rdmcandie wrote:
Both which require facts to substantiate, and we all know how you feel about facts.
Facts and conclusions are two different things. The problem I run into with many posters on this forum is that I look at data in the world around me, apply my own logic to them, and derive my own conclusions. But most people don't do this. Hell. Most people
can't do this. They lack the critical thinking skills required. So instead, they demand "facts", but when they mean facts they mean "conclusions". They want a source they recognize as an authority to tell them what the answer is.
When you ask for a citation for something, you're asking me to provide some source with conclusions similar to my own. But there is no one source of the facts I use to derive my conclusions, so that's a meaningless requirement. But since I'm sure you simply wont believe that I could derive a legitimate conclusion on my own, I'll go ahead and
throw you a bone. This is a report collating a number of studies on the interactions between food assistance (primarily food stamp programs) and "food insecurity" (the inability to consistently obtain sufficient food for a healthy life). What you'll notice throughout the report is wording like this:
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The results have been inconclusive and the authors have warned against drawing causal inferences from their research.
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A thorough 2004 USDA literature review summarized the large body of research showing that food stamp benefits substantially raise food spending, may raise nutrient availability in household food supplies, and cannot be shown to consistently affect individual nutrient intake (8). At the time that review was written, the literature measuring the effect of food stamps on food insecurity and hunger was sparse.
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There is a strong prima facie case that food stamps may alleviate hunger by providing valuable resources to very poor households. However, the main survey items ask about the occurrence of hardship at any time in the preceding 12 mo, whereas food stamp benefits vary widely in amount, arrive only once monthly, and are largely spent during the first several days after acquisition each month (12,13). Hence, the magnitude of the food stamp effect is an important open empirical question.
Hmmmm... I came to the same conclusion, and I didn't need to read what someone else wrote to do it! It's like magic or something.
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The first approach is to control for other observable variables while seeking to measure the effect of FSP participation in a regression model. However, several studies have found that prevalences of food insecurity or hunger remain much higher for participants than for nonparticipants even after including control variables in this fashion (17,18).
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Using data from the Survey of Program Dynamics, Huffman and Jensen found that being food insecure with hunger strongly increased the likelihood of FSP participation but “no evidence that the food assistance reduces food insecurity†(20).
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Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Survey of Program Dynamics, Ribar and Hamrick found that food stamp use in 1994–5 was associated with lower rates of exit from food insecurity by 1997, and hence their study “provides no evidence that food stamps alleviate food problems,†but they also noted the continued presence of unobservable factors and did not claim to have measured the causal impact of FSP participation (22).
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The authors' most reliable models indicated that food stamps did not affect the probability of being classified as food insecure, although they offered “tentative evidence†that food stamps reduced the level of food insecurity among those who are categorized as food insecure. The authors warned that establishing cause and effect with propensity score matching “might not be possible in some instances, given the magnitude of the selection effects.â€
Well that method was definitive! The report goes on, but you hopefully get the point.
The issue we're discussing is way too complex for super simple answers. However, the one pattern that emerges is that there's a whole lot of not much in terms of direct correlation between the actual programs and actual hunger. Some of this is just the nature of the beast. If more people are hungry, more people will apply for food stamps, creating an unfair correlation between food stamps and
increased hunger. Attempting to account for this is non-trivial, which is why definitive answers on the subject are not easy to come by. But this does suggest that there's an effect of opportunity costs going on here. The very existence of a food stamp program will affect people's choices (yeah, I said choices again). If you know you'll receive $300/month in food stamps, you take that into account when making spending choices as a whole. So while we can say that someone with absolutely zero income is clearly going to be benefited by receiving assistance, this becomes less apparent when looking at people who are "poor" but still have some income sources and thus spending choices. Assuming we don't intent to just support 100% of everyone's living costs forever, the question we're most looking at should be whether food stamps help or hurt people's future outcomes, not just the immediate condition.
And that's a tricky question. For me, it's a matter of human nature. I mentioned earlier the propensity for people to spend more than they earn. This is incredibly common. Nearly everyone does it. People are bad at budgeting. And it really does just appear as though there's a percentage of people who simply habitually run out of money every month, and will tend to do so no matter how much they have. That these people also tend to be in the lowest income ranges cannot be definitively said to be the cause or effect of this. It might be easy to assume that someone runs out of money every month because they just don't have enough, but there's tons of evidence to suggest that the same people, if given much more money will still spend more than they have (yeah, I'm not going to provide sources for this either. If you disagree, go do your own research). So is the person running out of money because they are poor? Or are they poor because they habitually spend more than they earn? Does this propensity translate into an equally poor work ethic as well? I certainly can't say for sure. While we can't say that hard work and effort always guarantees success, we absolutely can say that lack of effort and hard work increases your odds of failure. How much does the existence of assistance programs feed into this trait? I don't know, but it's hard to imagine that it's a non factor.
Again, I see this as human nature. We all know people who are habitually late. They just always arrive at any event, dinner, family gathering, whatever 15 or 20 minutes late. Do we make the assumption that they're late because they simply don't have enough time to get there? If so, then if we set the time of the event/whatever an hour later, they should arrive on time, right? We all know that doesn't work though. The propensity to be late has nothing to do with actual time, but a habit that one adopts of always adjusting their actions based on the time target in such a way that they get there late. At the risk of playing psychologist, people sabotage their own actions by deliberately waiting too long to start a series of events, such that they're done "just a little bit late". I see spending choices the same way. The person who never quite has enough money to make it through the month usually does so because they make choices to be "just a little short" each month. It's almost like a psychological need. They often use things like pawnshops and payday loans to allow them to do this, while still managing to get by. It's self destructive of course, because they actually reduce the total amount of money they have each month, but it fill some kind of need. Don't ask me to explain why, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming that people do actually feel some need to always be in debt. Just as the habitually late will sabotage themselves to ensure they're late, the habitually financially short do the same thing with money. And so they borrow money at the end of the month to make ends meet, then pay it back (with interest) at the beginning of the month, and then run short and borrow money again. Even if we could somehow erase that debt for them one month, they'd still spend just a bit too much and end out in debt again. It's a habit IMO.
It's because of this observation that I don't think that food stamps really help much. For the absolutely destitute? Sure. But as I've mentioned earlier, someone in that dire a strait benefits more from direct assistance from some charitable organization, not a government food stamp program. It's the eternally working poor who make up the bulk of food stamp distribution, and I'm not convinced it really helps them at all. The evidence would seem to suggest that it just enables them to spend a bit more money each month on other things (possibly quite wasteful things), while still managing to come up "just a little short" at the end of the month. We could likely double their food stamp allotment, and they'd still run out of money for food at the end of the month. I've seen absolutely zero evidence to suggest otherwise. Similarly, if we reduced (or even eliminated in some cases) the food stamp allotment, they'd likely come up just as short. It would simply change what other things they spent money on (for most cases at least). And the need to sacrifice those other things for food might just be the nudge that gets them on the track out of poverty. Again, I'm progressing from the assumption that most people who are poor enough to qualify for food stamps *could* improve their economic condition, but the rate at which a population will do so will increase if they are provided fewer funded benefits (like food stamps) in the first place. I'm not making an ethical assessment of that course of action, but simply stating what I believe to be a clear relationship between the two.
I don't think there's anything wrong with approaching an issue like this based on general observations of human behavior. I think we can all agree that most people strive to do the least amount of effort for the most reward. So it seems logical that the more shallow we make that reward curve, the less effort people will spend traveling it. Add in the propensity of most people to spend more than they earn, and it's not hard to derive a conclusion that programs like food stamps, while perhaps necessary in some cases, will in most cases act to flatten that curve and thus decrease the drive to expend effort to improve one's own condition. People tend to have a hard stopping point in terms of poverty, and they'll sit at that point, almost no matter how much in benefits we provide them. They'll tolerate that low point and spend any excess we provide them on other things that they want, but which they don't need, and which wont help them in the long run. If our objective is to make poor people as comfortable in their poverty as possible, such programs work as intended. If our objective is to help people through difficult times, and then help them out of those difficult times, they don't work nearly so well at all.
But that's just my opinion. You're certainly free to disagree.