Tinotopia

A few members of Congress are engaging in a publicity stunt where they live for a week on $21 worth of food. This is the amount that the average food stamp recipient receives, according to the story in the Washington Post.

Now, this is stupid for a bunch of reasons, foremost among them these:

1. You don’t get food stamp benefits on a weekly basis; you get them monthly. You can save a lot of money by buying things in larger sizes meant to be consumed over a longer period of time — even if you’re on food stamps.

2. They’re being extremely disingenuous about this ‘average food stamp recipient’ thing. Here’s how much the food stamp program pays out:

People in Household	Maximum Monthly Allotment	Weekly per person
1	$ 155	$38.75
2	$ 284	$35.50
3	$ 408	$34.00
4	$ 518	$32.37
5	$ 615	$30.75
6	$ 738	$30.75
7	$ 816	$29.14
8	$ 932	$29.12
Each additional person	$ 117	$29.13 and up

[UPDATE 24 September 2008: the allotments are now here. The new breakdown per person per week is:

People in Household	Maximum Monthly Allotment	Weekly per person
1	$ 162	$40.50
2	$ 298	$37.25
3	$ 426	$35.50
4	$ 542	$33.88
5	$ 643	$32.15
6	$ 772	$32.17
7	$ 853	$30.46
8	$ 975	$30.47
Each additional person	$ 122	$30.50 and up

]

However, these are maximum allotments. Your net monthly income is multiplied by .3 and subtracted from these numbers. The idea of the program is to make sure that you’re not spending more than 30% of your net income on food. It’s probably worth mentioning that ‘net income’ here does not mean ‘net income’ in any normal sense. Your ‘net income’ is you income minus 20%, minus $134, minus $175 for each child under two and minus $175 for each other child, minus certain medical expenses, minus child support payments, minus $143 if you’re homeless, minus any ‘shelter expenses’ (including phone bills, rent, electricity, etc., etc.) that are over 50% of your income up to a limit of $417.

Apparently after figuring all of this, the average recipient gets $21 a week. I’m not going to bother to fact-check that. However, it is important to notice that the food stamp program does not intend you to eat on $21 a week. The clear point here is that the USDA thinks that you should spend $30 to $35 a week on food. If you cannot afford this, the USDA will fund your eating more or less up to that amount.

If, however, you can afford to spend something on food but not $35 a week, the USDA will make up the difference in food stamps.

So the members of Congress are out to demonstrate that spending 25% of the monthly food stamp claim will not feed them for a week, even though food stamp benefits are not paid on a weekly basis and even though the food stamp program will pay you more than $21 a week if you are determined to have sufficient need.

The Washington Post, of course, does not notice any of this.

What’s more, the members of Congress seem to have no idea how to do this — which is fine by them, since their whole purpose here is to show how much ‘hunger’ there is in the U.S., and that the food stamp benefit needs to be increased.

Congressman Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) posted his grocery receipt.

He spent $20.66 on corn meal; strawberry preserves; peanut butter; pasta; coffee; tomato sauce; cottage cheese; bread; and garlic.

The coffee, which has no nutritive value and which is in fact a psychoactive drug (though one that you can buy with food stamps), cost $2.50, or more than ten percent of his total budget.

Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) got his wife to go along with this too, and so he spent $41.70 on a ‘fajita kit’; brown rice; tuna; coffee; lentils; spaghetti; beans; peas; broccoli; bananas; potatoes; onions; apples; garlic; shredded cheese; chicken; and what he calls ‘fatty’ beef.

Now, I’m no big-city Congressman, but it seems to me that when buying food on an extremely constrained budget, one of the first things you do is not buy pre-shredded cheese. Or coffee. Or anything offered as a prepared food ‘kit’ (though in fairness that fajita kit was only $1.79).

Unless, of course, I wanted to make an extremely dubious point, secure in the knowledge that the Washington Post et al. would never point out the obvious.