Food Stamp

 ✅ HOW MUCH MORE WILL YOU RECEIVE MONTHLY IN SNAP FOOD STAMPS AS PART OF BIDEN'S NEW STIMULUS PACKAGE?

The economic relief bill should address the current crisis — but it can try to mitigate the next crisis, too.   As President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress gear up to pass an economic relief package, their most pressing task is addressing the recession. But some economists and activists are hoping Biden and other lawmakers will also take a longer view. The Covid-19 recession has revealed many structural problems in the economy. Vast socioeconomic and racial inequality. Insufficient support for parents, who have been asked to do much more as schools and child care close down. Low-wage workers deemed “essential” are paid very little while being asked to risk their health and lives to do their jobs. All of these problems preceded the pandemic, but Covid-19 magnified them. So some experts and advocates have called for an economic relief package to do more than just provide crucial temporary aid, including: 1) More automatic stabilizers. When the economy gets bad, Congress boosts...

A policy brief published Friday found that each year, about 500,000 households leave CalFresh, a program that provides Californians with food stamps. The brief — from the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley — specifically found that individuals were more likely to leave the program when the paperwork was mandated and that the majority of those who left the program were eligible for its benefits. In order to help remedy these challenges, the brief called on county, state and federal policymakers to limit the amount of required paperwork and bolster communication, among other recommendations. As of 2019, the brief stated that about 14% of California’s population relied on CalFresh for assistance. However, one-third of eligible Californians do not use the service, according to Matt Unrath, brief author and California Policy Lab research fellow. He added that if California narrowed its participation gap, the state could receive more than $2 billion dollars in additional federal funding e...

TJ O’Connor, 78, moved from Florida to New Orleans in the early days of the pandemic. He’d worked as a sculptor here decades ago, and planned to set up shop again. But it’s been slow-going. He drove here, but his car broke down a few months after the move, and he takes a shuttle service and buses to get to doctor’s appointments. Getting to a food pantry, he said in a phone interview with The Lens, took “three buses or something. It was kind of crazy.” Through a chain of organizations, including the New Orleans Council on Aging and the Musician’s Clinic, he’s been able to get meals delivered to his house. But those solutions won’t go on forever, and he wants more control over his diet: “you don’t get milk, yogurt, or cheese. Anything perishable, pretty much.” To fill that gap, he’s applied for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps). Louisiana has one of the lowest rates of SNAP enrollment among the elderly. Only about 30 percent of eligibl...