Bureaucratic barriers hide the real numbers of poor people

Sunday's New York Times reported on a curious phenomenon: poverty and unemployment are increasing, but somehow the welfare rolls are not going up-- the rate of enrollees from last year to this year is a statistically insignificant 0.3%. A few states had increases, a few had decreases, but it all balanced out.

The number of people receiving food stamps, however, went up in every single state, sometimes dramatically-- Florida's rate went up 16%.

So why the difference?

Since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act passed in 1996, public assistance, although partially funded by the federal government, is administered by each state with a great deal of latitude. The Food Stamp program, however, or SNAP as it is now called, is a straightforward federal program with a simple application form, and it doesn't cost the states a penny.

Therefore states have no reason to hide how many people are on the SNAP program, while much of public assistance, with its poor cousin homelessness, come directly from cash-poor state coffers.

Here in Massachusetts, public assistance administrators have a long history of keeping the family homeless rolls down by by creating regulations that disqualify families from shelter. If a family is not in a homeless shelter, that family can't be counted in the statistics.

This year, the line item that provides shelter for homeless families is facing a $3.36 million deficit. The Executive Office of Health and Human Services has figured out a way to reduce that deficit by $517,375 by instituting eight new regulations.

The advocacy organization Mass. Coalition for the Homeless has analyzed the impact of one of these regulations:

1. Denying eligibility to families who have been evicted or voluntarily left public or subsidized housing without good cause in the past three years. This represents a significant expansion of grounds for denial. Under current regulations, a family can be denied access to shelter if they have been evicted from public or subsidized housing for non-payment of rent, criminal activity, or destruction of property and that eviction is directly connected to the family’s current need for shelter.

Currently, this bar from shelter usually is in effect for no more than 12 months. It is unclear how broadly DTA will define good cause. In one estimate from DTA, this change would affect 20 families per month, although the actual number of children and families left without shelter may be much higher. In describing this change, DTA has said, “Families in this situation have already been granted and lost one of the most generous public benefits due to their own actions…Besides saving scarce EA resources for those who have not had this opportunity, this policy shift will be an incentive to those with subsidies to keep them.”

The Coalition does not believe that households purposely make themselves homeless knowing that they can obtain shelter or that housing authorities will change their behavior and work more closely with tenants to address problems before eviction because the family will be ineligible for this assistance. No child should be condemned to homelessness, and denied a basic safety net, for even a day, let alone three years.

Once again, poor people are in a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" situation.

During the Bush years, when the leaks in our economy had not yet become visible, there was no room for poor people to make a decent living. Now, when even the middle class is suffering, poor people are just supposed to suck it up-- times are tough for everyone, right?

I will be curious to see if the new stimulus plans will reach deeply enough to to offer hope for those at the economic bottom. But based on past history, I'm not holding my breath.

Who is worthy? Poverty & the price of shrimp

Community forums where anonymity prevails are a great if sometimes painful way to find out what people really think about poor people.

Yesterday, New Year's Day, someone commented on Springfield MA's s forum that he or she had seen someone on food stamps buy $40 worth of crab legs.

One poster (I am not allowed to quote directly) asserted that some poor working joe who's trying to support a family on a $10 an hour wage would never be eating shrimp or crab legs and that what a person is allowed to buy on food stamps should be circumscribed. My query as to the possibly apocryphal nature of this observation-- was this something the poster had observed first-hand or had heard about from someone else?-- went unanswered.

The next thirty posts were about how 85% of food stamp users sold their food stamps for money or drugs, or bought shrimp platters or other expensive food items with them.

Now, the truth is, the days when food stamp recipients had to fumble with tearing $1, $5 and $10 coupons out of a book while others in the checkout line waited impatiently are long gone. The user swipes a card pretty indistinguishable from a regular debit card, so you really have to be right on top of someone and really trying in their business to know exactly how they're paying.

So let's do a reality check about our poor working slob who earns $10 an hour to support his family, and whether or not a shrimp platter would ever be in his budget.

First of all, our friend Joe is almost certainly eligible for food stamps himself-- and so are at least some of the forum posters.

Let's say Joe has a wife and two kids, works fulltime at $10 an hour, and lives in a $750 a month apartment in which he pays his own utilities.

Luckily for Joe, according to MassResources, his family is eligible for some fuel assistance.

Then, if I go over to the Food Stamp Calculator, and keep it simple by assuming Joe has no other income or major expenses such as childcare, Joe and his family should get about $380 a month in food stamps.

Joe's family's in trouble, of course. Let's take away 25% of $1,600 for taxes, leaving $1,200, and then deduct his $750 rent. He's got $450 a month left to live on, and of course he has other expenses.

But it's New Year's Eve. He goes to Shop and Stop after work to pick up a few things, and his eye is caught by a shrimp platter in the seafood section. It's only $26. He stops for a minute and then thinks, "What the hell."

The woman behind him in the check-out line seems not in the holiday spirit; she frowns at his tentative smile. But that's OK. It's New Year's Eve and he's headed home. Home to his family.

Next wave of suffering: $1 billion cut from Mass. budget

Gov. Deval Patrick filled in some of the details today from this week's announced $1 billion dollar cut from the state budget to help close a projected $1.4 billion gap. Obviously he's doing what he needs to do, although I expect to find considerable disagreement with some of his choices, especially when it comes to those services provided for those who have the least to spare in their own budgets.

Patrick also intends to lay off 1,000 state workers. Some of those workers will not be able to pay the mortgages on their homes and will fall into foreclosure. Other workers will have to apply for food stamps and fuel assistance. Food stamp usage is at an all-time high in this country and fuel assistance funds are in short supply.

There's nothing like a fiscal crisis to move an economy into a penny wise, pound foolish mode. That's one thing I'm appreciating about Barak Obama-- when asked what he will cut from his proposed programs if he becomes president, he says he is not going to cut fund to promote energy independence. Not only would it free us from dependence on other countries to meet our needs, true energy independence would create jobs.

I'm finding it hard to figure out how we're going to get out of this mess short-term-- maybe even long-term-- and I worry about how the poorest people are going to survive. Usually I aim to be pro-active, but I think I'm going to cut myself a little slack and let myself realize that like it or not, a lot of us will do a lot of suffering before this is over.

Correction to yesterday's post

Jerry just had some more back luck. Once he gets a job, as a homeless person, he will receive only $28 a month in food stamps, not the $98 I thought.

Once he is renting a room, and still working, he is eligible for $73 in food stamps-- again, not $98.
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put everything in late
still today I ate
my first cucumber