I live in the South, Mississippi to be accurate, and Alabama the sister state to my state has some disturbing stats for our region…..
Source: Yellow Hammer
The correlation between the two programs is not necessarily meaningful, other than to illustrate that any state having to give more food assistance to adults — justifiably or not — than education assistance to children should perhaps at least consider the reasons why.
Alabama is actually one of 27 states around the country in which the number of SNAP enrollees outpaces public school enrollment, and nationally the number of enrollees for the two programs is roughly the same.
Unsurprisingly, “States with higher poverty rates tend to have higher ratios of SNAP-to-schoolkids,” writes the Washington Post’s Philip Bump.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between the years of 2009 and 2013, an average of 18.6 percent of Alabama’s roughly 4.8 million population was living below the poverty line. That makes Alabama the sixth poorest state in the nation per capita over that time period.
But while there are undoubtedly many Alabamians in need who are helped by the SNAP program, fraud and abuse have also been found to be widespread.
The Alabama Department of Human Resources issues more than $109 million in benefits every year, and recovered $4.5 million dollars in food stamp fraud in 2013 alone.
In an effort to cut down on fraud an abuse, the Alabama Legislature in 2014 pushed through a package of bills that drastically reformed the state’s taxpayer-funded public assistance programs.
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Do not know about you….but this is just a damn shame…….your ass backwards neo-liberal policies are the blame. This country will NEVER obtain its true calling as long as stats like these persist…..IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT? No need to answer that was rhetorical…..your actions say it all!
Keep on this path and we will truly slide down the scale of “First World”……