In 2014, almost one in seven Americans received nutritional benefits, popularly known as "food stamps," through the Supplemental Nutrition Access Program. The program, which lifted 4.7 million people out of poverty in 2014, is one of the only federal assistance programs available to healthy adults without dependents, and the evidence increasingly indicates that it was a crucial stabilizer during the Great Recession, when many states actually dropped needy families from the welfare rolls.
But now, an estimated 500,000-1,000,000 Americans will lose their SNAP benefits, a result of a provision in the 1996 welfare reform law that imposed a variety of work requirements on SNAP recipients. A major goal of the 1996 reforms was to eliminate the work disincentives that many believed were built into America's social safety net. While the law focused primarily on TANF (the cash assistance programs for families with children), it also imposed a work requirement on SNAP benefits: Able-bodied adults without dependents are now only eligible to receive food stamps for three months out of every 36 months, unless they are either working or participating in a qualified job-training program.
[For more of this story, written by Dwyer Gunn, go to http://www.psmag.com/business-...ally-discourage-work]
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