eat.’”

“One family ruled out crime and rummaged through trash cans instead. The mother, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, could not get aid for herself but received $164 a month for her four American-born children until their time limit expired. Distraught at losing her only steady source of cash, she asked the children if they would be ashamed to help her collect discarded cans. ‘I told her I would be embarrassed to steal from someone — not to pick up cans,’ her teenage daughter said.”

Ugh. But: surely these are isolated incidents and the reporter found the five people for whom the system isn’t working, right?

“As many as one in every four low-income single mothers [in the U.S.] are jobless and without cash aid — roughly four million women and children.”

Oh.

Photo Credit: flickr/Rex Roof