Doug Henwood's Blog, page 32

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July 23, 2020 Jason Wilson on the protests and storm troopers in Portland • Forrest Hylton on COVID-19, repression, corruption, and drug gangs in Latin America

SNAP election

[This serves as an addendum to my article on expanded unemployment benefits Jacobin just posted.]

In April, the most recent month available, almost 6 million people were added to the food stamp rolls, reversing the long decline after the 2008–2009 recession. In percentage terms, that’s the biggest monthly increase since 1970, when the program was young and participation was just taking off. This surge is a thing unto itself.

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The number of participants in the food stamp program—which was renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2008, though the old name has stuck—declined steadily in the late 1990s, as unemployment fell sharply and real wages rose. But with the 2001 recession and the weak recovery/expansion that followed, participation rose steadily, more than doubling between the 2000 low and the 2013 high. It fell steadily through early 2020, but as a percentage of the population never got below roughly twice the trough twenty years earlier.

Benefits are far from generous, though they are a lifeline to many millions of people. As the graph shows, the real value of the average monthly benefit was increased during the 2008–2009 recession, but that was allowed to erode. In real terms (using the price index for food for preparation at home), it’s just 7% above where it was in 1992, even though the cost of food prepared at home is up 78% since then.

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The average monthly benefit per person was $181.60 in April, which works out to a rather tight $1.98 per meal. (All the SNAP stats are here.) That benefit level is about two-thirds of what the Agriculture Department calls a “thrifty” food budget for a non-elderly adult—a diet that, by the Department’s own accounting, doesn’t provide the recommended daily allowances of vitamin E or potassium; sadly, as they declare in cool bureaucratic prose, “a solution could not be obtained.” 

Despite the tightness of the budget, and the obvious need for food assistance even in more normal times, the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans have been trying to cut the program dramatically. It’s not a major budget item—0.3% of GDP—but reactionaries hate subsidizing food for the poor. Trump’s 2021 budget proposed cutting SNAP by nearly a third over the next decade. More recently, the administration tried to impose new regulations that would have kicked about 700,000 people off food stamps, a move that was blocked by a judge in March. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue—no relation to the chicken brand—justified these bits of savagery by saying the program was meant to provide “assistance through difficult times, not a way of life.” Because nothing says luxurious ease like a budget of $1.98 per meal.

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July 16, 2020 Claire Potter, author of Political Junkies, on how our politics got so divided • Sonia Shah, author of this article, thinks about the pandemic in more than biomedical terms

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July 9, 2020 Erin Thompson on art crime and the history of toppling statues • Jennifer Cohen on gendering the health and economic crises [back after another brief vacation break]

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June 25, 2020 Nikhil Pal Singh on race, class, policing, protest • Michael Kinnucan of Brooklyn DSA’s electoral committee on left victories in the NYC primary elections

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June 18, 2020 Eric Reinhart on jails as COVID-19 spreaders (article here, AER article on pretrial detention here) • Erin Hatton on “coerced” workers, from prisoners to grad students [back after vacation break]

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June 4, 2020 Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, on why cops are being so brutal and what should be done with them • Ben Tarnoff, co-founder of Logic magazine, on tech worker organizing (essay here)

NYC has way too many cops

As do many other cities, but since I’m a New Yorker, I’m leading with the hometown news.

US cities vary widely in the number of cops they have relative to their population, as the graph below (drawn from data assembled by Governing magazine). Among big cities, DC, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia top the list, with over 40 officers per 10,000 people. These are well above the national average of just under 28 per 10,000. Cities toward the bottom of the list have 20 or fewer.

If New York had an average number of cops, and not one of the highest ratios to population of any city in the country, we’d have 23,645 officers, not 36,228. If we had San Diego’s ratio, we’d have just 11,422, half as many as that average (which falls between Miami and Kansas City).

So, if New York wanted to be just average, we could fire 12,500 cops. If we wanted to be like San Diego, minus the nice weather and the US Navy, we could fire almost 25,000. We don’t have to be harsh about it. We could give them nice new jobs doing useful things instead of beating and shooting people, or a generous severance package if they prefer.

Even 11,422 is probably too many cops. But that’s another conversation.

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May 28, 2020 Excerpts from a virtual panel sponsored by Red May, Seattle: Jodi Dean, Leo Panitch, and Asad Haider on the current crisis, with lots about how socialists should engage with the state (full session, with video, here)

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May 21, 2020 Vincent Bevins, author of The Jakarta Method, on the US-sponsored strategy of mass murder during the Cold War • Kyle Beckham, lecturer in education at the University of San Francisco, on schooling during the pandemic