I hope that none of the loyal readers of this blog went hungry yesterday.
Today is the 35th anniversary of the EBT system for food stamp benefits (later, “SNAP”). The Mickey Leland Memorial Domestic Hunger Relief Act was signed on November 28, 1990. Let’s have a look at inflation-adjusted spending on taxpayer-funded food:
We’re spending roughly 14X what we spent in 1970. What else has grown dramatically since 1970? The number of foreign-born people living in the U.S. is about 5.5X:
Correlation can’t be causation here, of course, because we’re informed that low-skill migration makes America rich and the SNAP data suggest that the number of poor people in the U.S. has grown dramatically, from 17 million beneficiaries in 2000 to 42 million in 2025 (see Number of Americans dependent on food stamps has been reduced from 17 million in 2000 to only 42 million today).
I doubt these charts include any of tax-payer funded spending on SNAP, is for government bureaucratic paper-shufflers. This is a big government job program for the lower-skilled.