Food Stamps

Megan McArdle valiantly defends her anti-food stamp position against the forces of Big Poverty. Whether she would support the program if we renamed food stamps "food vouchers" is left as an exercise to the reader.

Seriously, though, I don't think we can agree that "food stamps are a program whose time has gone". Importantly, to divorce the question of policy desirability from political reality is a fool's errand; while the votes exist to preserve and expand the food stamp program thanks to a coalition of most Democrats plus Farm State Republicans, the votes do not exist to expand most other forms of income assistance. For another, food stamp recpients are in fact quite poor, and food stamps represent a sizeable chunk of their income. While food stamp eligibility extends all the way to those living at 130% of the poverty level, the average monthly income of food stamp recipients is $648. With an average monthly benefit of $200, food stamps account for almost one quarter of their recipients' income. To replace the food stamp benefit with the Earned Income Tax Credit would require doubling the credit's rate for households with children and increasing it tenfold for those without. What's more, most EITC filers take their credit as one big check at filing time, rather than fill out form W-5 to get a monthly EITC advance, which is only useful if you have a steady low paying job [otherwise you have to keep re-filing your W-5s], which is something of an oxymoron. And of course all of this is overuse of the IRS as a welfare agency when it should be focused on using random terror to elicit voluntary compliance with the tax code on the part of relatively rich people. State- and local-level relief agencies are much better equipped to deal with this sort of redistribution than a bunch of accountants in Washington.

So while it's true that chronic hunger in America is a much smaller problem than, say, homelessness, eliminating the food stamp program would do significant damage to the poor. As soon as McArdle gets Mitt Romney and Roy Blunt to support a doubling of the EITC, drastically increasing its benefit to childless households, doubling funding for the IRS, and a pony, I'll be on board with killing the food stamp program.

Comments

[Sir Charles]

Q: Who is more repulsive -- Upper West Side Megan or her coterie of Dickensian parody commenters?

A: Trick question -- they are equally repulsive and should all be forced to live a year with incomes at the poverty level -- and no food stamps. What a bunch of morally repellant assholes.

[litbrit]

they are equally repulsive and should all be forced to live a year with incomes at the poverty level

Better still, they should be forced to do it somewhere expensive, like, oh, the Upper West Side. Try affording food when renting a studio apartment the size of a broom closet eats most of your family's income, Ms. McArdle.