While the rich and the corporations have fully recovered from the Bush recession, it's abundantly clear that most Americans haven't. Millions remain unemployed, the median income is falling, and the middle class is shrinking while poverty rolls continue to grow. That last is now verified by a new statistic from the Department of Agriculture -- that currently 20% of the households in the United States now receive assistance from the SNAP program (commonly called food stamps). That's an average of 23,052,388 households for the year of 2013 -- an increase of 722,675 over the average in 2012.But that's not the end of the bad news. For the first time, a majority of those receiving food stamps are people between the age of 18 and 59 -- commonly called working age adults. In the past, the majority of those on food stamps were elderly people and children under 18. This shows just how bad our economy still is. Those working age adults aren't receiving food stamps because they are lazy, but because there is either no job for them to fill or the job they have does not pay enough to lift them out of poverty. Don't let this new statistic fool you though, since the number of children in food stamp families has not decreased (with more than 70% of food stamp households having at least one child).
And this situation may not improve much in the future. While the official unemployment rate is creeping down slowly, that is not because of substantial job creation. It is because millions have given up trying to find work, and are no longer being counted by the government as being unemployed (even though they would love to find a decent job).
And it is also because most of the few jobs being created are minimum wage (or near minimum wage) jobs -- jobs that serve only to keep a worker in poverty. In fact, the number of those working but still receiving food stamps has risen from 7% in 1980 to 17% currently -- and it is expected to continue to grow (because in just a few years, around 2020, it is expected that 25% of American jobs will be low-wage jobs).
In the past, education could be counted on to lift a person out of poverty. But that is starting to disappear also. An Associated Press study shows that high school grads getting food stamps has increased from 28% in 1980 to 37% in 2013. Other education levels are also rising among food stamp recipients -- with those having some college rising from 7% to 28%, and those having a college degree rising from 3% to 7%.
There is a way to reverse these trends. We need to raise worker wages, and a good start would be to raise the minimum wage (to at least $10.10 an hour). This would have the effect of driving up wages for most workers. We could also raise taxes a bit on the richest Americans, and use that money to help the unemployed and the poor. We could also strengthen worker unions and legislate a stop to job outsourcing -- and stop corporations from hiding profits overseas to avoid taxes. And finally, we could stimulate the economy with more spending and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.Taken together, those measures would cut food stamp rolls (and the rolls of other poverty programs), and create more taxpayers (which would help reduce our deficit and debt). The problem is that the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, oppose all of those ideas -- and they would block them (as they have been doing for years now). The only thing they want to do is funnel more money to those who don't need it -- the rich and the corporations.
This is why the 2014 election is so important. We must vote the Republicans out of power, so we can return to a saner and fairer economy.
