Newsweek's November 29 2010 issue's cover story was about the great differences between rich, nutrition and environment-conscious eaters and poor, nutrition and environment-oblivious eaters in America. It was an interesting article, but I have some comments.
I object to the divisive and sensationalist language, such as the comment that "America is a place of extremes, and what you eat for dinner has become the definitive marker of social status..." That is ridiculous. Like pretty much everything, America is a place of relatively normal distributions. Sure, the ultra-rich have gotten ultra-richer over the decades as they manipulate our government, but the overwhelming majority of citizens are in the big middle of the bell. Secondly, there is no way that dinner is the definitive marker of status. A third party looking at my great dinners and small apartment compared to someone with a six-figure income who owns a big house but eats fast food is not going suggest that I am of higher status.
The article talks about 50 million Americans living in food insecurity, one third of whom are have very low security, and ties this phenomenon in with poverty, but then goes on to point out that poverty and reliance on food stamps linked to obesity, but it fails to discuss the connection between food insecurity and obesity. The connection is not obvious, and any astute reader should ask "how are so many people obese and not getting enough food at the same time?" There is no talk of metabolism. When a person does not eat regularly, even within the course of a day, that person's metabolism slows down, burning fewer calories and storing more as fat because the body (hypothalamus) worries that the irregularity of food intake is a sign of impending starvation for a time. The body wants to build up fat stores and use as little energy as possible so that the person can survive until food is available again. When a person on supplementary nutrition assistance (SNAP, not really food stamps anymore) squanders the rations before the next month, eating a lot for a while then having too little food for some time, the metabolism drops and much fat is created during the weeks of plenty. A problem is impulsive shopping and impulsive eating when assistance is renewed, or when a paycheck comes in, instead of thoughtful planning and rationing.
The article does point out that "Lower-income families don't subsist on junk food and fast food because they lack nutritional education.... Lower-income families choose sugary, fat, and processed foods because they're cheaper -- and because they taste good." This is key. Education is not the problem. The problem is that the kind of person who is likely to be poor (impulsive, poor planning, poor insight) is also the kind of person who insists on buying unhealthy food. Cost is a red herring. I prove constantly that a SNAP budget is adequate for healthy eating. When SNAP recipients are given the opportunity to buy discounted healthy food, they do not buy more than they usually do, but instead use any savings to buy more unhealthy food. They don't want more healthy food. People Like Us showed that whole grain bread could not be given away in a poor neighborhood. There is not enough demand, and that is why there are so few stores in poor neighborhoods that sell good food.
The author follows a single mother SNAP recipient and her two kids and their eating habits. The mother spends $100/week on food, which is less than the maximum SNAP allotment for a family of three, so I'm guessing that the mother makes more money than the poverty line. $100/week for three people is not great, but it's doable to get healthy food. A super healthy breakfast can be made in two minutes for less than $1, but instead the mom takes the kids to a bodega each morning to buy processed foods and soda at many times the price. The mom only recently stopped getting doughnuts and lattes at Dunkin' Donuts because of the calories, totally oblivious to her massive daily waste of precious money. Several nights each week she gets fast food takeout for dinner. She makes homecooked meals on the weekend when she has more time and energy, but the article doesn't explain why she doesn't make enough to last the whole week.
The authors (Ian Yarett and Jesse Ellison) only skim the issue of a soda tax, though they present a snippet of each extreme side of the argument. I am absolutely in favor of massive taxes on soda and other "foods" that directly contribute to health problems. I am also in favor of prohibiting SNAP funds from being used to buy them. It is appallingly stupid to use tax money to help people develop health conditions that more tax money will have to go towards treating. Let's instead sensibly tax the harmful actions, and use the revenue to treat the damage they cause, at least. Nudge people away from harmful decisions, prevent harmful corporate manipulation of people, and behave efficiently with our money in ways that actually serve the American people.
If we have a more self-aware, patient, and thoughtful population, we will have fewer issues with poverty, obesity, violence, and nearly any other problem. The real sources of the problems we have here are the materialist and capitalist drives for immediate gratification of desires, insensitivity to our own internal states, and the lack of conscious monitoring of the ramifications of our actions.
Showing posts with label Food Stamps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food Stamps. Show all posts
2010-12-01
2010-09-27
What is a Food Stamp Budget?
Every once in a while some group or other challenges its members to eat on a food stamp budget for a time to raise awareness of food security issues. How much money is in a food stamp budget, and how do we evaluate if it is the right amount?
Let's turn to the USDA's FAQ for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Scroll down to the bottom of the FAQ. A person whose net income is at or below the poverty line ($903/month for a single person) gets $200/month worth of benefits, which is about $6.67 per day. Each additional person in the household increases the poverty threshold by about $312/month, and results in an another $150-167/month in benefits, depending on how many people there are in total. The decrease in benefits per additional person makes sense because of economies of scale. I happily feed two of us for less than twice the cost of feeding just myself. A family of four gets about $5.56 per person per day.
My immediate reaction is not only to say that it is easy to live at the poverty level of income, but also that SNAP benefits are extremely generous. I spent years supporting myself below the poverty line, and I still spend less on food for my household of two than SNAP would allot. Besides my experiences, let's look at some statistics from the USDA. A two-parent and two-child family earning less than $56,870 (average $36,380) in 2008 spent an average of $9000/year/kid. I would love to see the standard deviation for that, and the average for families earning less than $13,000, or even $13,000 to the top of the bottom overall national quintile if none of the study participants were in poverty. A family with $56,000 inflates these averages with its discretionary spending, so we don't know what amounts of money are actually necessary. An average of 18% of the $9000 went to food, which comes to $1620/year/kid, or $135/month/kid. So, the amount of SNAP benefit for each additional kid in a family is roughly 11-23% more than many families spend on average.
A single parent spends about 2/3 as much on the kids per year, which probably gives us a much better approximation of what amount of spending is actually necessary, but we don't see in the report what percent of this smaller amount of money goes to food. If a kid costs $6000/year, or $500/month, a family in poverty will see progressively larger problems with more kids, since the poverty line only gets bumped up by $312/month/person. Except that the $6000/year figure includes a bunch of assumptions that fit the USDA model for families who are not in poverty. About $2000 of that would be housing, and people below the poverty line tend to qualify for housing assistance such as Section 8. Health care might be about another $500, and people below the poverty line tend to qualify for Medicaid, and children for SCHIP. There are pieces of information missing from the puzzle, but overall I can find few complaints with the poverty cut-offs and SNAP benefits allotments.
The complaint about SNAP benefits is of course that they are too high on average. And there is evidence that people with more SNAP funds than they need may use them to buy more unhealthy food that damages their health and unnecessarily burdens our health care system and country.
My other complaints are that the system seems too rigid, and does not obviously take into consideration differences in cost of living by geography. As seen in the USDA report, rural areas are cheaper to live in than urban areas, and the urban south is cheaper than the urban northeast. Perhaps the SNAP benefits are high because they have to be able to feed people who live in expensive areas, and people who live in cheap areas just get a big windfall of steaks and whatnot. The USDA does say that "Eligibility levels are slightly higher for Alaska and Hawaii" because food costs more in those states due to transportation. I am only looking at the federal maximum allotment levels, and different states may have different policies that better reflect their costs of living by area. In the future, I will look into the policies of my state and select other states.
Let's turn to the USDA's FAQ for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Scroll down to the bottom of the FAQ. A person whose net income is at or below the poverty line ($903/month for a single person) gets $200/month worth of benefits, which is about $6.67 per day. Each additional person in the household increases the poverty threshold by about $312/month, and results in an another $150-167/month in benefits, depending on how many people there are in total. The decrease in benefits per additional person makes sense because of economies of scale. I happily feed two of us for less than twice the cost of feeding just myself. A family of four gets about $5.56 per person per day.
My immediate reaction is not only to say that it is easy to live at the poverty level of income, but also that SNAP benefits are extremely generous. I spent years supporting myself below the poverty line, and I still spend less on food for my household of two than SNAP would allot. Besides my experiences, let's look at some statistics from the USDA. A two-parent and two-child family earning less than $56,870 (average $36,380) in 2008 spent an average of $9000/year/kid. I would love to see the standard deviation for that, and the average for families earning less than $13,000, or even $13,000 to the top of the bottom overall national quintile if none of the study participants were in poverty. A family with $56,000 inflates these averages with its discretionary spending, so we don't know what amounts of money are actually necessary. An average of 18% of the $9000 went to food, which comes to $1620/year/kid, or $135/month/kid. So, the amount of SNAP benefit for each additional kid in a family is roughly 11-23% more than many families spend on average.
A single parent spends about 2/3 as much on the kids per year, which probably gives us a much better approximation of what amount of spending is actually necessary, but we don't see in the report what percent of this smaller amount of money goes to food. If a kid costs $6000/year, or $500/month, a family in poverty will see progressively larger problems with more kids, since the poverty line only gets bumped up by $312/month/person. Except that the $6000/year figure includes a bunch of assumptions that fit the USDA model for families who are not in poverty. About $2000 of that would be housing, and people below the poverty line tend to qualify for housing assistance such as Section 8. Health care might be about another $500, and people below the poverty line tend to qualify for Medicaid, and children for SCHIP. There are pieces of information missing from the puzzle, but overall I can find few complaints with the poverty cut-offs and SNAP benefits allotments.
The complaint about SNAP benefits is of course that they are too high on average. And there is evidence that people with more SNAP funds than they need may use them to buy more unhealthy food that damages their health and unnecessarily burdens our health care system and country.
My other complaints are that the system seems too rigid, and does not obviously take into consideration differences in cost of living by geography. As seen in the USDA report, rural areas are cheaper to live in than urban areas, and the urban south is cheaper than the urban northeast. Perhaps the SNAP benefits are high because they have to be able to feed people who live in expensive areas, and people who live in cheap areas just get a big windfall of steaks and whatnot. The USDA does say that "Eligibility levels are slightly higher for Alaska and Hawaii" because food costs more in those states due to transportation. I am only looking at the federal maximum allotment levels, and different states may have different policies that better reflect their costs of living by area. In the future, I will look into the policies of my state and select other states.
2010-09-01
Food Stamp Nudges
Back when food stamps actually were stamps (they may still be in some places, but there has been a change to magnetic strip cards), I had an idea for a possible nudge. I had read that there was a problem with people using too much of their allotment at the beginning of each month, then running short of food at the end of each month. I thought that if the stamps were printed in four different colors, people would be subtly encouraged to spend them proportionally by week, with more stamps of one color for the extra days at the end of months over 28 days. Of course, this wouldn't be applicable to cards.
Another problem with buying most groceries at the beginning of the month is that fresh produce and meats would spoil before the later part of the month. The food stamp program, as implemented, encouraged people to buy processed foods that would last longer. This is nutritionally sub-optimal, contributing to health problems that already plague the American poor.
Now, Western Massachusetts is doing an experiment to see if offering a 30% discount on fresh produce will encourage food stamp users to buy more healthy food. That may be a substantial incentive, but it does not overcome the challenges of impulsivity and spoilage. This plan may also have negative unintended consequences, as we already have evidence that making healthy food cheaper just encourages food stamp users to use the savings to buy more junk food, increasing caloric intake and not improving nutrition. If this experiment reproduces the earlier findings that cheaper healthy food worsens obesity or health outcomes for food stamp users, we will have to consider other options, such as making unhealthy food more expensive.
Also, of course, there is the more effective paternalistic approach, which would be to only allow food stamps to be used for healthy foods. Food stamps can be seen as an investment that taxpayers are making into the overall health and well-being of citizens, and indirectly into productivity. If food stamps are being used in such a way that increases health care consumption, such as treatments for diabetes, heart disease, etc..., also on the taxpayer dime through CMS and state-reimbursed uncompensated care as well as increasing health care costs for everyone as hospitals shift costs to other payers, then we are all seeing a smaller and smaller return on the investment. If food stamps were used to help people be healthy, and minimize health care consumption, we are all getting a better return on the investment, and the people using food stamps will have better lives, even if they complain about not being able to buy the junk food they want.
Another problem with buying most groceries at the beginning of the month is that fresh produce and meats would spoil before the later part of the month. The food stamp program, as implemented, encouraged people to buy processed foods that would last longer. This is nutritionally sub-optimal, contributing to health problems that already plague the American poor.
Now, Western Massachusetts is doing an experiment to see if offering a 30% discount on fresh produce will encourage food stamp users to buy more healthy food. That may be a substantial incentive, but it does not overcome the challenges of impulsivity and spoilage. This plan may also have negative unintended consequences, as we already have evidence that making healthy food cheaper just encourages food stamp users to use the savings to buy more junk food, increasing caloric intake and not improving nutrition. If this experiment reproduces the earlier findings that cheaper healthy food worsens obesity or health outcomes for food stamp users, we will have to consider other options, such as making unhealthy food more expensive.
Also, of course, there is the more effective paternalistic approach, which would be to only allow food stamps to be used for healthy foods. Food stamps can be seen as an investment that taxpayers are making into the overall health and well-being of citizens, and indirectly into productivity. If food stamps are being used in such a way that increases health care consumption, such as treatments for diabetes, heart disease, etc..., also on the taxpayer dime through CMS and state-reimbursed uncompensated care as well as increasing health care costs for everyone as hospitals shift costs to other payers, then we are all seeing a smaller and smaller return on the investment. If food stamps were used to help people be healthy, and minimize health care consumption, we are all getting a better return on the investment, and the people using food stamps will have better lives, even if they complain about not being able to buy the junk food they want.
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