Without a movement that links the poor, progressive unionists, religious leftists, activist lawyers, etc., folks won't even get what they are entitled to, much less demand better programs than what exists.
Yoshie
***** New York Times 26 February 2001
Millions Eligible for Food Stamps Aren't Applying
By ELIZABETH BECKER
CLEVELAND - As she weighs bunches of purple grapes or rings up fat chicken legs at the supermarket where she works, Fannie Payne cannot keep from daydreaming.
"It's difficult to work at a grocery store all day, looking at all the food I can't buy," Mrs. Payne said. "So I imagine filling up my cart with one of those big orders and bringing home enough food for all my kids."
Instead, she said that she and her husband, Michael, a factory worker, routinely go without dinner to make sure their four children have enough to eat. They visit a private hunger center monthly for three days' worth of free groceries, to help stretch the $60 a week they spend on food.
But they have yet to turn to the government for food stamps.
"I've never talked to anyone in government assistance," Mrs. Payne said. "I didn't think we'd be eligible because we own a home and a car."
Workers at the local food bank said it appeared the Paynes might qualify for food stamps. Local welfare officials said their eligibility could not be determined unless the family filled out an application, which the Paynes said they now intended to do.
The Paynes say they have never been solicited to apply for food stamps. In that, they are not alone. In a study last year, the Department of Agriculture reported that at least 12 million people - including at least a million children - are not receiving food stamps even though they are eligible. Based on detailed annual surveys of tens of thousands of people, the Census Bureau has estimated that 3.7 million households experience hunger as a result of not having enough money for food, and that many more - 9.7 percent of all households - cannot reliably afford all their basic food needs.
"There is no reason that any American in 2001 should go hungry," said Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, who is chairman of the Agriculture Committee. "States should do everything possible to make certain that those who qualify for food stamps know it and are enrolled if they so choose. That was the intent of the law."
Yet that has not happened in most states. Despite studies warning that bureaucratic hurdles discourage the poor from applying for food stamps, states have been wary of streamlining their application processes.
A major reason, some critics say, is that states fear they will be penalized by the federal government for giving recipients too much in food stamps - or too little. In 1996, Arizona was fined $21 million because of the high number of errors its social workers made in calculating the size of benefits. Those complicated calculations are based on mandates drawn up by the Agriculture Department to deter fraud. But as a result, many states require the poor to fill out long applications and visit welfare offices every three months to make sure the benefits are correct.
"This is a nutrition program and it should be simplified," said Joseph Gauntner, director of Cuyahoga Health and Nutrition, a tough critic of the food stamp program he administers for the county that includes Cleveland. "Now the rules read like a welfare program that is all about preventing fraud with ridiculously rigorous requirements for a benefit that averages only $73 a month."
Food stamp rolls have tumbled to 17 million people from 24.9 million at the time of the 1996 welfare overhaul law, according to Agriculture Department figures. Only half of that drop can be attributed to the strong economy or new restrictions that removed the eligibility of some adults without children and immigrants, according to studies by the Agriculture Department and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal public policy research group.
"Food stamp participation has fallen much more than the strength of the economy would explain," said Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, the senior Democrat on the Agriculture Committee. "At the same time, the demands on food banks, soup kitchens and similar food sources have increased markedly."
America's Second Harvest, the principal nonprofit source for food banks across the country, has doubled the amount of food it distributes, to two billion pounds in the last two years, says Douglas O'Brien, the group's policy director.
Ohio had one of the steepest declines in food stamp participation. In 1994, 80 percent of the state's eligible poor received food stamps. Last year, 59 percent got them.
Mr. Gauntner wants the state to streamline application forms and procedures for food stamps and adopt options offered by Congress in November that would adjust rules to reflect the higher cost of living, including a change that would allow a family on food stamps to own a reliable car for work.
He also wants money for a program to tell people about food stamps.
"Working doesn't mean you're getting out of poverty anymore," Mr. Gauntner said. "The issue isn't getting people to work anymore, it's figuring out how to help them feed themselves after they come home from work."
Rather than urging an expansion of food stamp programs, Mr. Lugar proposes greater tax benefits for corporations and small businesses that donate food to the nonprofit private food banks. He said that this could encourage producers and restaurants to donate some of the more than 80 billion pounds of food wasted each year in the United States.
As Ohio's food stamp rolls plunged, demand at private food banks like the Euclid Hunger Center in suburban Cleveland exploded. When it opened 10 years ago, the center was an emergency pantry for 100 families. Last year it helped 1,000 families, giving out 255,000 pounds of groceries - canned soups, pasta, vegetables - from the Cleveland Food Bank.
Fannie Payne signed up there and, with a family of six on an income of $1,900 a month, qualified for three bags of groceries each month.
Lisa Hamler-Podolski, executive director of Ohio's branch of Second Harvest, said that a third of the people at Ohio's food banks last year were first-time users.
"They are a new class of people, mainly working poor, who are running out of resources," Ms. Hamler-Podolski said.
"We're behind on all of our bills," Mrs. Payne said. "We don't pay electricity until they threaten a cutoff. To be honest, I'm behind two months on the mortgage - that's $600 a month. We owe $800 on the water bill and $500 for heat."
The Euclid Hunger Center helped her seek aid from her parish, St. William's Catholic Church. But it hurt that three cars broke down in six months.
"They all died and we had to get Mike to work, so we bought a good used car we can't afford," she said.
The first thing to go was money for food for herself and her husband.
"Some nights Mike and I eat our kids' leftovers, and when I don't have any money for milk I feed the kids soup for breakfast," she said.
Discount coupons helped Mrs. Payne stretch her money, but each month the situation got worse.
Recently her husband volunteered for his factory's latest shift, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., to earn extra money. She started working four days a week, 5 p.m. to midnight. Now their 13-year-old daughter, Kali, is in charge of the house from 10 to midnight, looking after the sleeping children - Sara, 9, Joseph, 7, and Alex, 3.
Joseph has noticed that food has grown scarce lately. When he and his mother were shopping recently, Joseph stopped a stranger with food bulging out of her cart and asked her if she was rich.
"No," the woman answered. "I have to feed a big family of five people."
"We're a family of six people," Joseph said, "and we could never buy that much food." *****