Growing up in Boonville, California
in the 1990s, a friend of mine would sometimes jokingly use the
phrase "the beatings will continue until morale improves."
If people are feeling bad, what better incentive to change their mood
than getting repeatedly whacked with a stick?
The recent proposal by Congress to
add work requirements to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) reminded me of that
phrase. In the 2018 Farm Bill currently under consideration in the
House, Republicans have proposed new conditions for SNAP that
would block many
people from receiving food assistance if they are unemployed. While
at first glance this may appear like a policy to encourage greater
employment, it would actually make it harder for people to find a
job, while taking away crucial support from more than one million
hungry Americans.
While setting more unemployed
Americans on a path to employment and economic self-sufficiency is a
positive goal, the threat of withholding food is a highly ineffective
way to encourage workforce participation. Some of the most common
barriers to employment are insufficient education or skills, mental
health issues, hiring biases and a lack of job opportunities. Fear of
not having enough to eat does nothing to overcome those obstacles.
When people are hungry,
they're frequently unable
to focus, which makes it harder for them to get a job, not easier.
Instead of boosting employment, this proposal would act as a barrier
rather than an incentive.
The actual impact of this policy
change would be to punish hungry Americans. In many regions of the
country, people are struggling to find full-time work, but can't.
While the overall unemployment rate sits at a low 3.8 percent, the
rate of involuntary underemployment is more than twice that,
and exceeds 10
percent in many states and counties. This proposal would leave those
who are unable to find a job with neither income nor food assistance.
Instead of adding poorly-designed
restrictions to SNAP, we should be pursuing evidence-based policy
changes to increase the effectiveness of our social programs. As
someone who works on universal basic income policy, I've spent years
studying the effects of unconditional benefits, i.e. what happens
when you offer people support without any requirements on their
behavior. Every analysis has arrived at the same conclusion:
When you give people benefits without strings attached, they use them
for productive purposes. The vast majority of people want to do well
in life, and they’ll make the most of any support they receive.
When we layer on restrictions and
bureaucratic hoops that recipients must jump through, not only does
this not improve people’s behavior, it actually blocks many people
from receiving much-needed support. Even without the new work
requirements, SNAP already has many barriers to access that make it
difficult to enroll. In California, the latest estimates finds that
only 70 percent of eligible residents receive SNAP
benefits—due in large part to the challenging enrollment process.
SNAP has a profound positive impact
on hungry families. Beyond just providing food security, recent
research has found the program reduces healthcare
costs and increases economic
self-sufficiency for women who received benefits as children. We
should be striving to boost participation by removing onerous
participation requirements, with the goal of ensuring that every
hungry American has access to the program.
Our social safety net is far from
perfect—there are many needed changes that can help lift more
people out of poverty and set them on a path for long-term success.
But if we want to do better, we should aim to remove barriers to
access, not punish struggling Americans by taking food assistance
away from those who can’t find work.
>> The article above was written by Jim Pugh, and is reprinted from In These Times.
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