Supplemental Nutrition Assistance in Regional Households with Elderly Present

Over the last decade, more and more households where at least one member was age 60 or older have received what used to be called "food stamps". It now goes by the name the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Since 2005, our region has seen participation in this assistance program basically triple among households where the elderly reside. In 2005, about 5.4% of households where someone age 60 or older resided used food stamps; in 2014 nearly 15% of those households do. This represents an actual increase of some 4,600 households where an elderly person resides that now are participating in SNAP that hadn't been a decade ago.

Click on the chart below to enlarge it and see how this has changed over the last 10 years.

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Regional Families Receiving Food Stamps and the Presence of Workers in Past 12 Months

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Eating on a Food Stamp Budget is a SNAP

When Leanne Brown moved to New York from Canada to earn a master's in food studies at New York University, she couldn't help noticing that Americans on a tight budget were eating a lot of processed foods heavy in carbs.

"It really bothered me," she says. "The 47 million people on food stamps — and that's a big chunk of the population — don't have the same choices everyone else does."

Brown guessed that she could help people in SNAP, the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, find ways to cook filling, nourishing and flavorful meals. So she set out to write a cookbook full of recipes anyone could make on a budget of just $4 a day.

What she came up with is now online, for free.  Take a look at The SNAP Cookbook. It contains simple, sensible, and delicious things that you could whip up on a SNAP food budget. Here's one I wouldn't mind trying !

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In the meantime, here is a comparison of families in Herkimer and in Oneida Counties that depend on food stamps to make ends meet.

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OH SNAP! Part Deux: Looking Back on a Decade of SNAP Data

My most recent post on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provided some data on SNAP, or Food Stamp Program, looking at how it has changed over the last 40 years. Below is a chart that shows SNAP Data for each NYS county over the last decade (2000 to 2010). It includes changes in the annual number of participants as well as changes in the total amount of funding coming to the SNAP recipients in each county. As you can see, the program dollars have grown considerably over the first decade of this century, as has the number of people participating in the program. Click on the table to enlarge it !

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NYS Counties SNAP (Food Stamps) Historical Benefits 1970-2010

With cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or Food Stamp Program) taking place this past week, I thought it would be a good thing to provide some insight into how large the program is in New York State counties.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities  the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) increased SNAP benefits across the board as a way of delivering high “bang-for-the-buck” economic stimulus and easing hardship in response to the economic downturn.  ARRA increased SNAP maximum monthly benefits by 13.6 percent beginning in April 2009.

ARRA provided that SNAP benefit levels would continue at the new higher amount until the program’s regular annual inflation adjustments to the maximum SNAP benefit exceeded those set by ARRA.  The maximum SNAP benefit levels for each household size, which are set each October 1, are equal to the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP) from the preceding June scaled to each household size.  The TFP is the cost of U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) food plan for a family of four to purchase and prepare a bare-bones diet at home.  At the time ARRA was enacted, food price inflation was expected to be high and the TFP cost was expected to exceed the ARRA level in fiscal year 2014.  Food price inflation, however, turned out to be lower than expected over the 2009 to 2013 period, resulting in the pushing out of the date that the TFP was expected to exceed the ARRA level.

In August 2010, Congress passed and the President signed P.L. 111-226, which accelerated the sunset of the ARRA benefit increase to April 2014 and used the estimated savings for state fiscal relief through additional federal funding for school districts to maintain teachers’ jobs and maintaining a higher federal match for Medicaid costs.  Four months later, the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act (P.L. 111-296), which reauthorized Child Nutrition programs, further accelerated the sunset date of ARRA to October 31, 2013, to offset the cost of the legislation.  As a result, beginning on November 1, 2013, SNAP benefit levels will be based on the cost of the June 2013 TFP, which is lower than the ARRA levels.

The impact of this change will be seen as the country heads forward. In the meantime here are annual data for1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 on how much program funding was provided to the total recipients in each county in New York State. This data comes from the USDA website on SNAP .

Food Stamp Recipients In Herkimer and Oneida Counties (2012)

The House approved Thursday a three-year nutrition bill (H.R. 3102), with a 217-210 vote, that would result in cuts of about $40 billion over 10 years for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and provide various reforms to the program. The SNAP Program, which is better known by the name Food Stamps, served nearly 48 million people in June of this past year according to U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Locally, the region had about twenty thousand households enrolled in the SNAP program during 2012. About a third of those were elderly, and nearly half of those households had children under the age of 18 present. Two out of every three families (67%) receiving SNAP support had at least one person working. For a more complete look at the region's SNAP recipients, see the table below.

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