Governors in Indiana, Arkansas, Idaho and West Virginia want to stop letting people use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to buy soda, candy and other unhealthy food.
We think that makes sense. Dr. Pepper and Twix offer little in the way of nutrition, which is, after all, at the heart of the SNAP program.
For some on the right, though, the fact that food-stamp recipients can use the subsidies to buy junk food instead of healthy essentials is their primary concern with the program. Sure, that’s an issue, and the governors pushing to ban SNAP use on candy might well succeed in the face of opponents who decry this limitation on consumer choice.
There’s blowback, too, because Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is championing the idea, and he’s a polarizing messenger. That doesn’t faze us — we think encouraging healthy eating is positive, and that consuming too much sugar and ultra-processed food isn’t good for anyone’s health.
Would it make SNAP recipients’ lives better if they stopped using aid money on junk food? Probably, and there’s certainly an argument to be made that subsisting on a low-nutrition Western diet causes health problems that often require medical treatments inflating Medicaid and Medicare costs. The libertarian Cato Institute reports that SNAP recipients tend to have less healthy diets and higher obesity rates than other Americans, including low-income people not on SNAP. Nearly a quarter of their food purchases are for junk food, undermining federal efforts to encourage healthier eating, according to Cato.
So there’s clearly a potential public benefit to restricting SNAP beneficiaries’ choices, even though the nanny-state aspect of the policy makes us uncomfortable. But this debate masks a larger issue tied to SNAP. Why, in a country where the economy has grown impressively since the pandemic, do so many Americans need the subsidy?
Today, 12.5% of Americans, or 1 in 8, receive SNAP support. In 2000, just 6.1% of Americans were on food benefits.
In Illinois, the problem is more pronounced. In 2000, 6.8% of Illinoisans were on SNAP. Today, 15.1% of Illinoisans are on SNAP, or 1 in 7. This is far higher than the Great Recession, when 10.8% of Illinoisans received SNAP benefits.
In our view, SNAP is a useful measure of whether people are able to afford the essentials of life. If you examine the percentage of the population participating in SNAP, you can get a sense of whether we’re thriving or struggling, generally speaking. You can also glean information about the health of the job market and economy more broadly, depending on whether the amount of people on food benefits is growing or shrinking. Unemployment and poverty rates tend to track SNAP numbers.
These numbers reveal a troubling truth: Illinois isn’t creating enough opportunity for working families to stay afloat without government aid. SNAP enrollment typically drops when the economy improves and rises when it weakens, making it a useful indicator of financial hardship. To qualify for SNAP in Illinois, a family of four must earn $51,480 or less in gross annual income; for an individual, the limit is $24,852. That’s not much to live on — and far below the state’s median household income of $81,000.
So yes, let’s take easy wins where we can. Barring food-stamp use for junk food could significantly improve Americans’ health.
But we’ll never solve the health crisis — or the poverty crisis — by simply policing the snack aisle. As tough as it is, let’s focus on fixing the system that puts so many Americans in line for food assistance in the first place.
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