Snap Matters: How Food Stamps Affect Health and Well-Being (Studies in Social Inequality) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804796831 ISBN 13: 9780804796835

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In 1963, President Kennedy proposed making permanent a small pilot project called the Food Stamp Program (FSP). By 2013, the program's fiftieth year, more than one in seven Americans received benefits at a cost of nearly $80 billion. Renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2008, it currently faces sharp political pressure, but the social science research necessary to guide policy is still nascent.

In SNAP Matters, Judith Bartfeld, Craig Gundersen, Timothy M. Smeeding, and James P. Ziliak bring together top scholars to begin asking and answering the questions that matter. For example, what are the antipoverty effects of SNAP? Does SNAP cause obesity? Or does it improve nutrition and health more broadly? To what extent does SNAP work in tandem with other programs, such as school breakfast and lunch? Overall, the volume concludes that SNAP is highly responsive to macroeconomic pressures and is one of the most effective antipoverty programs in the safety net, but the volume also encourages policymakers, students, and researchers to continue examining this major pillar of social assistance in America.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Judith Bartfeld is professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Director of the RIDGE Center for National Food and Nutrition Assistance Research at the Institute for Research on Poverty. Craig Gundersen is the Soybean Industry Endowed Professor of Agricultural Strategy in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois. Timothy M. Smeeding is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and, from 2008 to 2014, was Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. James P. Ziliak is the Carol Martin Gatton Endowed Chair in Microeconomics and the Founding Director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky.

Judith Bartfeld is professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Director of the RIDGE Center for National Food and Nutrition Assistance Research at the Institute for Research on Poverty.Craig Gundersen is the Soybean Industry Endowed Professor of Agricultural Strategy in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois.Timothy M. Smeeding is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and, from 2008 to 2014, was Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty.James P. Ziliak is the Carol Martin Gatton Endowed Chair in Microeconomics and the Founding Director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky.

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Snap Matters

How Food Stamps Affect Health and Well–Being

By Judith Bartfeld, Craig Gundersen, Timothy M. Smeeding, James P. Ziliak

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9683-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Contributors, 
INTRODUCTION, 
CHAPTER ONE. Why Are So Many Americans on Food Stamps? The Role of the Economy, Policy, and Demographics, 
CHAPTER TWO. The Effect of SNAP on Poverty, 
CHAPTER THREE. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Food Insecurity, 
CHAPTER FOUR. SNAP and Food Consumption, 
CHAPTER FIVE. The Health and Nutrition Effects of SNAP: Selection into the Program and a Review of the Literature on Its Effects, 
CHAPTER SIX. SNAP and Obesity, 
CHAPTER SEVEN. SNAP and the School Meal Programs, 
CHAPTER EIGHT. Multiple Program Participation and the SNAP Program, 
CONCLUSION, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Why Are So Many Americans on Food Stamps?

The Role of the Economy, Policy, and Demographics

James P. Ziliak

Since its inception fifty years ago, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has become a central component of the social safety net in the United States. The program is unique in its status as something akin to a universal entitlement; that is, subject to meeting low-income and asset tests, the program does not impose restrictions on eligibility based on age (Social Security), family structure (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF), or work history (Disability Insurance and Unemployment Insurance). Today, one in seven Americans receives assistance from SNAP at a cost approaching $80 billion in FY2013, making it the second largest means-tested transfer in terms of cost after Medicaid. For much of its first three decades, SNAP operated in the shadows of the safety net, in terms of both a policy or research interest, especially in comparison to politically contentious programs like TANF and more expensive programs like Medicaid. What has caught the attention of policy makers and researchers alike in recent years is the rapid growth of the program. Since FY2000, the number participating has increased 171 percent and inflation-adjusted spending by 286 percent. This has led to calls for programmatic reforms, ranging from the 2013 House Bill H.R. 3102 that would cut $39 billion over the next decade to wholesale decentralization in the form of a block grant to states with additional work requirements similar to TANF (Secretaries' Innovation Group 2013).

The aim of this chapter is to document the factors underlying the evolution of program participation since 1980. I emphasize three major points in my analysis: changes in the macroeconomy, both cyclical forces from the labor market and secular trends in income inequality; changes in public policies, both food and nonfood related; and shifting demographics of the American household. I begin by describing the socioeconomic and policy climate in recent decades that have had bearing on SNAP participation, followed by a formal empirical analysis of those determinants and detailed simulations of the relative contributions of the economy, policy, and demographics to changes in SNAP participation over time. The results suggest that SNAP is operating effectively as an automatic fiscal stabilizer — nearly 50 percent of the increase in participation from 2007 to 2011 is due to the weak economy — but policy reforms expanding access and benefit generosity also affected participation, accounting for nearly 30 percent of the increase after the Great Recession. The changing demographics of the American household are helping restrain growth in SNAP.

THE ECONOMY

The rush to cut or reform SNAP may be misplaced if growth in the program is primarily due to the weak labor market and economy over the past decade. There is extensive research evidence that SNAP functions effectively as an automatic fiscal stabilizer, meaning that, as the economy and market incomes fall during recessions, participation in SNAP "automatically" rises to smooth consumption, and as market incomes rise during economic expansions, participation falls (Wallace and Blank 1999; Blundell and Pistaferri 2003; Gundersen and Ziliak 2003; Ziliak, Gundersen, and Figlio 2003; Bitler and Hoynes 2010; Klerman and Danielson 2011; Ganong and Liebman 2013). This suggests that, as the macroeconomy improves in coming years, participation and cost of SNAP will decline. Indeed, assuming no changes in law, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) (2012) projected that by 2022 spending on SNAP would fall 23 percent because of improving labor market conditions.

That such a countercyclical link exists seems transparent in Figure 1.1, which depicts trends in aggregate SNAP participation and seasonally adjusted unemployment rates. Highlighted in the figure are years that include a macroeconomic recession as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It is clear that peaks in SNAP usage coincide (perhaps with a lag) with peaks in unemployment rates over the past three decades. A simple time-series regression of SNAP participation on the unemployment rate and a linear trend yields:

[MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1)

where standard errors are reported in parentheses. The r-squared of 0.57 says that unemployment rates explain nearly 60 percent of the variation in aggregate SNAP participation (the trend adds nothing to the model). The coefficient on the unemployment rates implies that for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, SNAP increases by 0.86 points, or almost 10 percent on the average SNAP participation rate of 9.2 percent over the 1980 to 2011 period. Although this time-series model is simply illustrative, a robust link between the business cycle and SNAP participation remains even in a more fully specified model as estimated in the following discussion.

Concomitant with large swings in unemployment rates, there has also been a sizable secular shift in the distribution of earnings and income that may bear on SNAP participation in recent decades (Piketty and Saez 2003; Autor, Katz, and Kearney 2008; Burkhauser et al. 2012). Figure 1.2 depicts trends in real median household income as well as the ratio of the 90th percentile of real income to the 10th percentile of real income. The median is a robust measure of the center of a skewed distribution, such as income that is used to signify how the typical household is faring, and the 90/10 ratio is a standard measure of inequality. Since 1980, real median income has increased 22 percent to $52,000, whereas 90/10 inequality increased 30 percent. Unlike the expansions of the 1980s and 1990s, however, which each had peaks in income in excess of the prior cycle, median income at the peak of the 2000s cycle was no greater than the 1990s, and in fact by 2011 any gains in median income since 1999 were lost. The flattening out of median income from 2000 to 2007, followed by a sharp decline in the Great Recession, coincides with a sharp increase in income inequality. The latter was driven by continued increases in income at the top coupled with significant declines in income at the bottom of the distribution.

POLICY REFORMS

There was little change in basic federal eligibility rules in the nearly two decades leading up to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA, also known as welfare reform). Welfare reform, however, had both...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804796831
• ISBN 13: 9780804796835
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Herausgeber: Bartfeld Judith, Gundersen Craig, Smeeding Timothy
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande