Isn’t it counterintuitive to learn that in an otherwise affluent society there are tens of millions who need support in the form of food? More than 42 million people in the United States live on welfare. That’s a population of Spain. What we mean by welfare is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. The United States is said to number some 300.000.000 inhabitants, of which the mentioned 42 million live on this kind of welfare. i.e. approximately one-seventh/one-eighth of the population. This welfare – commonly referred to as food stamps – makes one think about the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, where huge numbers of the Romans were kept pacified through free bread and entertainment.
A household is entitled to receive SNAP if its gross monthly income is equal to or smaller than 130% of the federal poverty level or if its net monthly income is equal to or smaller than 100% of the federal poverty level. To qualify, a citizen must accept a suitable job if one is offered to him by a SNAP agency or employment office and work at least 30 hours a week or else he is disqualified from getting SNAP benefits.
The distribution of SNAP across the three main racial groups is approximately as follows:
These people could have good-paying jobs had the entrepreneurs not outsourced the manufacturing overseas. But who pays for the food stamps? It’s either the entrepreneurs through their taxes who have outsourced the businesses (and it is all the same better so for them) or the middle class, also through their taxes. The middle class is shrinking, so…? The government can always issue money out of thin air, which in turn brings about inflation, but since the dollar is the currency of global trade, the cost of inflation is sustained by the whole globe. This inflation is, so to say, cushioned or slowed down.
Be it as it may, it is hard to square the image of the United States of America as a superpower and an affluent country with the fact that over 40 million of its inhabitants (and rising) are on the drop or else they would have hard time making ends meet.
