With jobless rates waning, the government ought to encourage food stamp recipients to find employment or to move up to better-paying jobs, said Robert Doar during a panel discussion on the future of the largest U.S. anti-hunger program. “We’re in very good economic times — that’s why we should be doing it,” said Doar, a former New York state commissioner of social services and currently a poverty analyst with the American Enterprise Institute.
Like other experts who took part in the Capitol Hill discussion hosted by the AEI, Doar said food stamps was a good program. “But it has problems,” he said. The program, funded by the government and run by the states, focuses on helping poor people buy food but is “insufficiently interested in moving people to jobs,” he said.
Among the steps agencies could take, Doar said, were placing posters at their offices that provided information on job-training programs and state employment offices. New York City often uses text messages to communicate with food stamp recipients, Doar said, so agencies could consider messages that publicize job programs. The agencies could partner with other social agencies to alert food stamp recipients of opportunities to improve their job skills. The government could also put more money into an education and training program within food stamps, he said. “We should be encouraging people to move into the labor force.”
Northwestern University professor Diane Schanzenbach, author of an AEI paper on food stamps, said proposals to narrow food stamp befits would have the unintended effect of creating a “benefits cliff” that would reduce aid faster than recipients could improve their income.