30 November 2009

A front-page report in Sunday’s New York Times,detailing the skyrocketing rise in food stamp use, provides a fardifferent picture of America at the end of 2009 than the complacentassurances of economic “recovery” voiced by Wall Street and the Obamaadministration.

The Times conducted astatistical analysis of food stamp use by county, in an effort topresent a more detailed social portrait of the 36 million peoplecurrently on the food stamp rolls. “They include single mothers andmarried couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtimerecipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slenderwages leave pantries bare,” the report noted.

Among the significant findings:

• In 239 counties, more than a quarter of the population receives food stamps.
• In more than 750 counties, at least one in three African-Americans receives food stamps.
• In more than 800 counties, more than one-third of all children depend on food stamps.
• In 62 counties, food stamp rolls have doubled over the past two years.
• In 205 counties, food stamp rolls are up by two-thirds.

The geographical dispersal of themounting social need for food is staggering, from traditional centersof poverty such as rural Appalachia and inner-city urban ghettos to thesuburbs built up in the Sunbelt in the last two decades. The mapshowing the counties where food stamp usage is growing most rapidlyincludes the affluent Atlanta suburbs, most of the state of Florida,most of Wisconsin, western and northern Ohio, and most of the MountainWest, including large swathes of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming,Colorado and Idaho.

While unemployment is the maintrigger of rising food stamp usage, the immediate economic cause varieswidely, from the collapse of the housing bubble in the southwesternstates and Florida, to the collapse of the auto industry in the GreatLakes region, to the layoffs sweeping through white collar America asthe recession worsens.

The Times notes the impacton affluent suburban areas, long dominated by the Republican Party,where food stamp usage has more than doubled since the official startof the slump in December 2007, such as Orange County, California andForsyth County, Georgia. Food stamp use has grown more slowly, inpercentage terms, in cities like Detroit, St. Louis and New Orleans,but only because so much of their populations were already living inpoverty and receiving food assistance when the slump began.

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