Why Not Feed Everyone?

The Trump Administration has illegally, at the time of this writing, halted payment for SNAP, the program that feeds hungry people in America. The GOP is out in force arguing that the program is about giving food to illegal aliens, or that it is rife with abuse, or that we shouldn’t pay people who don’t work to eat. None of this is true, of course. There is almost no fraud — substantially less than in the Pentagon procurement process, for example — illegal aliens by law cannot participate, and a significant portion of the non-elderly, non-child SNAP population work. The only reform really needed is to make the firms that don’t pay people enough to live on pay them enough to live on. But I want to talk about the last point: why, in the richest country in the history of the world, why shouldn’t we feed everyone?

Some, including many in the GOP leadership, seem to believe that people need to be taught not to mooch off the rest of us. That if you don’t make them suffer, possibly die, then no one will ever learn that you have to work hard to deserve what you get. There is so much wrong with that idea. First, again, note that most people who can work on the program do. Second, SNAP is a business welfare program. In addition to keeping grocery stores afloat — every dollar of SNAP adds about $1.80 cents of economic activity. Some grows, harvests, and sells the food that SNAP dollars buy. Third, all SNAP benefits are cut off, not just those for working age adults. What lesson is a child supposed to learn by starving? Do you think that permanently harming the growth of a child makes it more or less likely they will be able to find good workin the future? For that matter, what does a dead person learn?

Oh, you say, they will serve as an example to others. Work, or you will starve. This is morally monstrous for a lot of reasons. First, the official policy of the government is that not everyone who wants a job will have a job. The unemployment rate is the rate of people who are actively looking for work and cannot find it. The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate — keep inflation under control and ensure full employment. Keep in mind that full employment is not defined as everyone who wants a job has one. The Federal reserve won’t define maximum or full employment clearly — it does not even put out an unemployment number as a target. It essentially considers full or maximum employment as the level of employment that does not cause inflation. the Federal reserve is also required to keep inflation under control, and that goal has an explicit numerical target. As a result, it is the explicit goal of the law governing the Federal Reserve, and thus our economy, that is acceptable for some people to be unable to find work when they want work. In GOP land, then, the government keeps you from having a job and then starves you as a punishment for not having the job the Federal Reserve kept you from having in the first place.

And even if you do have a job, you will not be guaranteed that you can buy food. Companies often don’t give people full time hours, in part to not have to provide them benefits, in part to ensure greater flexibility for their needs. But it means that no one is promised enough hours to earn enough to house or feed themselves, much less a family. Even if you do get full time hours, there is no guarantee that your employer will be required to pay you enough to eat. Wal-Mart, for example, consistently leads the list of firms with the most employees on SNAP despite their enormous profits. No minimum wage is a living wage — a wage that pays enough to support housing, food, and medical care — anywhere in the country. So the government doesn’t force employers to pay you enough to live and then decides that you should starve if they do not.

The world is stacked against working people. Wages and job opportunities are deliberately suppressed in the supposed service of the long term health of the economy. To demand people earn for themselves that which you have setup to prevent them from earning is cruelty for the sake of cruelty. We can certainly afford SNAP — we spend more on tax breaks, contracts, and subsidies for forms that never lead to anything useful, yet we keep spending that money. Keeping it from people is both counterproductive and purposelessly cruel. We should be better than that.