Working families get 38 cents of each $1 in food-stamp benefits, says the UC-Berkeley Center for Labor Research in a research brief, “The high public cost of low wages.” The paper says hourly wages for the median American worker “were just 5 percent higher in 2013 than they were in 1979” when adjusted for inflation. For the bottom 10 percent of workers, wages fell by 5 percent from 1979-2013. With low wages, people rely on social-welfare programs; “the taxpayers bear a significant portion of the hidden costs of low-wage work in America,” says the report. “Overall, higher wages and employer-provided health care would lower both state and federal public assistance costs, and allow all levels of government to better target how their tax dollars are used.”
For its report, the labor center looked at four programs – Medicaid, welfare, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit. It calculated there were 10.3 million working families enrolled in food stamps, defined as those families working at least 10 hours a week for more than six months of the year. That amounted to 36 percent of enrollment. “The [food stamp] program cost $26.7 billion for working families, which is 38 percent of total federal expenditures on this program,” said the center.
At latest count, 46 million people received food stamps, the lowest monthly total in more than three years.
The Republican majority in the U.S. House has voted for conversion of food stamps to a block grant to states in order to save $125 billion. “It’s a mistake to think you can save money” that way, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack during a speech at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. A block grant would result in lower benefits per person, or 11-12 million people being denied aid, he said.