Food Stamps

Food stamps have typically been viewed in a negative light in the media, with images like the “lobster queen” and “surfer-on-stamps” not helping the cause. But now, a new study conducted by economist Hilary Hoynes at the University of California at Berkeley has shed a new perspective on food stamps.

In an article called Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net, Hoynes looked at later-life effects on children whose mothers used food stamps during pregnancy and early childhood. And what she found was nothing short of startling, especially when compared to what the GOP has been arguing for years: mothers who use food stamps during these critical periods of their child’s lives increase their offspring’s self-sufficiency instead of detracting from it.

Along with her colleagues Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond, Hoynes found that access to food stamps “leads to a significant reduction in the incidence of ‘metabolic syndrome’ (obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes) and, for women, an increase in economic self-sufficiency.”

In conservative politics after the Reagan era, Republicans have long held to the argument that reliance on food stamps only creates a cycle of neediness, as the benefits teach people that handouts are a suitable alternative to “going out and getting a job.”

But with this new study, Hoynes has countered in three specific ways: food stamps work now as they have worked before; food stamps work in the short term to measurably benefit the health of newborns; and food stamps work in the long term to both improving health for both genders and to decrease a reliance on SNAP in the next generation.

One point to ponder, though, would be to examine the health and wellbeing of mothers and their children who exist comfortably without a safety net. While the crux of Hoynes’s paper does clearly point out that a safety net is better families than living without it, how does it compare to people who have no need for it? What are the physical and mental conditions of their offspring if they don’t have to go through food stamps?

But at the very least, it does take quite a bit of wind out of the GOP’s sails.