- Rise in full-time workers receiving food stamps, By Jere Downs, October 12, 2011, Louisville Courier-Journal: “On her day off from work one recent Friday, Angela Carter stopped at Shively Area Ministries to pick up four bags of free food. She figured the noodles, bratwurst, cereal, canned goods, milk and beef stew would see her, her husband and two sons through until $350 is deposited in her food stamp account. ‘I have a full time job and I’m still broke,’ said Carter, whose paycheck for her $8.57-an-hour job as a Rite-Aid clerk comes twice a month. ‘One paycheck goes to rent, the next one goes to bills. I always run out of money for food.’ Her husband, seeking assembly line work, has brought home only three paychecks in the last 3 months. As the 13 Kentucky and Southern Indiana counties in the Louisville area experitence the end of a third year of more than 9 percent unemployment and flat wages, the working poor like Carter figure prominently among a sharp rise in the number of households receiving food stamps, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture…”
- N.J. relaxes rules on food stamps, By Ken Serrano, October 8, 2011, Asbury Park Press: “Faced with an increasing number of people receiving food stamps, some states, like Kansas, have toughened eligibility requirements for their federally funded food assistance programs. But New Jersey has done the opposite. Gone is the requirement that people must list assets to apply. The annual gross income limit for a single person in New Jersey to be eligible to participate in its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was raised in April 2010 from $14,701.50 to $20,146.50. Deductions for things like utility bills figure into the limits. The maximum allowable income for a family of three to participate went from $23,803 per year to $34,281…”
- Fingerprinting those seeking food stamps is denounced, By Kate Taylor, October 11, 2011, New York Times: “Taking aim at a practice she called unnecessary, costly and punitive, the speaker of the City Council, Christine C. Quinn, is asking the Bloomberg administration to justify requiring applicants for food stamps to be electronically fingerprinted. New York City, where 1.8 million people receive food stamps, is one of only two jurisdictions in the country that require applicants to be fingerprinted, according to Ms. Quinn’s office. The other is Arizona. California and Texas recently lifted a similar requirement; New York stopped using fingerprinting for food-stamp recipients statewide in 2007, but kept it in New York City at the Bloomberg administration’s request…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty