Hunger in the US is overhyped when compared with the US 100 years ago, or with poor countries today, but yeah, there's still a problem here, and you nail it. Two obvious facts that neither party wants to face: When you look at the neediest 5%, and especially the neediest 1%, you realize that a large fraction are psychotic or intellectually disabled. Expecting either category to fill out some complicated form is ridiculous. I once took a schizophrenic family friend to the welfare office, and she curled up on the floor and started to cry as the case officer asked her whether she owned any stock or bonds.
Those of us who don't rely on the government for food assistance hate it when large entities burden us with complicated paperwork requirements (IRS, DMV, insurance companies) and come to hate the entities themselves. This change will also make poor people dislike and distrust the federal government more, which is win-win from a Republican perspective.
I agree with all this. It's an obvious truism that "Increased paperwork can undermine and even reverse all those good intentions." But note how the perspective changes. Conservatives are acutely sensitive to this dynamic for businesses, but are oblivious to it (or worse) for poor folks. Left-progressives do just the opposite.
I think the point is that they are entirely sensitive to it with regard to poor people and social programs--cutting the rolls is the entire point of the new requirements! There is absolutely no goal to improve efficiency or fairness, conservatives just don't believe these (social welfare, public health, health care) are appropriate governmental functions!
I am not even a conservative and I half agree with their goal of reducing social programs. I think one in eight is way, way too many people in the richest (and one of the fattest?) countries ever getting food subsidies. I support just about anything that makes the benefits better targeted and reasonably harder to get or continue.
Mentally challenged people need something a lot more substantive than a SNAP payment system, so I wouldn’t design this individual part of the system around them.
We are really stratified, so it is difficult to realize how much some people struggle. I know many full time workers with kids who are on SNAP because many jobs are low wage. Heck, my own daughter who is in a job that requires a Master's degree has looked into SNAP because it is a four day a week job, and it is hard to make ends meet. She makes a little too much, but would qualify if she had a kid.
It's sort of like the question in criminal justice about whether it's better to convict 1 innocent man vs. let 1 or 10 or 100 guilty men go free. Conservatives believe it's better to let X number of poor people starve than to incorrectly give welfare to Y people who don't deserve it. Progressives believe the opposite. But also, not everyone agrees exactly on what X and Y are.
There also used to be a principled conservative argument that has nearly disappeared, that while as private individuals, and members of civic organizations and churches there is a strong moral obligation to ensure no hardship in one’s own community and the nation, it is wrong to do so with stolen funds (with taxation being a form of theft). In this mode of thinking there is both a moral imperative to help one’s neighbor and a revulsion for compulsion to do the same. I think we have a deep loss with our continued hollowing out of norms. Laws only go so far in establishing a just society for whatever values of x and y. The thing that drew conservative and liberals together in the past was the common moral agreements on ends even there were strong disagreements on means.
Regulated companies will spend hundreds of thousands for lawyers/lobbyists to fight against a basic recordkeeping requirement like it is life or death.
But yea no issue making individuals who highly represent lower educated/organized people do a bunch of paperwork as a general f you to the poor
Oh, yes, those dastardly 55 to 64 year old welfare queens just squandering away the prime working years of their life while living fat off the government's teat. That's exactly who we need to return to the office to make this country great again, soon-to-be-seniors headed towards Social Security age. All this from the party of supposedly less government, too! The jokes write themselves.
As one of the few SB readers who actually takes SNOP payments as part of my job: sure, it does rankle slightly when people spend it on soda or candy or fillet'o'minion. But let's be honest, people are going to buy the former anyway (so you're just eating into their limited cash reserves that would get spent on actual essentials like toilet paper, which foodstamps don't cover)...and the latter, while not mythological, is rare enough that it's basically a rounding error. Do you know how onerous it would be to arbitrarily exempt random "high-value luxury" food items? Lemme tell you, the technological backend that grocery store POS POS (piece of shit point of sale) systems run on is not rocket surgery! It was literally only this year of Our Lord, 2025, that we finally became able to *read chips on EBT cards*. Before that people still had to swipe every time. So if someone is a bit flush with government cash and wants to splurge a bit, and they think their small food budget can handle it, this red-blooded American thinks that's their God-given right and it'd be cutting off our face to spite our nose to stop it. You either believe in the power of markets to allocate scarce resources, or you don't. I think Adam Serwer got a bit out over his skis when he wrote that infamous "The Cool Tea Is The Point" article - lots of people genuinely believe they're being compassionate in some way with these sorts of changes - but ultimately motivations don't matter so much when policy changes are simply farcical on the merits. Just the nutrition facts, ma'am, and the facts are bad.
How administratively difficult it is to comply with the requirements of our social safety is underreported for sure. I have an adult disabled family member and making sure he is able to stay on the programs available to him, which are what let him live independently, while also allowing him to have a part time job, is a ton of work.
That said I am not sure changing what SNAP covers is exactly the same thing as the work requirements. That’s paternalism not restricting access, no?
Thanks either way for the reporting on an important subject and Merry Christmas.
I applied for unemployment for the first time a few years ago and I was shocked at how difficult the system was to navigate, even for someone highly educated, for someone whose case wasn’t wasn’t completely typical. And I am one of the most competent people at paperwork and bureaucracy I know. I can’t imagine navigating these systems with less cultural capital.
It would be a worthy goal to set up a system to streamline all assistance programs across the federal, state and local levels and align recertification schedules to make it as simple as possible for people to get what they're entitled to.
Unfortunately the failed DOGE experience might have soured taste for government efficiency programs.
The Great Depression casts a long shadow in America. If we are bluntly honest, any actual hunger today is caused by personal issues (serious mental issues, addiction etc.) than by someone working a job and struggling to afford food. If someone is working a job and is hungry, they’ll fill the forms out.
I’m somewhat skeptical of this talking point as someone involved with childcare.
I used to have a student who only spoke I believe it was Urdu or some Pakistani language and they had difficulty with repetitive forms like this.
Back when you had to reapply for free and reduced lunch even with a working family it could be difficult to navigate the annual forms of bureaucracy and get through these situations. Because we wanted to we had a friend of a friend make a call and explain it all but not every bureaucrat could be expected to go find someone like that. Also there’s the how do you feed the kids of the most marginal parents.
Every one of my foster kids has had food anxiety. There’s a bowl that I will do anything to keep full in our kitchen that has the anytime snacks because unfortunately a lot of foster kids have intense anxiety about the presence of food. Now these parents have all had their kids taken so clearly they’re the worst but any involvement with cps will reveal it’s a slippery mess with where the line is between the most awful parents and the ones just good enough to keep them.
They will WANT to fill out the paperwork, but even now before the rule changes, it can be daunting. I know people who have their SNAP paused for a month or two here and there because of snafus. Also, some jobs are harder to document, such as gig positions.
This is in fact not true. We are a capitalist society that requires some level of inequity and low pay in the labor market. I could show you tons of studies but won’t waste my time. Anyway, food stamps are a good way to level this required inequality.
It is why something like a UBI makes sense. Not as substitute for disability, but for assistance on the margin. Get rid of transaction costs for qualifications by making it universal (then more or less taxing it back from the wealthy).
Then you could focus all the effort of the social bureaucracy on addressing the mentally ill, the addicted, the mentally diminished and so forth.
The weird thing to me about food stamps is that even the poorest segments of Americans suffer more health problems from eating too much, rather than eating too little. It seems like it would be better to give people money that could be spent on anything *except* food.
Low satiety, carb heavy shelf stable foods are cheap. High satiety, fresh vegetables and fresh animal proteins are expensive. I think providing people with more money that can only be spent on food will lead them to consuming more of the latter on the margin (unless they really are close to starving)
There are many problems with this but it often amounts tov giving them food they can’t cook that their families won’t eat.
There’s several stacking cultural factors and there might be an argument for paternalism but it would lead to much bigger swings than restructure what snap is for.
To be clear, I was not arguing we should subsidize one or the other or encourage people to buy anything in particular. My point was that there is not a linear relationship between price spent on food and calories consumed, and that we shouldn’t be afraid of giving poor people more money for food (which in my opinion should have fewer restrictions; let people buy prepared food with SNAP)
I appreciate the clarification. I in general think that’s fine. But I think it’s underrated how much the culinary habits I’d describe as healthy are culturally determined.
My own dinner is very much this way and trying to get kids from poverty to eat lots of sautéed vegetables is challenging to the point that I serve my foster kids a lot of frozen crap so they aren’t hungry. If you know how to get poor people to want sautéed eggplant I’ll Venmo you 25 dollars right now.
It’s Christmas and half the commenters here don’t understand that a capitalist society tolerates low wage employment. And further they are very mad that the US seeks to militate against this and ensure people are able to eat meagerly. Merry Christmas!!
As a hater of bureaucracy, and especially of government forms that have never been road tested on real people (if they did road test they did a bad job), I totally understand the point. But.. just playing devil's advocate.. I asked gpt5 about this and my assistant is pretty certain that all the rules and the paperwork applied before the evil new government added some people. So if you were 50 and had no kids, (fill in list of inclusions/ exclusions) you had all these requirements before. The previous evil government made poor people’s lives a misery.. it’s just normal bureaucracy, you want to claim stuff they make you jump through hoops.
Do we see the problem here? In the richest country in the world, that has to import laborers and engineers to fill employment needs? One in eight is 12.5%. Below, Richard writes of the psychotic and intellectually disabled, but that can’t be more than 1% or 2%. The rest are bums. We should institutionalize the 1% or 2%, then these requirements would be effective and humane.
10.6% of the US lives under the federal poverty line and 12.9% lives under the supplemental poverty measure, so 12.5% seems reasonable to me, assuming the program intent is to help impoverished people.
How many of those 10.6% are receiving black market income? Drug dealers? Earning cash income and not reporting it? And how many are simply determined not to work. I have two in my family. One is a 35 year old woman who has never worked a day in her life, and the other is a 39 year old man who briefly served in the Navy and is on disability for a minor problem that was pre-existing.
That’s a bizarre construct of what I posted. I think lines must be drawn. That’s how government works. That’s what govt does for income levels, age of majority, basically everything.
But what I posted was to institutionalize the 1 or 2% that require it, and leave in place the measures that are meant to ensure we are not supporting freeloaders. That does not create the situation you posited.
Do you think ANYONE should be institutionalized? Should everyone be? Aha! You drew a line, didn’t you?
Ok where are you drawing the line? Where 69.8 and they can't fill out the forms and 69.9 they can? Wouldn't it be more likely a gradual transition from more help to less help?
Because by your logic the burden is highest on those with the least ability (the most deserving) and lowest on those with the highest level of ability (the least deserving), right?
Why are they bums? Most people on SNAP who are not children, the elderly or disabled do work. That's why I am against this work requirement. It is more cost and paperwork to find a small percentage of people who are working age and able bodied but not working for long stretches of time
Hunger in the US is overhyped when compared with the US 100 years ago, or with poor countries today, but yeah, there's still a problem here, and you nail it. Two obvious facts that neither party wants to face: When you look at the neediest 5%, and especially the neediest 1%, you realize that a large fraction are psychotic or intellectually disabled. Expecting either category to fill out some complicated form is ridiculous. I once took a schizophrenic family friend to the welfare office, and she curled up on the floor and started to cry as the case officer asked her whether she owned any stock or bonds.
She was probably fed up with how commodities investors always get left out of these questionnaires.
so unfair!
Those of us who don't rely on the government for food assistance hate it when large entities burden us with complicated paperwork requirements (IRS, DMV, insurance companies) and come to hate the entities themselves. This change will also make poor people dislike and distrust the federal government more, which is win-win from a Republican perspective.
I agree with all this. It's an obvious truism that "Increased paperwork can undermine and even reverse all those good intentions." But note how the perspective changes. Conservatives are acutely sensitive to this dynamic for businesses, but are oblivious to it (or worse) for poor folks. Left-progressives do just the opposite.
I think the point is that they are entirely sensitive to it with regard to poor people and social programs--cutting the rolls is the entire point of the new requirements! There is absolutely no goal to improve efficiency or fairness, conservatives just don't believe these (social welfare, public health, health care) are appropriate governmental functions!
I am not even a conservative and I half agree with their goal of reducing social programs. I think one in eight is way, way too many people in the richest (and one of the fattest?) countries ever getting food subsidies. I support just about anything that makes the benefits better targeted and reasonably harder to get or continue.
Mentally challenged people need something a lot more substantive than a SNAP payment system, so I wouldn’t design this individual part of the system around them.
We are really stratified, so it is difficult to realize how much some people struggle. I know many full time workers with kids who are on SNAP because many jobs are low wage. Heck, my own daughter who is in a job that requires a Master's degree has looked into SNAP because it is a four day a week job, and it is hard to make ends meet. She makes a little too much, but would qualify if she had a kid.
It's sort of like the question in criminal justice about whether it's better to convict 1 innocent man vs. let 1 or 10 or 100 guilty men go free. Conservatives believe it's better to let X number of poor people starve than to incorrectly give welfare to Y people who don't deserve it. Progressives believe the opposite. But also, not everyone agrees exactly on what X and Y are.
There also used to be a principled conservative argument that has nearly disappeared, that while as private individuals, and members of civic organizations and churches there is a strong moral obligation to ensure no hardship in one’s own community and the nation, it is wrong to do so with stolen funds (with taxation being a form of theft). In this mode of thinking there is both a moral imperative to help one’s neighbor and a revulsion for compulsion to do the same. I think we have a deep loss with our continued hollowing out of norms. Laws only go so far in establishing a just society for whatever values of x and y. The thing that drew conservative and liberals together in the past was the common moral agreements on ends even there were strong disagreements on means.
You and I differ on the x and y values for how many of those arguments were sincere.
Great point!
From the conservative's perspective though
There is a huge difference between having to ask the government to be able to do something
And being able to get free food or money from the government
Regulated companies will spend hundreds of thousands for lawyers/lobbyists to fight against a basic recordkeeping requirement like it is life or death.
But yea no issue making individuals who highly represent lower educated/organized people do a bunch of paperwork as a general f you to the poor
Oh, yes, those dastardly 55 to 64 year old welfare queens just squandering away the prime working years of their life while living fat off the government's teat. That's exactly who we need to return to the office to make this country great again, soon-to-be-seniors headed towards Social Security age. All this from the party of supposedly less government, too! The jokes write themselves.
As one of the few SB readers who actually takes SNOP payments as part of my job: sure, it does rankle slightly when people spend it on soda or candy or fillet'o'minion. But let's be honest, people are going to buy the former anyway (so you're just eating into their limited cash reserves that would get spent on actual essentials like toilet paper, which foodstamps don't cover)...and the latter, while not mythological, is rare enough that it's basically a rounding error. Do you know how onerous it would be to arbitrarily exempt random "high-value luxury" food items? Lemme tell you, the technological backend that grocery store POS POS (piece of shit point of sale) systems run on is not rocket surgery! It was literally only this year of Our Lord, 2025, that we finally became able to *read chips on EBT cards*. Before that people still had to swipe every time. So if someone is a bit flush with government cash and wants to splurge a bit, and they think their small food budget can handle it, this red-blooded American thinks that's their God-given right and it'd be cutting off our face to spite our nose to stop it. You either believe in the power of markets to allocate scarce resources, or you don't. I think Adam Serwer got a bit out over his skis when he wrote that infamous "The Cool Tea Is The Point" article - lots of people genuinely believe they're being compassionate in some way with these sorts of changes - but ultimately motivations don't matter so much when policy changes are simply farcical on the merits. Just the nutrition facts, ma'am, and the facts are bad.
Merry Christmas🎄!
How administratively difficult it is to comply with the requirements of our social safety is underreported for sure. I have an adult disabled family member and making sure he is able to stay on the programs available to him, which are what let him live independently, while also allowing him to have a part time job, is a ton of work.
That said I am not sure changing what SNAP covers is exactly the same thing as the work requirements. That’s paternalism not restricting access, no?
Thanks either way for the reporting on an important subject and Merry Christmas.
I applied for unemployment for the first time a few years ago and I was shocked at how difficult the system was to navigate, even for someone highly educated, for someone whose case wasn’t wasn’t completely typical. And I am one of the most competent people at paperwork and bureaucracy I know. I can’t imagine navigating these systems with less cultural capital.
It would be a worthy goal to set up a system to streamline all assistance programs across the federal, state and local levels and align recertification schedules to make it as simple as possible for people to get what they're entitled to.
Unfortunately the failed DOGE experience might have soured taste for government efficiency programs.
The Great Depression casts a long shadow in America. If we are bluntly honest, any actual hunger today is caused by personal issues (serious mental issues, addiction etc.) than by someone working a job and struggling to afford food. If someone is working a job and is hungry, they’ll fill the forms out.
I’m somewhat skeptical of this talking point as someone involved with childcare.
I used to have a student who only spoke I believe it was Urdu or some Pakistani language and they had difficulty with repetitive forms like this.
Back when you had to reapply for free and reduced lunch even with a working family it could be difficult to navigate the annual forms of bureaucracy and get through these situations. Because we wanted to we had a friend of a friend make a call and explain it all but not every bureaucrat could be expected to go find someone like that. Also there’s the how do you feed the kids of the most marginal parents.
Every one of my foster kids has had food anxiety. There’s a bowl that I will do anything to keep full in our kitchen that has the anytime snacks because unfortunately a lot of foster kids have intense anxiety about the presence of food. Now these parents have all had their kids taken so clearly they’re the worst but any involvement with cps will reveal it’s a slippery mess with where the line is between the most awful parents and the ones just good enough to keep them.
They will WANT to fill out the paperwork, but even now before the rule changes, it can be daunting. I know people who have their SNAP paused for a month or two here and there because of snafus. Also, some jobs are harder to document, such as gig positions.
This is in fact not true. We are a capitalist society that requires some level of inequity and low pay in the labor market. I could show you tons of studies but won’t waste my time. Anyway, food stamps are a good way to level this required inequality.
Every program has its own forms. Wasn't there a Department that could have worked on creating one form that rules them all? A DOGE?
It is why something like a UBI makes sense. Not as substitute for disability, but for assistance on the margin. Get rid of transaction costs for qualifications by making it universal (then more or less taxing it back from the wealthy).
Then you could focus all the effort of the social bureaucracy on addressing the mentally ill, the addicted, the mentally diminished and so forth.
Yes. Administrative costs could be put into additional upstream services.
The weird thing to me about food stamps is that even the poorest segments of Americans suffer more health problems from eating too much, rather than eating too little. It seems like it would be better to give people money that could be spent on anything *except* food.
Low satiety, carb heavy shelf stable foods are cheap. High satiety, fresh vegetables and fresh animal proteins are expensive. I think providing people with more money that can only be spent on food will lead them to consuming more of the latter on the margin (unless they really are close to starving)
There are many problems with this but it often amounts tov giving them food they can’t cook that their families won’t eat.
There’s several stacking cultural factors and there might be an argument for paternalism but it would lead to much bigger swings than restructure what snap is for.
To be clear, I was not arguing we should subsidize one or the other or encourage people to buy anything in particular. My point was that there is not a linear relationship between price spent on food and calories consumed, and that we shouldn’t be afraid of giving poor people more money for food (which in my opinion should have fewer restrictions; let people buy prepared food with SNAP)
I appreciate the clarification. I in general think that’s fine. But I think it’s underrated how much the culinary habits I’d describe as healthy are culturally determined.
My own dinner is very much this way and trying to get kids from poverty to eat lots of sautéed vegetables is challenging to the point that I serve my foster kids a lot of frozen crap so they aren’t hungry. If you know how to get poor people to want sautéed eggplant I’ll Venmo you 25 dollars right now.
It’s Christmas and half the commenters here don’t understand that a capitalist society tolerates low wage employment. And further they are very mad that the US seeks to militate against this and ensure people are able to eat meagerly. Merry Christmas!!
Whatever the level of socialist redistribution, it is never enough for socialists.
As a hater of bureaucracy, and especially of government forms that have never been road tested on real people (if they did road test they did a bad job), I totally understand the point. But.. just playing devil's advocate.. I asked gpt5 about this and my assistant is pretty certain that all the rules and the paperwork applied before the evil new government added some people. So if you were 50 and had no kids, (fill in list of inclusions/ exclusions) you had all these requirements before. The previous evil government made poor people’s lives a misery.. it’s just normal bureaucracy, you want to claim stuff they make you jump through hoops.
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, here's my gift: a bootleg copy of the greatest Christmas sitcom episode ever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7WjB52MKrE
The best!
“ SNAP serves one in eight Americans.”
Do we see the problem here? In the richest country in the world, that has to import laborers and engineers to fill employment needs? One in eight is 12.5%. Below, Richard writes of the psychotic and intellectually disabled, but that can’t be more than 1% or 2%. The rest are bums. We should institutionalize the 1% or 2%, then these requirements would be effective and humane.
10.6% of the US lives under the federal poverty line and 12.9% lives under the supplemental poverty measure, so 12.5% seems reasonable to me, assuming the program intent is to help impoverished people.
This is the correct answer
How many of those 10.6% are receiving black market income? Drug dealers? Earning cash income and not reporting it? And how many are simply determined not to work. I have two in my family. One is a 35 year old woman who has never worked a day in her life, and the other is a 39 year old man who briefly served in the Navy and is on disability for a minor problem that was pre-existing.
So your theory is that in the 2nd percentile with an IQ of 69 they should be institutionalized, but at 70 magically they are fully self sufficient?
That’s a bizarre construct of what I posted. I think lines must be drawn. That’s how government works. That’s what govt does for income levels, age of majority, basically everything.
But what I posted was to institutionalize the 1 or 2% that require it, and leave in place the measures that are meant to ensure we are not supporting freeloaders. That does not create the situation you posited.
Do you think ANYONE should be institutionalized? Should everyone be? Aha! You drew a line, didn’t you?
Many people need to be institutionalized and then there are those just over the limit and they need various levels of assistance.
I allowed for those just over the limit who need assistance. The limit they are just over is the one at which they are capable of filling out a form.
Ok where are you drawing the line? Where 69.8 and they can't fill out the forms and 69.9 they can? Wouldn't it be more likely a gradual transition from more help to less help?
Because by your logic the burden is highest on those with the least ability (the most deserving) and lowest on those with the highest level of ability (the least deserving), right?
Why are they bums? Most people on SNAP who are not children, the elderly or disabled do work. That's why I am against this work requirement. It is more cost and paperwork to find a small percentage of people who are working age and able bodied but not working for long stretches of time
We used to call this the “save every penny no matter what it costs” rule. You see this in so many areas.