In the US the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, popularly known as ‘food stamps’, is a federal initiative that helps low-income Americans buy food. By virtue of its objective it is one of the most accurate indicators of poverty in the country. While in 2007, immediately before the crisis, 26 million Americans were in receipt of food stamps, by 2012 – at the tail end of what some now call ‘the Great Recession’ – that figure had almost doubled to 46 million. Over subsequent years, despite an alleged upturn in the country’s economic fortunes, that number barely moved, with Donald Trump frequently highlighting how 43 million Americans used food stamps while on the campaign trail in 2016. For all the talk of his victory being powered by ‘fake news’, that number was entirely accurate.
Analogous to food stamp use in the US is the meteoric rise in the number of people using food banks in Britain. The Trussell Trust, which operates the largest food bank network in the country, claims to have delivered around 41,000 food packs in 2010. By 2017 that had risen to 1.2 million after nine consecutive years of rising demand for their services. While the increased use of food banks in the UK is partially the result of disastrous welfare reforms, it also reflects something observable on both sides of the Atlantic: being in work no longer guarantees escaping poverty – quite the opposite.
The most detailed data available in the UK only serves to confirm a historic shift has taken place over the last decade, with those in relative poverty more likely to be in a working household than not. Most troubling of all is that this is accelerating: by the end of 2016, 55 per cent of people in poverty were in a household where someone was employed – an astonishing 7.4 million people. Just six months later that figure had risen to 60 per cent.
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chaos under heaven