SNAP Matters: How Food Stamps Affect Health and Well-Being

By Timothy Smeeding and James P. Ziliak

In 1963, President Kennedy proposed making permanent a small pilot project called the Food Stamp Program (FSP). By 2013, the program's fiftieth year, more than one in seven Americans received benefits at a cost of nearly $80 billion. Renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2008, it currently faces sharp political pressure, but the social science research necessary to guide policy is still nascent.

In SNAP Matters, Judith Bartfeld, Craig Gundersen, Timothy M. Smeeding, and James P. Ziliak bring together top scholars to begin asking and answering the questions that matter. For example, what are the antipoverty effects of SNAP? Does SNAP cause obesity? Or does it improve nutrition and health more broadly? To what extent does SNAP work in tandem with other programs, such as school breakfast and lunch? Overall, the volume concludes that SNAP is highly responsive to macroeconomic pressures and is one of the most effective antipoverty programs in the safety net, but the volume also encourages policymakers, students, and researchers to continue examining this major pillar of social assistance in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Nov 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9780804796873

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Copyright in this work does not extend to the material authored by Christian Gregory, Matthew Rabbitt, and Laura Tiehen, which was written as a work of the United States Government and is in the public domain.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

SNAP matters : how food stamps affect health and wellbeing / edited by Judith Bartfeld, Craig Gundersen, Timothy M. Smeeding, and James P. Ziliak.

pages cm — (Studies in social inequality)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9446-6 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8047-9683-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (U.S.)—Evaluation. 2. Food stamps—United States—Evaluation. I. Bartfeld, Judi, editor. II. Gundersen, Craig, editor. III. Smeeding, Timothy M., editor. IV. Ziliak, James Patrick, editor. V. Series: Studies in social inequality.

HV696.F6S63 2015

362.5'830973—dc23

2015022871

ISBN 978-0-8047-9687-3 (electronic)

Typeset by Thompson Type in 10/13 Sabon

SNAP MATTERS

How Food Stamps Affect Health and Well–Being

Edited by Judith Bartfeld, Craig Gundersen, Timothy M. Smeeding, and James P. Ziliak

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

STUDIES IN SOCIAL INEQUALITY

EDITORS

David B. Grusky STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Paula England NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

EDITORIAL BOARD

Hans-Peter Blossfeld

Mary C. Brinton

Thomas DiPrete

Michael Hout

Andrew Walder

Mary Waters

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Contributors

INTRODUCTION

Judith Bartfeld, Craig Gundersen, Timothy M. Smeeding, and James P. Ziliak

CHAPTER ONE. Why Are So Many Americans on Food Stamps? The Role of the Economy, Policy, and Demographics

James P. Ziliak

CHAPTER TWO. The Effect of SNAP on Poverty

Laura Tiehen, Dean Jolliffe, and Timothy M. Smeeding

CHAPTER THREE. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Food Insecurity

Christian Gregory, Matthew P. Rabbitt, and David C. Ribar

CHAPTER FOUR. SNAP and Food Consumption

Hilary W. Hoynes, Leslie McGranahan, and Diane W. Schanzenbach

CHAPTER FIVE. The Health and Nutrition Effects of SNAP: Selection into the Program and a Review of the Literature on Its Effects

Marianne P. Bitler

CHAPTER SIX. SNAP and Obesity

Craig Gundersen

CHAPTER SEVEN. SNAP and the School Meal Programs

Judith Bartfeld

CHAPTER EIGHT. Multiple Program Participation and the SNAP Program

Robert A. Moffitt

CONCLUSION

Judith Bartfeld, Craig Gundersen, Timothy M. Smeeding, and James P. Ziliak

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful for financial support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation; the Economic Research Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the Ford Foundation; grant number AE00102 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, which was awarded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; and an anonymous donor. We thank two anonymous referees, Jay Bhattacharya, Gary Burtless, Thomas DeLeire, Alison Jacknowitz, John Pepper, Isabel Sawhill, Kosali Simon, Jonathan Schwabish, Michele Ver Ploeg, and participants at the September 2013 Five Decades of Food Stamps Conference sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research and held at the Brookings Institution for insightful comments on earlier versions of the chapters. We are especially grateful to Ron Haskins and Stephanie Cencula at Brookings, and Stephanie Fahs at the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research, for all their assistance in organizing the conference. We also thank Deborah Johnson, Dawn Duren, and David Chancellor at the Institute for Research on Poverty for excellent editing services. The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the federal government, authors’ universities and institutes, or any sponsoring agency.

CONTRIBUTORS

Judith Bartfeld is Professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an Affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), a Specialist with Cooperative Extension, and Director of IRP’s RIDGE Center for National Food and Nutrition Assistance Research. Her research interests are in food security, food assistance programs, child support, and the economic well-being of single-parent families. For more, see her home page at http://sohe.wisc.edu/staff/judi-bartfeld/.

Marianne P. Bitler is Professor of Economics at the University of California-Davis and a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research Programs on Health Economics and Children. Her research interests include public economics, health economics, and labor economics, and much of her recent research has focused on childhood poverty. For more, see her home page at economics.ucdavis.edu/people/mbitler.

Christian Gregory is an Agricultural Economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. His recent work focuses on federal food assistance programs, household food security, health, and nutrition outcomes. For more, see his home page at www.ers.usda.gov/ers-staff-directory/christian-gregory.aspx.

Craig Gundersen is the Soybean Industry Endowed Professor of Agricultural Strategy in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois. His research is primarily focused on the causes and consequences of food insecurity and on evaluations of food assistance programs, with emphasis on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). For more, see his home page at http://ace.illinois.edu/directory/cggunder.

Hilary Hoynes is Professor of Public Policy and Economics and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research specialties include the study of poverty, inequality, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low-income families. For more, see her home page at https://gspp.berkeley.edu/directories/faculty/hilary-hoynes.

Dean Jolliffe is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, and a Research Affiliate of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. He has expertise in poverty, food security, development, and transition economics. For more, see his home page at www.deanjolliffe.net.

Leslie McGranahan is a Senior Economist and Research Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Her research focuses on the effect of government policies on consumption patterns, government expenditure on low-income populations, and the intergenerational transmission of wealth and inequality. For more, see her home page at www.chicagofed.org/people/mcgranahan-leslie.

Robert A. Moffitt is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include the economic analysis of transfer programs, labor economics, and applied microeconometrics. For more, see his home page at http://econ.jhu.edu/directory/robert-a-moffitt/.

Matthew P. Rabbitt is an Economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. His current focus is on the measurement and determinants of food insecurity, applied econometrics, and food assistance programs. For more, see his home page at www.ers.usda.gov/ers-staff-directory/matthew-rabbitt.aspx.

David C. Ribar is Professorial Research Fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, where he is a member of the Labour Economics and Social Policy Program. His research interests include child care, the consequences of teenage fertility, the economic motivations behind public and private transfers, welfare reform, the administrative burdens of assistance programs, people’s time use, and food insecurity. For more, see his home page at https://melbourneinstitute.com/staff/dribar/default.html.

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on policies aimed at improving the lives of children in poverty, including their education, health, and income support. Her recent work has focused on tracing the Food Stamp Program and early childhood education on children’s long-term outcomes. For more, see her home page at www.ipr.northwestern.edu/faculty-experts/fellows/schanzenbach.html.

Timothy (Tim) M. Smeeding is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and former director of the Institute for Research on Poverty, from 2008 to 2014. His recent work has been on income security policy, measuring poverty, mobility across generations, and inequality, wealth, and poverty in national and cross-national contexts. For more, see his home page at www.lafollette.wisc.edu/facultystaff/smeeding-timothy.html.

Laura Tiehen is an Economist in the Food Assistance Branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Her research examines the outcomes associated with federal food assistance including poverty, food security, and health-related behavior. For more, see her home page at www.ers.usda.gov/ers-staff-directory/laura-tiehen.aspx.

James P. Ziliak is the Carol Martin Gatton Endowed Chair in Economics and Founding Director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky. His recent work has been on the causes and consequences of food insecurity, poverty measurement, trends in income volatility, and the effects of tax and welfare policy on labor-market outcomes and family well-being. For more, see his home page at https://sites.google.com/site/jamesziliak/.

INTRODUCTION

Judith Bartfeld

Craig Gundersen

Timothy M. Smeeding

James P. Ziliak

During the past year, the Department of Agriculture has been conducting a food stamp program in eight pilot areas. There have been encouraging results from this program. Low income families are receiving better diets—they have been able to obtain meat, poultry, fish, milk, eggs, fruits and vegetables. Retail food store sales in these areas increased 8 percent in dollar volume. There have been savings in distribution costs and benefits to the economy of the food stamp communities.

President John F. Kennedy, August 2, 1962¹

In 1963, President Kennedy proposed making permanent a small pilot project called the Food Stamp Program (FSP). Fifty years later, more than one in seven Americans received benefits at a cost of nearly $80 billion in FY2013, making it the second largest program in the safety net in terms of recipients and fourth largest in terms of expenditure. Renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2008, the program today faces political pressure on many fronts, including cost and eligibility standards for certain food items.

Despite the program’s size and scope, the social science research necessary to guide policy is nascent compared to that for many other programs in the safety net. This volume brings together leading scholars to answer a wide-ranging set of questions about SNAP to assess the past effectiveness of the program, identify critical gaps in knowledge, and gauge prospects going forward as a major pillar of social and food assistance in America. Collectively, the chapters explore how and why the program has grown over time, how it affects the well-being of participants, and its interconnections with the broader safety net. Providing both a synthesis of existing research as well as new analyses to help fill in critical gaps, the volume addresses a far-reaching set of questions: How does SNAP participation respond to the economy, to demographic pressures, and to policy reforms? What are the antipoverty effects of SNAP, and how does it compare to other programs in the safety net? How is food spending among SNAP-eligible households related to the amount of SNAP benefits, and does the in-kind nature of SNAP alter household’s food choices? Does SNAP contribute to or reduce obesity, and does it improve nutrition and health more broadly? To what extent does SNAP work in tandem with other components of the food safety net for children, such as school breakfast and lunch, and how is it related to participation decisions in other safety net programs?

The volume is intended as a resource for policy makers, researchers, and students. As such, it sheds light both on substantive questions surrounding SNAP’s role and impact, as well as on the fundamental challenges in evaluating safety net programs. In the following chapters, the authors highlight what is known about SNAP but are candid in noting where research is ambiguous or lacking. The volume provides strong evidence that SNAP is highly responsive to macroeconomic pressures as well as to policy choices intended to enhance access among low-income households. As a result, it has become one of the most effective antipoverty programs overall and is particularly effective at lifting nonelderly households with children out of deep poverty. SNAP is firmly embedded within the broader safety net: Program rules have broader implications for children’s access to school meals, for instance, and it often fills in residual gaps remaining after other forms of assistance. As documented throughout this volume, the program differentially serves the most at-risk households, in terms of low income, preexisting food insecurity, and poor health. Although serving the most at-risk is surely desirable from a policy standpoint, it creates substantial challenges in assessing program impacts, a topic also addressed at length in this volume. In addition to the challenges stemming from nonrandom program participation, evaluating program impact is further complicated by issues such as misreporting of program participation in survey data as well as the frequent reliance on binary measures of participation and the lack of sufficiently long time frames. These challenges notwithstanding, the volume is cautiously optimistic with regard to the broader benefits of the program. Higher SNAP benefits appear to reduce the risk of food insecurity, SNAP does not appear to contribute to obesity, and limited evidence suggests that SNAP has long-term benefits on health. Most recipients spend more on food than their benefit amount over the course of a year, suggesting that benefits are not distorting food choices relative to an equivalent amount of unrestricted income. At the same time, there remain considerable gaps in understanding, especially with respect to impacts on nutrition and health outcomes, for which methodological challenges are particularly salient.

SHARING THE NATION’S ABUNDANCE

The authorizing legislation of the Food Stamp Act of 1964 began with a lofty goal: In order to promote the general welfare, that the Nation’s abundance of food should be utilized. . . . to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s population and raise levels of nutrition among low-income households.² Initial food stamp participation was sluggish, with only a half million participants signed up in the first full year. Even by 1969 there were still fewer than 3 million persons enrolled, despite a new federal poverty measure, which indicated that there were over 24 million Americans living in poverty. It took nearly a decade for the program to fully roll out across the country, in part because states had the option of continuing commodity distribution programs in lieu of adopting the FSP, there was a lack of funding, and there was wide variation across states in determining program eligibility and benefits.

An airing of CBS Reports Hunger in America in 1968 highlighted widespread hunger and malnutrition among many children. In response to this and other evidence of hunger across the United States, Congress amended the Food Stamp Act in 1971 to establish national-level eligibility and benefit standards. This led to rapid growth in participation and cost in the mid-1970s, as seen in Figure I.1. Many antihunger advocates still believed that the program was not reaching those in greatest need because of the so-called purchase requirement that stipulated that recipients had to purchase the stamps. That is, recipients paid for the stamps (limited to no more than 30 percent of their income with the 1971 amendments) and then received a bonus payment to cover the difference between the amount paid and the amount needed to attain a low-cost, nutritionally adequate diet. However, this left behind those families too destitute to buy the stamps and led others to be reluctant to participate, especially if the bonus payment was quite small. The Food Stamp Act of 1977 eliminated the purchase requirement and replaced it with the net income rule whereby recipients were expected to spend 30 percent of net income on food and use the stamps as a supplement. Participation in the program jumped by 1.5 million recipients the month following implementation of the new rule in 1979, spawning the modern era of the Food Stamp Program.³ Subsequent changes went further to reduce barriers to access. By the early 2000s, electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards replaced vouchers or stamps used to make food purchases. This move to EBT was designed to improve program integrity and to reduce the stigma that some potential recipients may feel when using SNAP. Whereas obtaining benefits traditionally involved in-person applications and recertification when income changed, to further reduce hurdles to applying, many states now allow online applications and recertification.

Figure I.1. Trends in Food Stamp Program/SNAP participation and cost.

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), SNAP Program Data.

Currently, benefits can be redeemed at nearly 250,000 outlets nationwide for the purchase of food for home consumption, though over 80 percent of benefits are redeemed at big-box supermarkets.

The basic federal structure for eligibility and benefits has remained largely intact since 1979, although states have leeway over some aspects of eligibility, a flexibility that has been more widely used over time (see Ziliak, Chapter One in this volume, for further discussion).⁴ To qualify for assistance a household must have gross income below 130 percent of the family-size adjusted poverty guideline and net income below 100 percent of the guideline (the gross income test is waived if the unit contains a disabled person or someone age sixty or older).⁵ Moreover, a household must have liquid assets valued at less than $2,000 ($3,250 for seniors and the disabled) and the market value of a vehicle less than $4,650 to qualify—although states have flexibility with regard to both of those restrictions.⁶ The vehicle test is typically waived for one vehicle if it is used primarily for work purposes or to transport someone with a disability. Alternatively, households may be deemed categorically eligible if they receive benefits from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program or from Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Many states have used broad-based categorical eligibility to extend eligibility to households with gross income higher than 130 percent of the poverty line and/or assets over the $2,000 limit, consistent with a broader policy trend toward making supports available to low-income working households.

The benefit level varies by the size of the household but is fixed across the lower forty-eight states and District of Columbia (higher in Alaska and Hawaii). Benefits are updated annually by the Consumer Price Index for the twenty-nine food categories that constitute the Thrifty Food Plan, which is a minimal-cost and model-based market basket of foods that serves as the basis for the maximum benefit. The monthly amount received is determined by subtracting 30 percent of net income from the maximum benefit allowed per unit, under the assumption that households are able to spend 30 percent of net income on food. The calculation of net income is intended to provide a more realistic estimate of available income after considering other standard expenses. These expenses are deductible from gross income and include 20 percent of labor market earnings, a standard deduction, dependent care expenses, child support payments, excess shelter costs, and excess out-of-pocket medical expenses for seniors (those over age sixty) and persons with disabilities. Most of the deductions are limited, but, still, over one-third of units report zero net income and thus receive the maximum benefit (see Caswell and Yaktine 2013)—meaning their SNAP benefit is expected to be sufficient to meet all their food needs. The maximum benefit was temporarily increased by an average of 13.6 percent in 2009, with the intent that the increase gradually be phased out. In the face of considerable pressures regarding rising program costs and caseloads, the size of SNAP has been reduced recently. First, the 13.6 percent benefit increase tied to the 2009 American Recovery and Relief Act was ended on November 1, 2013. This was earlier than the scheduled phase-out, which was designed to end in 2015. This resulted in a benefit cut for nearly every SNAP household, reducing benefits back to the inflation-adjusted 2009 levels by about $29 per month for a family of three and reducing benefits by $5.0 billion in 2014 (Dean and Rosenbaum 2013). Second, the Agriculture Act of 2014 contains a $8.55 billion cut over the next ten years, reducing benefits by about $90 a month for 850,000 households in seventeen states. This is due to a change in the calculation of net income for households who receive less than $20 a month in benefits from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (Bolen, Rosenbaum, and Dean 2014).

THE TSUNAMI OF SNAP PARTICIPATION AND ITS EFFECTS ON POVERTY

For most of the 1980s, nominal spending on food stamps was relatively stable at $11 to $12 billion per year. Participation declined due to decreased need as the macroeconomy improved after the back-to-back recessions of 1980 and 1982. This was followed by a surge in participation and cost from 1990 to 1994 that occurred simultaneously with the growth in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. Recipients of AFDC were categorically eligible for food stamps, and at least 90 percent of AFDC families participated in the FSP in a typical year. As policy makers at the state and federal levels set their gaze on reining in the growth of AFDC, attention naturally turned to the FSP at the same time. With passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, also known as welfare reform, states were granted greater administrative control of food stamps, undoing some of the federalization in the 1971 Food Stamp Act. Moreover, certain classes of recipients were denied access (convicted drug felons and legal noncitizens in the country fewer than five years) or had access limited. Able-bodied adults without dependents between the ages of eighteen and fifty—so-called ABAWDs—had eligibility reduced to three months out of any thirty-six months if they worked fewer than twenty hours per week.⁷ By 2000, participation in the FSP was down to its lowest levels since 1979.

The decline in the number of FSP recipients in the late 1990s was followed by a sharp increase in the number of participants starting in the 2000s, with especially large increases starting after the Great Recession. In Chapter One, James Ziliak explores the reasons underlying the growth in the program, focusing on the macroeconomy, SNAP policy, related welfare policy, and demographics. Figure I.1 makes transparent the buoyancy of the caseload with the business cycle from 1979 to 1999, with participation rising during recessions and declining during expansions. The past decade of near uninterrupted growth in participation is unprecedented in the program’s history. By most measures the recession of 2001 was mild; with declining unemployment in the aftermath of the recession, past experience would have dictated a tampering down of caseloads. This did not happen, which leads Ziliak to examine the macroeconomic contribution to the caseload of stagnant household incomes and a widening income distribution. SNAP policy at the state level also changed significantly during this period. Take-up rates in the program, that is, the probability a person participates given that he or she is eligible for assistance, fell dramatically after welfare reform, so states used their new authority to expand access and outreach. This included restoring benefits to legal immigrants, expanding categorical eligibility to align more generous income and asset tests in TANF to food stamps and expedited application and recertification processes, among others. Concomitantly there was the push and pull of various demographic forces on the caseload—upward pressure from increasing shares of children being born to low-income single mothers and more reports of disability status and downward pressure from the aging of the population owing to the lower take-up rates of older Americans in the program.

Ziliak assembles over three decades of household data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to estimate models of SNAP participation. In a series of counterfactual simulations he finds that the macroeconomy accounts for 45 percent of the growth from 2000 to 2011, food stamp policy changes account for 35 percent, nonfood policies such as welfare reform account for 3 percent of the growth, and demographic factors actually reduced growth of the SNAP caseload by 5 percent. Of the macroeconomic factors, the unemployment rate was the most important contributor, but stagnant income and inequality also mattered. This suggests that if growth over the next decade is accompanied by flat wages in the bottom half and increasing incomes at the top, we will not expect SNAP participation to fall as much as predicted based on pre-2000 experience. Although a key argument in favor of adoption of EBT as the mechanism of program delivery was to reduce stigma and thus raise participation among eligible households, Ziliak finds no evidence that the rollout of EBT across states and over time increased participation. On the other hand, liberalized access to the program with broad-based categorical eligibility and the fall in wages for low-income workers will continue to keep participation rates elevated. Demographic shifts, in particular the aging of the population and smaller households, are the seeming allies of policy makers concerned about containing program growth.

With the growing reach of SNAP to more American families, an obvious question is whether it is lifting more families out of poverty. Answering this is not straightforward because the value of food stamps is not counted as income in the official poverty statistics. That is, the official poverty rate counts only cash income in determining whether the family is poor and excludes in-kind transfers such as SNAP, Medicaid, and Medicare, as well as taxes paid and tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Another challenge in determining the antipoverty effectiveness of the program is the fact that both the participation rate and the amount of benefits received are grossly underreported in the CPS, which comprises the data for official poverty statistics and for the new Supplemental Poverty Measure, which does count the effects of SNAP. This means measurement error is a serious concern confronting accurate assessment of the program. A related measurement issue is that the standard approach of determining the antipoverty effectiveness of a program like SNAP is to count the number of people lifted above the poverty line. This leads to an understatement of the impact of SNAP insofar as it does not measure those whose level of poverty is diminished, even if the SNAP benefit levels do not raise a family above the poverty line. In fact, the inverse relationship between income and benefits means that SNAP may not raise many participants above the poverty line. Needless to say, even when SNAP benefits are not sufficient to raise someone above the poverty line, the resources available to participants are improved through the receipt of SNAP.

In Chapter Two, Laura Tiehen, Dean Jolliffe, and Timothy Smeeding assemble twenty-four years of data from the CPS to assess the antipoverty effect of SNAP, both the rate and depth. They find in a typical year that SNAP lowers the poverty rate by 5 to 10 percent and that this effect is stronger in recessionary periods. More impressive is the effect of SNAP on deep poverty—the fraction of people living on incomes less than one-half the official poverty line is lowered 10 to 20 percent in any given year by food stamps over the past two decades. In terms of number of persons affected, in 2011 roughly 4 million people were lifted out of poverty and another 3.5 million were lifted out of deep poverty. Children were the greatest beneficiaries of the poverty alleviation benefits of SNAP. The authors also show that if one makes an adjustment for the underreporting of SNAP benefits in the CPS, the antipoverty bite of the program is double that with no adjustment, and the corrected estimates suggest that SNAP lifts more out of poverty than the EITC. This makes it the most effective antipoverty program among the nonelderly. Furthermore, state policy options designed to strengthen program access, such as removal of asset tests and use of longer recertification periods for workers, have increased the antipoverty effectiveness of the program.

SAFEGUARDING THE HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF THE NATION

The focal goal of SNAP is to alleviate hunger by providing resources to purchase a nutritious diet. Although the United States does not collect data on the physiological condition of hunger, since 1995 the USDA has collected survey data on food insecurity, which means that there is inadequate or unsure access to enough food for an active, healthy life due to economic reasons. This survey is fielded as a supplement to the CPS in December of each year, where each of the 50,000 to 60,000 households is asked to respond to a series of eighteen questions (ten if no children are present) on the Core Food Security Module regarding worries about having enough food to eat and reductions in food intake. Figure I.2 presents trends in food insecurity and very low food security—where the latter is a more severe measure of hardship as reflected in responses to the food security supplement—from 1995 to 2012. The figure shows that both rates held steady until 2008, when they increased about 30 percent with the onset of the Great Recession, and have remained at these elevated rates in the ensuing years.

Figure I.2. Trends in food insecurity in the United States.

SOURCE: USDA, Economic Research Service, Key Statistics and Graphics.

If SNAP participation increased so much after 2000, and really accelerated after 2007, why did food insecurity rise in tandem? Did SNAP fail in its key mission to enhance food security? Or did it ensure that the extent of food insecurity did not rise more