Consider This from NPR - After Extra SNAP Benefits Expire, Some Fear A "Hunger Cliff"

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Some 16 million American households receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will get less money this month.During the pandemic, the federal government temporarily increased SNAP benefits. But those extra benefits have now expired. That means recipients will get about $90 less each month on average, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research institute. Some families may see their benefits cut by more than $250 per month.Dr. Megan Sandel, co-director of the Boston Medical Center's Grow Clinic, which focuses on treating malnutrition issues in kids, explains how children's health can suffer when families are not able to put enough food on the table.And NPR's Stacey Vanek Smith reports on another worrying trend in Americans' personal finances. Credit card debt is increasing at a record rate, as people struggle to keep up with inflation.This episode also features reporting from NPR's Alison Aubrey. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Teresa Calderas is 63 years old, and she's been disabled for many years. I have chronic pain. I have arthritis, fibromyalgia, and degenerative disc disease, and so I'm just not able to work. And for many years, she's relied on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. It's a federally funded benefit to help people pay for food. The thing is, Calderas says, it wasn't really enough. I would run out of money pretty much for the middle of the month. That changed during the pandemic. As part of the federal response

back in spring 2020, the government temporarily increased SNAP benefits. For Calderas, it made a huge difference. I was getting, I think, about $20 a month. And the extra amount that I ended up getting was about $280 a month. And that helped me tremendously. I could eat more like when I felt like I needed to eat. She noticed a big difference in her overall health. You know, I feel better. I have a little more energy. My nails look better.

You know, they were real split, cracked, and dried. And I noticed having eaten more vegetables and meats that, you know, they look a lot better. They're not pretty, but they're healthier. And I think your nails say a lot about what your health is like. But those extra benefits expired this month, at the same time that inflation is putting more pressure on people with fixed incomes like Calderas. but there are lots of us out here who you can't buy a gallon of milk when we need it. I'm just going to ask you to go back to not eating very much, about a meal a day. She says she'll figure out some way to get by, but that losing those extra benefits will hurt. I'm pretty familiar with hunger, and it's not a good feeling, you know. Consider this. Some experts are worried the end of extra SNAP benefits is pushing the country toward a hunger cliff. And it's coming at a moment when Americans

are already racking up record credit card debt to keep up with rising prices on basic needs. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. The increase in SNAP benefits was one of many emergency measures that the federal government put in place at the beginning of the pandemic. Together, they were designed to keep people afloat when we had no idea what the next few months would look like. And in terms of keeping people from going hungry, they worked pretty well. In previous recessions and crises, food insecurity has gone up. And in this crisis, food insecurity largely held constant, which is pretty remarkable. That's Dorothy Rosenbaum with the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

But now the end of the extra SNAP benefits could be painful for a lot of families. Rosenbaum says the average person receiving benefits will get $90 less per month. For some households, it could be more than a $250 a month cut. This will certainly increase the degree to which some people struggle to put food on the table. We wanted to get a sense of how this change could impact the health of individual families. And for that, I spoke with Dr. Megan Sandel. She's a pediatrician and co-director of the Boston Medical Center's GROW Clinic, which focuses on treating malnutrition issues in kids. Let me just translate to you kind of who's a typical family that I see.

They're working sometimes two jobs. They have this young child, this six-month-old that's not growing the way you would expect on the growth curve. And so they will come and see me and the mom will break down in tears and say, I just got my rent bill. Landlord is increasing it. I can't keep up. And I know the SNAP cutbacks are coming. And think about what SNAP is. It's the largest anti-hunger program in the United States. It's an evidence-based tool for ensuring families put food on the table. And now I know that there's going to be one more or

less tool in the toolbox to try and help this kid grow and get back on the growth curve. What makes children, young people, particularly vulnerable in moments such as this? You know, you think about kind of what is really important around growth. In the first three years of life, you are in the most rapid growth period in terms of brain and body. And so when you're missing out on key nutrition, it's hard to catch up. It literally can be situations where we get to kids late and they're starting to struggle in school or they're not reading on time or other things. And so we're really talking about millions of families here that have a potential hit. And we've seen this before. Our research showed that during the Great Recession in 2008, 2009, when there was a boost, they were able to see a benefit. And then when that boost was reduced, we saw kids stop

growing, being in fair to poor health, and their caregivers being in fair to poor health. So this is really a family issue. What types of long-term effects can hunger have on children as they grow? So I like to think about it in three ways. I think we know that there are physical health implications. You're not able to fight off viruses as well. You're not going to be able to do as well

with your immune system. And we also know that there can be developmental effects, right? You're not walking on time. You're not running on time. You're not learning to read on time. And then I think mostly there are huge mental health effects, both for, again, kids and their parents, anxiety, depression, lost productivity at work, lost productivity in school. And so I think the good news is there's a solution, right? We know that SNAP needs to cover the cost of a healthy diet. It doesn't really do that now, and it's not going to do it if you end up rolling it back

further. But Congress is going to take up the Farm Bill. There are ways in which you could really start to see covering the real cost of food, and we could see the benefits of that over the next generations. If you could enact any law or program or structure right now that would have a meaningful impact on fighting child hunger, where would you begin? You know, the Farm Bill is a huge, huge bill that is considered every five years. And there is a real opportunity for Congress to strengthen and improve SNAP, not just to roll it back, but to actually look at it as this evidence-based solution to reducing food insecurity and promoting health.

And the way you do that is actually to boost SNAP benefits so they reflect the real cost of a healthy diet across the country. My counseling to families to have fruits and vegetables and dairy and eggs are meaningless if their actual ability to purchase them is reduced. And so there are ways in which we could actually use the pandemic era boost as an example of how we improve the program and really create health equity for children and adults across the country. Dr. Megan Sandel, pediatrician and co-director of the Boston Medical Center's Grow Clinic. The end of extra SNAP benefits is arriving at the same moment that we're seeing a worrying trend in Americans' personal finances. Credit card debt, which had dipped way down in 2021, is now rising at a record pace. NPR's Stacey Vanek-Smith explains why. Stephanie Roth realized how much her financial situation had changed when she was

signing up to bring a dish to the Valentine's Day party at her kids' daycare. I used to always be the mom who would sign up for, you know, the main stuff like the sandwiches and the meats and the this and that, the big expensive things. Roth has three young children. She's 41 and lives in Lebanon, Tennessee, just outside Nashville. Before the pandemic, she was in a good financial situation. She could bring the sandwiches and the soda and the cupcakes. But looking at the signup sheet last month, she realized she could not do that anymore. I was literally looking at the list and I was thinking, like, what has inflation maybe not messed with? And I signed up for like bananas because I was like, there's still 59 cents a pound. Roth has a full-time job, earns about $40,000 a year working as an administrative

medical assistant. And she's always been good with money. But during the pandemic, she went through a divorce and took full custody of her kids, ages two, four, and six. That meant a complete change in her finances and lifestyle. Roth was suddenly supporting her whole family. One of her top expenses? Daycare. It's like $1,500 a month. I mean, it's half my paycheck, basically, you know. Between that, the rising price of gas, food, and clothes, Roth says her paycheck feels like it's spent before she even takes it home. Actually, more than spent. You know, a cell phone bill came up due, and I didn't have the money in my checking account.

So I've had to pay, you know, pay with my credit card. Roth started leaning on her credit card to pick up the extra expenses her paycheck couldn't cover. At the same time, her credit card company was raising interest rates from 15 percent to more than 22 percent. Roth watched her debt grow along with the minimum payments. And then there were these unexpected expenses that started this kind of spiral. My middle daughter recently fell and kind of hit her chin on the floor and had to have two stitches in her chin. She's OK. Everything's fine. But it was an $800 New York trip. Roth's credit card debt seemed to explode from a few thousand dollars to more than $10,000.

And right now, Roth owes about $25,000 to the credit card company. Sometimes it feels very like heavy, like crushing, you know, like I just think about, you know, I'm going to have to pay this back. I have to pay this back. And I don't know how that's going to, you know, if I do minimum payments, what I'll be like 300 when it's paid off, you know. Millennials like Roth have seen their debt rise by nearly 30 percent since before the pandemic, to about $3.8 trillion. What's strange about this is back in 2021, that debt had fallen near record lows. We saw Americans across the income stream save a lot of money. I mean, a lot of money. Jill Schlesinger is the author of The Great Money Reset. She's also a certified financial planner. She says stimulus checks, lockdown and lots of pay raises had people in really strong financial shape a couple of years ago.

Then all of a sudden 2022 starts and inflation doesn't go down. It actually continues to accelerate. And so we saw many people plow through those pandemic era savings and left with nothing. For a lot of people, this is not so much going out and buying something fancy. Things are more expensive. And just to keep up with where you were last year, you have to pay a lot more. Credit card debt in the U.S. has been rising at one of the fastest rates in history. We collectively owe nearly a trillion dollars on our cards. That is an all-time high. Ann Schlesinger says with interest rates rising on those cards, getting ahead of the debt gets harder and harder. So millions of Americans like Stephanie Roth are falling behind on their finances. But here's the

other thing. Roth actually makes too much money to qualify for aid or free services that might help her financial situation. Things like free pre-K for her daughter or SNAP food assistance. I have like, I just make enough to like not be poor enough to qualify for services. I don't know because I'm like, dude, I am so poor, like you don't even know. Roth tries every month to pay a little more than the minimum payment, but most of the time it just doesn't happen. At the same time, she worries that her kids are missing out on things. I mean, that's probably going to be my biggest focus is like, you know, just making sure that they are having those fun, you know, memorable moments that they might, you know, think is

special. It's a special time or that could give them, you know, joy or, you know, because it's been hard. We've all been through a lot like the last year or two. Roth dreams of having extra money to take her kids out for ice cream without having to plan for it or to the Build-A-Bear store. And of her being able to be the mom who signs up to bring sandwiches and cupcakes to daycare instead of the bananas.

NPR's Stacey Vanek-Smith. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.