Who Is On Food Stamps? Your Neighbors

Foodstamp participation is at record highs. One in every eight Americans, and one in every four children, is on foodstamps these days. This is the same program that conservatives wanted to scrap in the 1990s. The person most responsible for ending the stigma attached to the program was none other than George W. Bush who expanded the program rather than eliminate it.

Here is the article in the NY Times.

Here is an interactive county by county map in the NY Times showing the distribution of foodstamp use. It is very revealing.

The two counties with the highest percentage of foodstamp use are the Bronx in New York City,and Hidalgo County, Texas, both at 29% of the population. The region with the highest use is the South, especially Appalachia and the Ozarks.

We usually associate American poverty with urban minorities, but the larger part of the population of the poor, and especially the newly poor, are rural whites. Suburbs have very large populations of the newly poor, and largely white.

I teach college now in the Bronx, one of the poorest counties in the USA sandwiched in between two of the richest counties, Manhattan and Fairfield, CT. Twenty years ago, I taught in rural Kentucky, at Berea College in the Appalachians. What strikes me about those two places is not how different they are, but how similar.

Both have minimal legitimate economies. Both have large thriving illegal drug trades (I remember one county in Kentucky was so thoroughly taken over that the courthouse was used to grow pot, with county prisoners providing the labor). Both have high rates of alcoholism and domestic violence. Corruption is endemic in both (in rural Kentucky, the most powerful man was the school district superintendent, and school district was frequently the biggest employer; superintendents were always under investigation for bribery, favoritism, and kickbacks; I should point out that this was 20 years ago). Illiteracy is high in both.

Where I find the most striking similarity is the isolation. My Bronx students are as isolated as my rural Appalachian students ever were. My Appalachian students had little experience of the world beyond their own hometowns. So too, my Bronx students have little knowledge of the world beyond their own neighborhoods, even with the towers of Manhattan in sight. Many have never been out of the Borough.

In both cases, the students I taught were mostly people on their way up and out of those places. I've had remarkably bright and gifted students in both places; some who probably belong in NYU or Columbia but don't have the money or the connections to go there (I remember when George W. Bush became President in 2000, a legacy student with a C average, I thought, "meritocracy my ass!").

The little community college where I teach is not so little anymore. Our enrollment this year was a record.