Report: 15 percent of Americans on food stamps
By Jeff Cox, cnbc.com
5 September 2012
The number of Americans on food stamps hit a record high in June, and economists don’t expect much improvement as long as unemployment remains high. Those receiving benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program numbered 46.37 million, the government announced in a report that hit just days ahead of the monthly nonfarm payrolls report, which the Labor Department releases Friday. The two numbers are inextricably linked as the economy battles its way back from the crippling recession that the National Bureau of Economic Research says ended in 2009. “The unemployment data is not really telling us the true story of how many people are underemployed,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital in New York. Food stamps are “a good indication of how the income of the work force has stagnated and more and more people are applying for food stamps.” With 22.4 million households using food stamps, fully 15 percent of the American population is on the program. The costs, at $6.025 billion for the month, are just off the all-time record though the average monthly benefit per person has declined modestly to $132.96. While the unemployment rate actually has come down from the 10 percent readings it showed in 2009, the number of participants for the SNAP program has soared. […] If Cardillo is correct and the proliferation of food stamp recipients represents underemployment and wage stagnation, that could signal difficult times ahead for reducing entitlement spending. Cardillo said just 90,000 new jobs were formed in August, and the unemployment rate level was at 8.3 percent. […] Data last week from the National Employment Law Project underscored how far there is to go. The group found that 58 percent of all jobs created during the past two years paid $13.83 an hour or less while just 22 percent were in the “midwage” class of $13.84 to $21.13 an hour, even though that group lost 60 percent of the jobs during the recession. “The economy has fewer good jobs now than it did at the start of the 21st century,” Annette Bernhardt, policy co-director at the NELP, said in a statement. “Indeed, it’s important to recognize that the U.S. labor market was already in trouble before the Great Recession, the result of 30 years of growing wage inequality and shrinking numbers of good jobs.” […]
