At the Lafayette, Indiana Courier Journal, reporter Mikel Livingston, that paper's social policy reporter, set out to try to pass the Food Stamp Challenge.
The idea, in his words, was to "survive for one week on $29.69," because, he says, that is "what the average recipient of SNAP benefits, commonly called food stamps, receives each week in Indiana." By Day 6, he claimed, "faced with the possibility that eating all my remaining food on the final day would net me just 619 calories, I realized I had failed." What he really proved is that he was well on his way to succeeding with room to spare.
Livingston should have known why he hadn't failed, because he wrote the following near the end of his report:
SNAP is meant to be supplemental. Eighty percent of SNAP recipients have some form of income they're able to put partly toward food, a statistic not reflected in this challenge.
Had Livingston properly reflected the supplemental nature of the program and continued on for the remainder of the week, he would have succeeded.
For eight years, the fundamentally dishonest promotional materials provided by the national Food Stamp Challenge program have invariably made it appear as if food stamp benefits represent the entire amount the government expects a household to be able to spend on food.
Livingston recognized that they don't, but he failed to quantify their significance. Bad move, Mikel.
I first explained the situation way back in April 2007 in my first post on the subject. Here is an updated rendition of that language:
The food stamp program’s “How Much Could I Receive?” page provides a table of “Maximum Monthly Allotments."
I converted the Monthly Allotments to weekly allotments per person by dividing by the average number of weeks in a month [4.345], and then by the number of people. Here are those maximum benefit levels:
To arrive at the allotment to which a household is entitled, the net monthly income of the household is multiplied by .3, and the result is subtracted from the Maximum Monthly Allotment for the household size to find the household’s allotment. This is because food stamp households are expected to spend about 30 percent of their resources on food.
The $29.69 Livingston used is the average of what remains per person AFTER an individual or family on food stamps has contributed what the program believes they can contribute towards buying food from their own resources (a fairly complex calculation that is beyond the scope of this post, except to note its existence). The program does not in effect force families to, as the Challenge describes it, "spend no more than $29.69 for all food and beverages for one week." The Program’s table assumes that Food Stamp recipients will spend more, and it’s reasonable to assume that many if not most recipients do indeed spend more.
In Livingston's case, assuming he had absolutely no food left at the end of Day 5 (he actually had a bit, but we're trying to keep it simple), it means that he spent an average of $5.94 per day for five days. At that rate, he could have gone another 2-1/2 days on the remaining $14.96 of the $44.65 of the one-person Maximum Monthly Allotment. So he could have made it through 7-1/2 days. Instead of failing the Food Stamp Challenge, he was in the process of succeeding — with at least a half-day to spare — when he quit.
Eight years later, the Food Stamp Challenge program, whose promoters by now must certainly know better, is still duping politicians and reporters into believing that benefits provided is the same as the amount of money a family has available to spend on food.
To his credit, Mikel Livingston saw through that falsehood, but he didn't take it through to its logical conclusion.
Nevertheless, congratulations of effectively passing, Mikel, and proving that it's not the automatically impossible mission the left wants everyone to believe it is. Now please pass that on to your readers.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
