Mostly. Rice and Beans showed up a lot. If you shop late at night when they’re replacing the stock, you can get meats right as the go on sale for not being fresh.
I already said it was unpleasant. But it is enough to survive on.
When I was in grad school, I lived on a food budget that was somewhere around there.
Consider: for $10 at Wegmans, I could buy a large box of cereal, a gallon of milk, and a gallon of orange juice. With that, I could have breakfast for two weeks, so about $20 would get me a healthy breakfast for a whole month. I’m sure that I could get lunch and dinner with the remaining $113.
Well I’ve learned something new today. Thank you. But in any case, the PPACA (“Obamacare”) is expanding Medicaid and making subsidized health care plans available to both the poor and middle class. Once in effect, the poor will thus have health care.
Just another data point - and not in any way intending to diminish or dismiss anyone’s difficulties - but US$1133/month is more than my take-home pay here in Rio de Janeiro, and about US$50 below my nominal salary. That’s for full-time skilled work, and above average here - around three times the minimum wage.
Rio de Janeiro isn’t a cheap city to live in - not cheaper than the US (except presumably outlier cities like New York). By the Big Mac Index as a quick comparison point, Brazil is more expensive than the US: http://www.economist.com/content/big-mac-index
I guess all I’m trying to say that in a discussion about how America treats the poor, it’s worth looking at exactly what being “poor” means.
I don’t think this is entirely true. Obamacare is far from universal. There will still be poor people without healthcare. It’s better than nothing, but still.
Not to mention people who can’t navigate bureaucracy as well as the average middle class person. Imagine if going to the DMV, waiting for 4 hours and then being told you don’t have the right paperwork and doing it all over again tomorrow was the only way you could afford to see a doctor? Homeless people, the mentally ill, the senile, they’re not going to put up with that.
Until you can go to a hospital or doctor’s office and get quality care with no questions asked, UHC is not a reality. It’s like voter ID: throwing a bunch of bureaucracy in people’s way will necessarily exclude people. Time, effort and education required to navigate these organizations are still substantial costs, even if everything is nominally “free”.
I hope you’re better at cooking than you are at math:
$10x4x4 = $160 not $100 and that does not include any inflation. This assumes a 4 week month. So we’re good to go for Feb. anyway. Filthy poor don’t need to eat for those two or three days extra in the other 11 months.:smack:
That is interesting, and just to throw out a little more data that may or may not be relevant – that $1133 was the maximum unemplyment benefit allowable. I was very lucky to be single and childless. The benefit would not have been any higher if I had a child, or a dozen of them.
I must have missed where somewhere said there were Americans dying in the streets from hunger.
We could house all the poor people in cardbox boxes and rest assured they’d survive like this. But I don’t want to live in a society where there a bunch of cardboard box slums and people are constantly hungry, albeit “alive”. That’s a recipe for disaster.
“Survival” is the goal of the Third Word. Not an advanced, industralized country.
Perhaps we should revisit TANF - as in the acronym is for “Temporary Assistance to Needy Families”. If you’re trying to live for a decade on food stamps, you’re doing something wrong.
It’s not that I think we shouldn’t help people who are down on their luck - it’s that I don’t think we should do it on a permanent basis.
Maybe or maybe not. When I inquired about Obamacare in June, no one oncluding state health officials or social service agaents, could tell me anything. First, because governor Walker was (maybe still is) not cot cooperating with its implementation here. So there were no rules established about elgibility or really anything else.
2nd, and something that also seems to be one of the biggrst flaws in that study, all these benefits are counted as “income” if you sign up for them – even if you don’t necessarily use them. So getting one set of benefits may preclude you from getting another set.
Just as another small example. My food benefit was $200/month. If I was very frugal with that (and I was) and only spent $100 of it, my food “income” was still $200/month. If it turned out that put me $50 a month over the limit for some other benefit, too bad for me, no matter that what I actually bought and ate would have kept me under it.
Since no one appears to have quoted it yet: Statistics on food insecurity in the US:
In 2011, 50.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, 33.5 million adults and 16.7 million children.
In 2011, 14.9 percent of households (17.9 million households) were food insecure.
In 2011, 5.7 percent of households (6.8 million households) experienced very low food security.
In 2011, households with children reported food insecurity at a significantly higher rate than those without children, 20.6 percent compared to 12.2 percent.
In 2011, households that had higher rates of food insecurity than the national average included households with children (20.6 percent), especially households with children headed by single women (36.8 percent) or single men (24.9 percent), Black non-Hispanic households (25.1 percent) and Hispanic households (26.2 percent).
In 2011, 4.8 million seniors (over age 60), or 8.4% of all seniors were food insecure.
Food insecurity exists in every county in America, ranging from a low of 2.4 percent in Slope County, ND to a high of 35.2 percent in Holmes County, MS.
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Cites for each statistic can be found on the linked page.
The question is whether “many Americans are going hungry”. 50 million people definitely counts as ‘many’, which leaves only the largely definitional issue of whether ‘food insecure’ qualifies as ‘going hungry’.
Tell that to employers who won’t hire an “overqualified” 50-year-old who has been unemployed for longer than three months and is unfortunate enough to have children.
Unless you make full-time employment a constitutional right and make the government create jobs for every man and woman, you will always have people who need permanent (or at least long-term) assistance. Life’s shittiness doesn’t keep to some arbitrary time schedule. Why should assistance?
But regardless, children will always need food. Even if their parents are lazy loafs. Unless you want the government to force sterilizations or remove children from poor households, the government shouldn’t be putting arbitrary time limits on aide to families.
(The conservative in me thinks that parents who have dependents receiving public assistance should submit to temporary sterilization. But since we don’t have anything like this that doesn’t come with insignificant health risks, the conservative in me lets the liberal do most of the talking.)
Just to add a little perspective this was the monthly TANF maximum in Mississippi for 2009:
$110 for the first person
$36 for the second person
$24 for each additional person
It’s true, two can eat cheaper than one!
That’s the maximum benefit-would it be possible to find the average benefit?
According to that website, to qualify:
Before you can say that it shouldn’t be permanent, we need to find a way to give everyone that wants one livable wage employment. Currently, we have four out of five people reporting themselves to be struggling with joblessness, poverty, or reliance on welfare of some form.
The people that haven’t recovered from the 2007 economic crash are still trying to get jobs and some sort of financial security five years later. The job hunt is so bad for most people that our unemployment figure is dropping mostly due to people just stopping looking. Labor Force Participation has dropped by 6.4 million people since 2007. You can guess at the reasons.
In my interpretation, why keep looking? Every job opening just gets flooded with resumes. So much so that most places now employ software to automatically drop applications based on wide criteria nets (that’s unique for each company, mind you) so you never even hear back. The list of how hard it is to get a job can just keep going longer.
The policies and regulations that sorta kinda worked to help people out before the recession basically shafted most of the US population after the dam snapped and everyone was suddenly in need.
From Gallup:
For the rest of the thread: Just from my perspective, cereal, milk, and orange juice are not a healthy breakfast. Some people may thrive on that much sugar, but I shudder at the idea.
For those saying you can survive if your calories are low, yes. You absolutely can. The hunger strike people can go for days, weeks, MONTHS without eating anything. They are destroying their health, but they aren’t DEAD so you can say they are surviving.
We could all sit around and claim we could live on a single Tic-Tac per day, but that’s neither credible nor relevant. And for most people short-term deprivation is a lot easier to bear than permanent deprivation, so saying you DID live on a single Tic-Tac back in Nam is not even worth sharing.
The sad part is, the $5 bag of cereal is cheaper and more calorific than getting something that is leaner and probably more healthy, like eggs and bacon.
A lot of people don’t know that you can buy 3 meals a day for roughly $3. Go buy those totino’s pizzas for $1 each and the eat that three times a day. It’s cheap! But it will also kill you through malnutrition and probably some form of heart disease.
That’s what the poor people can eat. It’s not a choice between Totino’s and fresh fruit. it’s a choice between a bag of rice and Totino’s and doing mental gymnastics in your head about cost and how long the rice will feed you vs the ease of just throwing the pizza in the oven.
I am on welfare and food stamps. There is a three year waiting list for housing vouchers. I get 142 dollars cash and 157 in food stamps to supplement my daughter’s income. She makes 8 dollars an hour for 32 hours a week. I don’t work because I’m considered disabled by DHS after applying for a mental health waiver. I’m waiting for approval for disability. I’ve been waiting since last November. I applied for disability for my autistic eight year old but I was turned down because apparently it’s not severe enough. She does get Tenncare, and I do now too, but my working daughter doesn’t get any sort of insurance at this time.
The food stamps help, but it really only buys about two weeks worth of food. I cook everything at home, usually three or four meals of veggies and pasta and sometimes meat. When times get tight toward the end of the month we rely a lot more on pasta and don’t eat nearly as many veggies or fruit, which costs so much more than a pack of discount stale cookies at the deli. My little girl has a lot of food issues from texture to digestive. It’s really hard to find food she will eat that is also good for her that I can also afford on a regular basis. She qualifies for free lunch but the lunches at her school are so unappealing I usually send her yogurt and a banana instead, and she drinks milk they provide.
I don’t think it would be possible for us to eat nutritious food every day for 157 dollars a month. None of us can eat beans because they make us sick. White rice is okay and we eat it sometimes but it doesn’t fill you up for long. I think we could eat, but it would be mostly pasta and canned veggies, with some mealy apples every few days. I got some great deals on canned soup this week using coupons and a sale so that’s what we’ve eaten every night since Sunday. Luckily our rent is low and our cars are paid off and we don’t have any extravagances (internet is included in rent) so we almost always have something to eat.
What the hell is “food insecurity”? What’s happening to the laguage in this country - everyone keeps trying to make their points clear by muddling the meaning, it makes no sense.
Right, and heck you’ll probably feel better on the pizza than just a bag of rice. I can’t handle that much straight carbohydrate.