Today, I link to the outstanding New York Times article, In One of the World’s Wealthiest Countries, More People Will Go Hungry, June 10, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET.
And, if you can afford it, subscribe to the New York Times. [This is not an affiliate link, I just believe that everyone can benefit from a New York Times subscription.]
All that follows is from the above article: [But please read the whole article. It is very important]
If President Trump’s budget bill reaches his desk with its proposed cuts and rule changes intact, Ms. Walker [the lady profiled in this article] will most likely have to make many similar calls. The bill, passed by the House in late May, would slash nearly $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP and food stamps, between this year and 2034.
The program provides low-income Americans an average of $6 a day per person for food. Its money would be reduced to pay for tax cuts that would give the nation’s 0.1 percent wealthiest households — those earning at least $4.3 million — an extra $390,070, on average, next year alone.
In one of the wealthiest countries in the history of the world, a missed call means cupboards begin to empty. A typo in an email address means stomachs start to growl.
Americans need SNAP because their jobs often don’t pay enough to cover basic living expenses. That is a problem of wages, not dependency. I know this as a journalist who has covered this safety net for nearly 30 years. And I also know this because I have depended on SNAP while working, too.
If the Trump administration honestly wanted to end the dependency, it would raise wages. According to a 2016 study from the Economic Policy Institute, for every $1 increase to the wages of low-income workers, spending on government programs, including SNAP, would most likely drop by at least $5.2 billion a year. The same study found that raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 would have reduced spending on government assistance each year by $17 billion (around $23 billion today). Those figures suggest that, even today, raising wages would save more money than SNAP work requirements do.
America doesn’t gain much by ending welfare as we know it without ending low wages. The Clinton administration showed that in 1996, and the Trump administration is trying the same approach in 2025. People like Ms. Walker do not need to be told to work. They do not need to be run through endless paperwork to prove that they are working. They need jobs that pay enough to cover their grocery bill, and they’d get there a lot faster if America would make work pay.
