The federal government's food stamp program is the "the largest federal nutrition initiative for low-income households" (washingtonpost.com). Statistics have shown that in times of economic crisis, participation in this program increases. This was so comforting to me because I did not expect people to be so generous during unstable times such as the one we are in now. I had expected the numbers to go down, however the statistics showed just the opposite. Spokeswoman Jean Daniel said that "the July 2008 figure is the highest since the all time peak of 29.8 million in November 2005, in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita". They have not yet received the results for the most recent months, but they are predicting another rise in number of participants. Before reading this article, I had just assumed everyone would be looking out for solely him/herself and his/her families during a time of crisis. I feel bad that I discredited our country's generosity, but am glad to see our country working to help each other out. After reading this article, my confidence in our country has definitely been boosted.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/03/AR2008100301389_pf.html
2 comments:
This is very comforting to know is backed in factual evidence. Similar to our discussions in class on perilous time and analyzing the social interactions of societies in perilous times, we have seen that people need a sense of community when faced with adversity because it gives them someone to lean on and helps in the situation to know someone else is going through the same hard times as them. In our class room experiment over the blog deletions most students stayed clumped together pyscologicaly not wanting to be deemed as the outcast casting blame on others and making accusations.
I'd like to clarify something... the increase in participation in the food stamps program means that more Americans are requesting government assistance in obtaining food, and this is why the expenditure is also higher. I'm not sure this suggests any increased generosity on the part of Americans, as it's a government program funded through taxpayer dollars. (We aren't directly donating.)
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