In November of last year, Brookings published a report comparing state social safety nets. One of the most significant parts of safety nets in the states is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, otherwise known as SNAP and formerly known as “food stamps”.
SNAP is an extremely important anti-poverty program. The Census Bureau estimates that nationwide, 3.7 million people are lifted out of poverty as a result of these benefits. This makes it the third largest anti-poverty program in the United States, behind only Social Security and refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Below are two charts. The first shows the number of Ohioans that received SNAP benefits in each month since January 2007, and the second shows the average amount of benefits each person received in dollars. All data below comes from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
These two graphs highlight how the SNAP benefits changed during the Great Recession and during the COVID-19 pandemic. During both downturns, SNAP benefits increased in Ohio, but the nature of these downturns highlights some important differences.
One difference between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic is that in 2008, there was a large increase in the number of people receiving benefits, while in 2020 there was a massive spike in the size of those benefits. During both events, the number of people and the value of the benefits increased, but there is a clear difference in the magnitude of each change.
This is because of how the Federal Government chose to respond to these different crises. In 2009, the Obama administration passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which provided funding for infrastructure, healthcare, and education. The goal of this was to get the economy back on track after the financial markets collapsed.
In 2020, one of the steps the Trump administration took early on to address the pandemic was the passing of the Families First Coronavirus Response act, which among other things allowed states to increase the amount of money families received substantially. This resulted in the total amount of SNAP benefits issued in Ohio to more than double from $169 million to $387 million, while the total number of recipients only increased from 1.3 million people to 1.6 million people.
The difference between these two downturns was that in 2008, the financial sector failed from within. In 2020, there was a major outside force that caused all of the damage. The response from the Obama administration reflects the fact that fundamental change was needed in order to get back on track. Extreme emergency spending would have been helpful, but it would not have addressed the long term issues that plagued the economy.
When the pandemic began in 2020, there wasn’t the same type of major structural flaw in the economy. Certainly the pandemic exposed every flaw that it could find, but at the time it was not unreasonable to think that with a large enough band-aid type fix could solve the immediate problems until a vaccine brough the pandemic to a close. This is the same time that officials were issuing lockdowns that were only supposed to last a few weeks.
What is interesting about the expansion of benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic is that they were extremely successful at abating poverty, even after the vaccine was developed and case counts began to fall. Unfortunately, programs like the expanded SNAP allotments and the expanded Child Tax Credit are starting to phase out.
At the end of 2024, local governments will run out of time to use the last of their American Rescue Plan Act funding. This means local policymakers are on the clock to try and find ways to use this money wisely. If it gets used ineffectively, then people who have come to rely on increased assistance in the face of rising prices are going to get left behind. Hopefully this last bit of stimulus can be used to create long-lasting change.