On not feeding the hungry
Amidei, Nancy
THE BUDGET BREAKS FAITH WITH THE POOR On not feeding the hungry NANCY AMIDEI IT HAS BEEN argued that last November conservatives won, not conservatism; that liberals lost, not liberalism. Someone...
...The food assistance programs are a case in point...
...On the strength of that, and in order to make the idea administratively workable, every food stamp family with children in a school that offers lunch will have its food stamps reduced by $12 a month for every child-whether or not the child eats a lunch at school...
...The theory behind President Reagan's proposal rests on the false assumption that the food stamp program gives families enough for three full meals and that a free school lunch is thus a "duplication...
...At the same time, the child nutrition programs were reduced by $500 million, (a cost which has been passed on to local public and private schools...
...700,000 pre-school children of working parents will no longer get a meal at their day care center, over 700,000 women and children will lose the benefits of WIC...
...Taken together these proposals will save the president $2.1 billion by asking those who now have only 44 cents per meal to manage on less...
...His budget will devastate the very groups and programs that liberals have traditionally supported...
...Twenty-two million Americans, many of them victims of the recession (the food stamp program grows by over one million people for every one percent rise in unemployment) use food stamps...
...We could make other choices...
...Since the food stamp program does not provide enough for three meals daily, it is hard to understand just what the school lunch "duplicates...
...Overall, of the first $34 billion worth of reductions announced by the president, $16-19 billion (roughly half) comes from programs on which the poor depend...
...employable and unemployable will both be worse off, the disabled as certainly as the physically sound...
...The elderly now qualify for congregate meals and Home Delivered Meals, while 2.2 million nutritionally vulnerable pregnant and nursing mothers and their young children get specially nutritious foods through WIC...
...Reagan or the country, but raises the issue of whether people who are victims of recession, age, or accidents of fate will be allowed to eat...
...There are still people with too little to eat and with poor diets, but the kind and extent of serious malnutrition that were so visible in the late 1960s are no longer to be found...
...said, was the broader availability of the federal food assistance programs-particularly food stamps and WIC...
...families with children will find their food stamps reduced by more than one of the proposals...
...Three times since 1977, the food stamp program was amended to make it tighter and more restrictive...
...we know what it will mean in human suffering to dismantle them...
...For the food programs alone, the reductions are dramatic, particularly when viewed against the backdrop of the past three years...
...Similar contradictions abound...
...At best the food stamp program provides $2.00 per person each day for food...
...And the reason, the health professionals NANCY AMIDEI, formerly deputy assistant secretary of the U.S...
...2.3 million poor children will no longer get a lunch in the summertime when school is out...
...those with lower-than-average social security payments will now get lower-than-otherwise food stamp benefits...
...Thus even in the case of children home sick from school, they will be fed by a family with even lower family food resources...
...Each of these programs will be reduced by 30 percent, 40 percent or more...
...Those who take the low-paying jobs will be penalized for their efforts, and neither the very young nor the very old will be spared...
...By continuing to keep food stamps four to fifteen months out of date, $423 million will be saved...
...that bigger issues are at stake than sentimental images of hungry people...
...Another $450 million in savings comes from a variety of changes in the ways that income or benefits are to be calculated from now on...
...the fact that the reductions do not come from the budget item labeled "free school lunch" is less important...
...The results are no different than they would be if the specific budget item had been reduced: in many places there will no longer be a free school meal provided, and for many families the free school meal will represent a costly loss of badly needed food stamps...
...The question may quickly become moot, however, because the spend-reductions overall are so severe that many school food service managers doubt they will be able to continue operation of a program at all...
...If the president's proposals are adopted, we will have made a choice...
...Some say that these are not the times for tales of starving children...
...Twenty-seven million children participate in the school lunch program (one-third of them for free...
...overall there was very little for the hungry poor...
...This is especially unfortunate because the food stamp program does not provide enough for three meals daily-a fact acknowledged by the Department of Agriculture and in 1977 by the Congress...
...Beyond the rhetoric, the billions, and the economic theories, this and every other budget are fundamentally about choices, and about all of those whose lives will be affected...
...In the world of social programs, that is a minor revolution...
...Food stamp users are generally very poor household income averages about $300 a month...
...Since school officials cannot keep daily count of who eats meals and who doesn't, a family's food stamps would be lowered automatically...
...Someone should tell President Reagan...
...Worse than that, we will have said to millions of Americans that we no longer care...
...Those who want to work but are responsible for dependents who might otherwise require costly institutional care (retarded adults, a frail spouse, very young children) will not be permitted to deduct the cost of that dependent care separately so that another $39 million can be saved...
...It is these highly successful programs, these programs which in fact "work" and have made such a difference in the lives of poor Americans, that are under attack and would be dismantled by the Reagan economic program...
...Another staggering cut of almost $2.3 billion (out of roughly $5 billion) will come from programs for child nutrition: parents earning $5.50 an hour will find their children's lunch going up from 20 cents to 70 cents...
...In many places school-based programs will simply close...
...Finally, $300 million will be cut from food assistance to Puerto Rico...
...on the average, the benefits are more like $1.30 per person each day...
...Less money is less money...
...IN ONE way or another, the president's proposals to reduce spending in the food stamp program will affect virtually everyone that depends on it: those who work but earn very low wages will be especially hard hit...
...But that hurts the poorest most of all, and is no respecter of other "protected" groups like the disabled or social security retirees (their situation is already tenuous: those whose only income is average social security benefits will be cut off the food stamp program altogether...
...There were no school breakfasts, no programs for the elderly, no special supplemental foods for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC...
...Our national record in relieving serious hunger and malnutrition is one of the major success stories of recent times...
...Those with relatively higher "paper incomes" are people with exceptional expenses which severely limit the money they have available for food and for which they are currently permitted some deductions (much like the deductions taxpayers may claim in figuring tax liability): high medical or utility bills, expenses related to work...
...It is a sad commentary on the hopes so many people had in electing their new president.n electing their new president...
...We will have turned back the clock to that time just a decade and a half ago when doctors did indeed find children starving in America...
...the disabled and elderly people with high medical bills will get fewer food stamps...
...In that process over eight hundred thousand people lost their eligibility for food stamps, and all food stamp benefits were effectively reduced by being pegged to food store prices four to sixteen months out of date...
...Today all that is changed...
...Despite the president's claims that he will protect the "truly needy," and certain programs or groups (like free school meals), the cuts in food assistance hit every age and population group among the poor, the "truly needy" very much among them...
...And it will eliminate one million people from the program, most of them elderly, disabled, sick, or currently working at low-paying jobs...
...Over one-half have no assets and no car...
...At that time there was very little in the way of food assistance:a food stamp program in only a few hundred counties, inadequate surplus foods, a school lunch program priced out of reach of poor children...
...In the late 1960s, health professionals documented serious problems of hunger and malnutrition among low-income Americans...
...Limiting food stamp eligibility on the basis of a gross dollar-income amount (in this case 130 percent of the poverty line) will be less fair, but it will save money - $275 million...
...Whatever else has happened to poor people during these hard years of unemployment and recession, they have at least had the hope of being able to feed themselves...
...We,know what it has meant to have these programs in place...
...For those of us who remember when hunger was being "discovered" in America, and who have seen the difference that the food assistance programs have made in people's lives, the Reagan budget has a particularly cruel edge to it...
...Those changes saved $600 million...
...These same programs will also absorb a major share of the nearly $15 billion in additional cuts...
...They're wrong...
...And the president's other proposals indirectly, devastatingly, do affect the free school lunch...
...It is difficult to discover the social policy design beneath these proposals...
...So the president's proposals prove to have a particularly cruel twist...
...This economic plan is not some abstract test of loyalty to Mr...
...So, when the Department of Agriculture conducted its most recent food consumption survey, and when the Field Foundation sent an even bigger team of health professionals out to poor communities across the nation in 1977, they found nutrition much improved among the poor...
...We could choose to distribute the tax burden more evenly, or require that the Pentagon practice the same economies being demanded of every other public agency...
...three-and-a-half million children get breakfast at school...
...In the case of WIC, the reductions could result in a higher incidence of low-birth-weight infants born to poor mothers-with all the increase in sensory and neurological handicaps and higher infant death rates that that implies...
...Much was made of the claim that the free school lunch program was "protected...
...And indeed, none of the budget reductions comes directly from the budget line for that program...
...We will have chosen for some parents that they no longer be allowed to feed their children, will have chosen for some of the sick and disabled and elderly that they should be more sick, less able, more frail...
...A Field Foundation report in 1967 and the Ten State National Nutrition Survey gave ample proof that poor Americans were at serious nutritional risk...
...Department of Health, Education and Welfare, is the director of Food Research Action Center in Washington, B.C...
...It is almost as though those designing the reductions cared about the amounts to be saved but not about the effects of those savings...
...Poor people who depend on the federal food programs started out behind, and they get farther behind with every new announcement on the budget...
...The elderly who are not only poor but who have high monthly medical bills as well are being asked to make do with fewer food stamps so that $25 million can be saved...
...So when this year's budget exercise is touted as treating all groups equally, and as requiring all elements of society to share the pain, the operating premise simply isn't true...
...The free, school lunch is somehow to be "protected" but not the families whose children need it, and the protection is so clumsily designed that it will jeopardize the program's future...
...It is possible to be both fair to this country's workers, and sensitive to the needs of this country's poor...
...But free school lunch does not exist in splendid isolation either for individual families, or for schools...
...The proposal to save $600 million by giving fewer food stamps to the families of children with access to a free school lunch provides a useful illustration...
Vol. 108 • April 1981 • No. 7
