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Food stamp use skyrockets to record 16% of US population

Monday, August 8, 2011 12:45

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The number of Americans using the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — more commonly referred to as food stamps — shot to an all-time high of 45.8 million in May, the USDA reported. That’s up 12% from a year ago, and 34% higher than two years ago.

The program provides monthly benefits to low-income individuals and families, which they can use at stores that accept SNAP benefits.

To qualify for food stamps, an individual’s income can’t exceed $1,174 a month or $14,088 a year — an amount that is 130% of the national poverty level.

The average food stamp benefit was $133.80 per person and $283.65 per household in May.

The highest concentration of food stamp users were in California, Florida, New York and Texas — where more than 3 million residents in each state received food stamps in May. Source: (1) CNN Money

No one ever talks about the ‘Poverty Water Line’. Above the PWL, you accumlate wealth faster than you spend it. Below the PWL, you keep sinking deeper and deeper into extreme poverty. Often, it takes two incomes, no kids, and a helping hand from wealthy parents to get above the PWL.

Young couples need to budget, save to extremes and plan their future spending very carefully. After about ten years, a newly wed couple will find their PWL if they have been successful saver/planners. They see their net assets growing and their debt being reduced or managed. Once this personal waterline has been found, they will be among the group where the rich get richer and the poor get pooer. Increasing assets by gambling in the market or in shady ventures are not options for most.

It’s called inequality. The wealth and income inequality gap has skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. A massive new a underclass has been created and continues to grow. All of this is a symptom of a massive levels of political corruption where lobby money buys policies(IE outsourcing of labour the past 30 years that have decimated industry and the middle class while greatly enriched management) that further expand this gap.

Misplaced priorities

Currently 25% of the total US corn crop is used in the production of ethanol which is added to gasoline. The EPA is proposing to increase this to 35%.

At a time when world food prices are increasing at an alarming rate, this policy is shear lunacy. It is time that we started to address the concerns of the citizens of the world rather than the pocketbooks of mid-West US corn farmers. There are numerous studies that question the benefit of adding any ethanol to gasoline and certainly raising the amount to 35% will result in damage to many gasoline engines and put additional pressure on worldwide food prices. Hopefully, world leaders will not follow the US if they do decide to increase the amount of ethanol in gasoline to 35%.

First world nations traded off their industrial base at the expense of their own economies.

This has had the effect of providing cold hard cash for developing nations. Cash they didn’t have before. USA is a net exporter of food. Developing nations now compete with Americans for our own home grown food supply, thus driving the prices up.

The unwritten plan to tier humans into the cognitive elite, and then everyone else, is fully in effect. US’s middle classes and below, are deliberately being shifted into a lower fiscal base to prop up the citizens of 2nd and 3rd world nations. With each passing year, we will be competing with millions upon millions of more people, all for our own agricultural products.

An economic system based on exponential growth is supposed to work this way, producing never ending increases in population, never ending consumption of non-renewable resources, never ending pollution of the ecosystem, etc. Grow, grow, grow. Until the population overshoots and collapses. The end result of exponential growth in a finite world is completely predictable. The economic system is a Ponzi scheme based on never ending growth. It is doomed to fail.

Indeed, this is all speculation (caused mainly by fiat currency) and the rich squeezing the poor. There is no food shortage and in the last 20 years alone Americans have spent less and less on food. Food now represents no more than 5% of their annual income; it use to be 20-25% back in the 70s.

To make matters worse, when you look into the real root of the problem, it is not that the food prices are rising, it is that the fiat currencies of the world (to which these food commodities are traded) are being severely beaten by global currency devaluations of failing fiat currencies.

So the “feed the poor” mantra is nothing but fodder for the speculators who want to make a quick buck on the middle and poor classes of this world. It’s sickening. Don’t forget the farmers who are being manipulated by the large multi-billion dollar multinationals and being forced through manipulated markets to sell their wheat, corn, tomatoes at a price near or below production costs.

It’s time to bring about a whole new type of energy/wheat/food board. The little farmer and the consumer need real protection. This has gone far enough.

Hungry people are very dangerous people, social unrest follows as they have nothing to lose. If unrest occurs in a major petroleum producing nation (as it already has) and supplies are interupted, economic devestation follows in its wake. There are sound financial reasons for regulating speculation in food.

Farmers deserve a fair market wage for their expertise and efforts but in this casino it isn’t the farmers that are getting rich.

The absolutely psychopathic attitude of food speculators requires that regulations be put into place as part of an overall plan to end world hunger.

Quite often it isn’t a lack of food, but an inability to pay that leads to the scenarios of malnutrition, starvation, hunger related epidemics and political unrest/wars.

Another leg to the table to ending this barbarity is to value and promote local agriculture, seed saving and sustainable farming practices that preserve top soil and protect water supplies.

Food speculation (caused mainly by fiat currency) has created all manner of misery, benefiting a tiny few and in its current form, has to stop.

References:

(1) CNN Money