food stamps argumentative essay

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Let’s address the stigma of food stamps

Plus, unemployment's toll on mental health, what motivates covid-19 profiteers and how tv broadcasters are weathering the pandemic..

A lot of people are out of work who have never had to lean on government assistance before. With the unemployment figures coming out Friday, this story takes on a new urgency.

While we are talking about the need for food assistance, let’s spend a few moments to recognize that food stamps carry an unfortunate and unwarranted stigma. The whole notion that you can use food stamps to live on filet mignon is a tired trope perhaps perpetuated by people who have never had to stretch the national average of $1.30 per person per meal, which is what food stamps will buy you.

Data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows just how much help Florida’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program provides recipients:

Journalists, this is a time when you can put a face on this stigma. You can point out that while they were working, they paid into the system that they now need to lean on. It is not very different from drawing unemployment benefits, which we taxpayers and our employers also fund.

I read this post from BuzzFeed’s Janelle Harris two years ago and it stuck with me. It’s a story about the shame and fear Harris felt the first time she used her benefits card. If you qualify for food stamps right now, you should know that there’s no shame in ensuring you can feed yourself and your family.

What about food stamp fraud?

Yes, it happens, but not as often as you might believe. The most common fraud involves selling SNAP cards for cash and fraud on the retailer side .

Department of Agriculture assistant inspector general Ann Coffey told a congressional subcommittee last year that her office had recovered $463 million in improper SNAP payments in the last five years. Those federal investigations resulted in 2,335 criminal convictions, she said. By way of background, the feds generally go after retailers because that is who the government pays, while states go after individuals, because that is who the states send benefits to. To get an accurate picture of prosecutions, you will need to look both places.

Food stamps take on a new importance

COVID-19 has forced governments to make some changes they probably should have done a long time ago. For example, in about a dozen states now, food stamp recipients can use their benefits to buy food online. Congress authorized a pilot program six years ago as part of the 2014 Farm Bill , but the pandemic has created a much higher need and kicked it into a higher gear.

NPR pointed out that the ability to use food stamps online matters because so many people on the program also are at risk for the virus. NPR said:

There are a series of technology hurdles — from stores needing new systems online that differentiate between food and non-food items to states needing new systems to handle new payment processors. They’re not unsolvable problems, they just haven’t been done; food stamp issues don’t tend to be top-of-mind for most technologists. Because of COVID-19, the USDA now says it’ll fast-track any state that wants to join the pilot. Eleven more were just approved, including California. Many should be online with authorized retailers by some point in May. In those states, Walmart will accept SNAP for grocery pickup but not delivery (and did not respond to NPR’s requests for explanation); Amazon and Amazon Fresh will accept SNAP for online grocery orders, but SNAP customers of Amazon’s Whole Foods chain will still have to shop in person. So, even where delivery is possible, options are limited, and for the majority of SNAP recipients, still not possible.

Walmart and some others have figured out a workaround. They allow food stamp recipients to order online, then use SNAP benefits cards when they pick up their orders. That still requires buyers to leave their homes.

The New York Times said Walmart and Amazon are now set up in nine states to allow food stamp users to buy and pay online: New York, the first to join a year ago; Washington; Alabama; Iowa; Oregon; Nebraska; Florida ; and Kentucky and California, both of which started this month. The Times Added:

The District of Columbia and several states — Arizona , Idaho , North Carolina , West Virginia , Missouri, Texas and Vermont — have signed up over the last month but are not yet up and running. Once they are, the pilot program will cover more than half the country’s SNAP participants, according to the Agriculture Department.

Whether your state is part of the program, about to be or still isn’t, there is a story in there for you to help your readers/listeners/viewers get the benefits they are qualified for (and paid for through taxes all their working years).

This website built a collection of grocery stores that accept food stamps and do deliver. The government does not consider Instacart, which gives shoppers access to delivery from 52,000 stores, to be a retailer. So a shopper using SNAP benefits cannot use Instacart.

The Brookings Institute published some disturbing new data that shows the urgency of food assistance right now (note, this is NEW data).

By the end of April, more than one in five households in the United States, and two in five households with mothers with children 12 and under, were food insecure. In almost one in five households of mothers with children age 12 and under, the children were experiencing food insecurity.

See the black, horizontal lines on each vertical bar? That is what their 2018 study showed.

Unemployment’s toll on mental health

Don’t think of Friday’s unemployment figures as statistics. Think of them as people who don’t know how they are going to pay their next electricity and water bills. Think of them as people who have not just lost their jobs, but also their health insurance — the safety net beneath their families.

President Donald Trump recently said if people lose their jobs and if the economy does not reopen soon, “You’re going to have mental depression for people. You’re going to have large numbers of suicides. Take a look at what happens in a really horrible recession or worse. So, you’re going to have tremendous suicides.”

If the president is right — and a chorus of experts have shared similar sentiments — we will soon be seeing a new pressure. The moment people lose their insurance that pays for mental health care is the moment they need it most. The recently passed CARES Act included $425 million for mental health services and the regulatory flexibility that increases access to telehealth, but community health clinics are already overrun. How will we supply the mental health care the president predicts we’ll need?

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s polling found nearly half of Americans reported the pandemic has had a negative impact on their mental health .

The American Psychological Association said a free Coursera course in Psychological First Aid developed by psychologist George Everly Jr., a professor at the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Johns Hopkins University, usually sees about 300 to 400 students per week. In the first week of April, 11,000 people took the class. Now, more than two million people in total have taken the class.

The National Association of Social Workers recently published this warning :

Mental health leaders emphasized that progress is in jeopardy as social distancing rules and fears of the virus hamper traditional treatment efforts, including syringe exchange programs, peer counseling and medication-assisted treatment.

January 2019 data (American Psychological Association)

The U.S. wasn’t in a good place to begin with. A year before the pandemic began, the APA warned that the suicide rate in America is rising at “an alarming rate.”

Who profits from COVID-19 rumors and nonsense?

When I was still learning the skills of investigative reporting, my idol/colleague Steve Eckert would say, “Look for evidence of a motive. Usually the motive is money.” But sometimes the motive is to divert attention, grab power (closely associated with money) or to pose as the only answer to people’s problems.

My Poynter colleagues at the International Fact-Checking Network pointed out that where you find fake and frightening rumors about COVID-19, you will also likely find a motive behind them. For example, in Africa the rumors are linked to websites selling masks. In Brazil, COVID-19 rumors posted to social media are linked to a site selling “ozone generators.”

The COVID-19 shutdown’s effect on TV

The owners of some of the country’s biggest TV stations reported first-quarter earnings and forecasts this week. Despite today’s unemployment figures, it is not all dismal.

Keep in mind as you look at these big increases in first-quarter income that the biggest players in local TV bought stations in the last year and political ads put money in the coffers in those places that had hot primary elections.

Tegna announced Thursday that the company’s revenue increased 32% in the first quarter of 2020. Tegna says acquisitions and political spending were big contributors to its growth. Take out the political spending and the growth drops to 24%. Tegna announced one-week furloughs for employees in the second quarter but told investors that it expects the business to begin rebounding in the third quarter, when political spending amps up.

Sinclair Broadcast Group said its revenue is more than double last year’s first quarter, up 134% year-to-year to $1.5 billion, versus $673 million in the first quarter of 2019. $40 million of that growth arrived via political advertising and through its acquisition of 21 regional sports networks and Fox College Sports in August. But the company warned that delays and potential losses of more sports events will be costly in the months ahead.

The company said it expects to see a 5% to 9% revenue drop in the second quarter compared to last year. But political advertising is still expected to rise in the second half of the year.

Nexstar Media Group Inc. , the largest owner of TV stations in the country, also had a robust first quarter. The company said it has the resources to withstand the COVID-19 downturn. In its first-quarter report , the company said it saw a 177% increase in revenue from a year ago. First-quarter ad revenue was up a fairly amazing 87% in the first quarter, largely driven by political spending.

In a comment, Nexstar CEO Perry Sook said local TV is not just driven by advertising these days, but also gets money from cable companies, which pay for the right to carry the station’s signal.

“In 2020, over 50% of our annual revenue is expected to be derived from contractual distribution fee and political advertising revenue, which we do not expect to be materially impacted by coronavirus,” Sook said. “Notably, Nexstar has solid visibility in terms of our contractual distribution economics through December 2022 as we completed new multi-year retransmission consent agreements representing approximately 70% of our subscribers at year-end 2019, as well as new long-term network affiliation contracts with CBS, FOX and NBC.”

All the same, the stock market has taken a dim view of broadcasters in this pandemic year, even if it is an election year, too.

In January, Nexstar traded at $111 a share. It is now at $72 . Sinclair hit its peak a year ago at $61.81 and now trades for $15.80 a share . Gray Television was $20 a share in February and is now at $12.76 . TEGNA was at nearly $18 a share in January and about half that now .

We’ll be back Monday with a new edition of Covering COVID-19. Sign up here  to get it delivered right to your inbox.

Al Tompkins is senior faculty at Poynter. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @atompkins.

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Comments are closed.

A couple of things that are missed. First, you imply that fraud is minimal. I suppose if you believe that 1.3 billion in fraud is something to sneeze about, you need not go further. Second, finding a ‘way around’ using online purchases may not be what it’s cracked up to be. The use of EBT online is far to new to be signaling success. Only two major chains are allowed and once the retailers associating brings legal action for being shut out, watch how quickly the fraud flood gates open. Finally, a retailer can only ‘buy’ cards from those looking to ‘sell’ their benefits. At 1.3 billion in fraud, that’s more than just a ‘few people” selling their EBT benefits.

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The Food Stamp Program: History and Effects Essay

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Español   |   Kreyòl Ayisyen

SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, is the nation’s most important anti-hunger program. SNAP provides nutritional support for low-income seniors, people with disabilities living on fixed incomes, and other individuals and families with low incomes. SNAP is a federal program administered by the Florida Department of Children and Families Office of Economic Self-Sufficiency (ESS). ESS is responsible for determining eligibility for SNAP using federal guidelines.

Ways to Protect Your EBT Benefits

Eligibility

SNAP eligibility rules and benefit levels are, for the most part, set at the federal level and uniform across the nation, though states have flexibility to tailor aspects of the program. Individuals must pass all eligibility rules to receive food assistance benefits. Find out more about  eligibility rules .

Ineligibility

Ineligibility: Individuals are ineligible for SNAP if they:

• are convicted of drug trafficking,
• are running away from a felony warrant,
• purposely break Food Assistance Program rules,
• are noncitizens without a qualified status, or
• are a student who attends an institution of higher education at least half time, in some circumstances.

SNAP Benefits

Households can use food assistance benefits to buy breads, cereals, fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, poultry, dairy, and plants and seeds to grow food for your household to eat. Households cannot use food assistance benefits to buy nonfood items such as pet foods, soaps, paper products, household supplies, grooming items, alcoholic beverages, tobacco, vitamins, medicines, food to eat in the store, or hot foods. For more information on SNAP Benefits, go to  Food Assistance Program Factsheet .

For Out of State Agencies seeking to verify information with Florida's Department of Children and Families Economic Self Sufficiency Program regarding a client, please send an email to  @email .

The Electronic Benefits Transfer Card

Once approved for SNAP and/or TANF benefits, your re-loadable EBT card will be mailed to your mailing address on file.

Learn more about EBT cards

Learn how to protect your EBT card

The SUNCAP Program is a special Food Assistance Program for individuals who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI). You may be eligible to receive food assistance benefits through the SUNCAP Program without any additional application, paperwork, or interviews. If you already receive food assistance benefits in the regular Food Assistance Program, you may be automatically put in the SUNCAP Program when you become SSI eligible. If your food assistance benefits will go down because of SUNCAP, you may choose to continue receiving your food assistance benefits under the regular Food Assistance Program.

For more information, go to the SUNCAP Brochure

• SUNCAP folleto en español
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Online Purchasing Pilot

Did you know as of May 2021,  Walmart, Amazon, Aldi, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Freshfields Farm, Hitchcock’s Markets, Publix, Mt. Plymouth IGA and Whole Foods  are accepting SNAP payments online? More retailers may join the online purchasing pilot as it progresses. Updates and other important information will be shared with all SNAP benefit recipients as soon as it is available.

Which retailers will be accepting SNAP payments online? How will I know when more retailers join the online purchasing pilot?

As of May 2021,  Walmart, Amazon, Aldi, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Freshfields Farm, Hitchcock’s Markets, Publix, Mt. Plymouth IGA and Whole Foods  are accepting SNAP payments online. More retailers may join the online purchasing pilot as it progresses. Updates and other important information will be shared with all SNAP benefit recipients as soon as it is available.

How will I know if these retailers can deliver to my home? Can SNAP be used to pay for delivery?

To determine if grocery delivery is available for your location, please visit the retailers’ websites. The available delivery zip codes indicate where retailers are able to provide their full line of groceries, including perishable items.

Please note: the use of EBT cards for the purchase of groceries is restricted for approved grocery items only and cannot be used for delivery fees.

Is using my EBT card online secure?

The use of your EBT card online will still require your unique personal identification number (PIN). All retailers participating in the online purchasing pilot are using compliant methods of encrypted-PIN entry to ensure secure transactions.

How do I order groceries using the online program?

Walmart online EBT assistance

Amazon online EBT assistance

Aldi online EBT assistance

BJs online EBT assistance

Publix online EBT assistance

Hitchcock’s Markets

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St Petersburg, FL Food Assistance and Pantries

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Pantry details at your fingertips, subsidized groceries, search results, daystar life center food pantry.

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33712 (727) 825-0442

The food pantry usually has frozen meat, fresh produce, non-perishable food and juice. They help with your needs on an emergency basis and monthly thereafter. Food Pantry Hours:Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday 8:30am - 3:00pmAdditional Services: Financial assistance with overdue rent and utilities to prevent eviction, personal hygiene items, clothing, transportation assistance, mail service, access to phones and computers, assistance applying for government benefits,

Wesley UMC Food Pantry

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33704 (727) 896-4797

Our food pantry is one of the largest in this area. Pantry Hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday 9:0am - 11:45am We are open to all in need. Our thrift store is also open during these hours. Requirements: ID For more information, please call.

Elim Seventh Day Adventist Food Pantry

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33711 (727) 350-3531

Food pantry.Serves: Pinellas county. Hours: Monday through Friday7:00am to 6:00pmServing anyone in need. When contacting, ask for someone in the food ministry. For more information, please call.

People That Love Church

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33701 (727) 820-0775

Food Pantry offers emergency supply of canned and non-perishables to families and individuals.Requirements:Must bring ID & proof of dependents. Serves: Pinellas county. Food Pantry Hours:Monday - Friday 10:45 am to 2:20 pmFor more information, please call.Please present picture ID. The shelter is for men only. Contact Brother Flint.

St. Vincent de Paul Society

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33705 (727) 896-3300

Food pantry serving Pinellas county. Hours:Monday through Friday7:00am to 8:00amLunch Hours:Monday through Saturday11:00am to 12:00pmDinner Hours: Monday through Friday 7:00pmto 8:00pmSaturday5:00pm to 6:00pm Sunday6:00pm to 7:00pmWhen calling, ask for anyone in the food ministry.For more information, please call.

Suncoast Haven of Rest Rescue Mission Food Pantry

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33713 (727) 545-8282

Services are by appointment only.Food Pantry Hours:Monday - Friday 10:00 am - 5:00 pmSaturday 10:00 pm - 1:00 pmRequirements:Identification, proof of income or proof of snap benefits and proof of address.For more information, please call.

St Petersburg Free Clinic

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33701 (727) 327-0333

Provides a food pantry. Serves PinellasWe Help Services is our emergency food pantry. We Help also helps clients with birth certificate and identification services, water bill assistance and connecting with other community resources.Hours: Monday-Thursday 8:30 am- 3:30 pm, Friday 8:30am- 12:00pmThe Free Clinic's Community Kitchen feeds anyone in the community who is hungry six nights per week. This program is located in Beacon House, the homeless mens' residence. Without these meals, many women, men, an

St. Vincent de Paul South Pinellas

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33755 (727) 823-2516

Provides a food pantry. HOURSMonday through FridayLunch: 11am-12pmDinner: 7pm-8pmSaturdayBreakfast: 8am-9amNo Lunch or Dinner ServiceSundayLunch: 11am-12pmDinner: 6pm-7pm

Salvation Army - A Georgia Corporation

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33701 (727) 550-8080

Provides a food pantry. Serves: South PinellasFor more information, please call.

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33701 (727) 825-0442

Provides a food pantry. Serves Pinellas

St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church Emergency Food Pantry

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33711 (727) 867-7015

St. Bartholomew's distributes every 1st and 3rd Sunday of the month.The Fall, Winter, Spring Hours:1st and 3rd Sunday of the month. 10:00am - 12:30pm The Summer Hours:1st and 3rd Sunday of the month 10:15am - 12:00pmThere is currently no needs test but recipients fill out a card. We distribute 1 bag (approximate value $15.00) per household per month.

FBC Food Pantry

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33702 (727) 576-5508

FBC Food Pantry Hours:Tuesday and Thursday1:00pm to 4:00pm (with the exception of holidays).The Food Pantry is located in FBCs Heritage Hall at the back of the Church. Please follow the Food Pantry signs for parking and entrance locations.Things to Know Before You Go:You must sign in before 4:00pm to receive food.Requirements: Each household must provide a Photo ID for each member of the household in order to receive food for every member. Acceptable IDs for adults are a drivers license, state ID, or passport

St Stefanos Greek Orthodox Church - Food Pantry

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33710 (727) 345-8235

St Stefanos Food Pantry Hours:First and third Saturdays from 9:00am-12:00pmFor more information, please call.

St. Bede's Episcopal Church Little Free Pantry

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33704 (727) 823-7649

Located on the porch by the church office. Non-perishable food and hygiene products available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Take what you need and leave what you can. Only unopened, unexpired items accepted. For more information, please call.

St Stefanos Food Pantry

Food Pantry Hours: The 3rd Saturday of the month 10:00am - 12:00pm For more information, please call.

Positive Impact Ministries Food Pantry

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33711 (727) 865-8292

Food Pantry Location:Tangerine Plaza in the parking lot of the old Wal-Mart, corner of 18th Ave. S. & 22nd St. S.Food Pantry Distribution Hours:Every Saturday from 9:30 AM to 12:00 PMNotes:

The Rock Food Pantry at the Rock Church

View Website and Full Address Saint Petersburg, FL - 33714 (727) 521-6306

Food Pantry Distribution Hours: Sunday 12:30pm until all food is gone.

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