One in five New Mexicans, or about 20.7 of the state’s population, are on food stamps, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Wall Street Journal reports that 428,642 New Mexico residents use the federal food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the state has had a 10.5 percent increase in recipients over the past year.

New Mexico is one of five states, including Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Oregon, where one in five residents use SNAP. Mississippi, where 21.5 of the population uses food stamps, has the highest proportion of recipients of any state, and New Mexico has the second highest proportion.

Stagnating income, persistently high unemployment, and natural disasters like Hurricane Irene all contributed to an 8.1 percent national increase of in SNAP usage in the past year. The program was used by about 15 percent of Americans in August, a total of 45.8 million people.

SNAP usage accelerated rapidly with the onset of the recession, but growth rates have slowed relative to the high increase of previous years.

Earlier this year, a New Mexico program that supplemented food stamps for the elderly and the disabled was imperiled due to lack of funding, but the Legislature re-funded it during its emergency session. The program ensures a $25 per month minimum for New Mexicans who qualify for it, an increase over the $16 per month required by the federal government.

The Center for American Progress recently estimated that SNAP is keeping about 5.1 million people out of poverty.

In her testimony, Smith argued that such limits will discourage people from saving money and do little to reduce fraud:

Therefore, the Michigan League for Human Services is opposed to the implementa­tion of a $5,000 asset limit for food assistance. If Michigan imposes any asset limits on food assistance, it would be going against the national trend of eliminating asset tests to help families get back on their feet during this economic downturn. Twenty-nine states do not have any asset limits for food assistance.

We certainly agree that food assistance benefits should only go to those who need them and that lottery winners should not receive benefits. However, there is no reason to paint such a broad stroke. Food assistance cases have been skyrocketing since the beginning of the recession. Michigan has led the nation in unemployment, years before employment declined in other states. In 2009, there were 10 unem­ployed people for every job opening. Even now, there are more than 4 unemployed people for every open job in Michigan…

We need to be prudent in the use of our tax dollars. Implementing an asset limit for food assistance will cost Michigan money. While the federal government funds 100 percent of the food assistance benefit, administrative costs of the food assistance program are shared with the state, approximately fifty-fifty. Caseworkers already manage an average of 900 cases each, and with more than 2 million people on food assistance in Michigan, the additional work of verifying assets seems unfathomable and could increase the workload of DHS caseworkers tenfold. Overburdened staff could also affect error rates and other important outcomes on which the state is audited. The more administrative hurdles we erect, the more the state will pay. Last time that Michigan made a major policy change to their food assistance program, a federal audit was triggered and Michigan was fined $65 million for not meeting program requirements.

The incidence of abuse in the food assistance program is minimal. DHS reports 5,000 prosecutions a year for fraud in ALL assistance programs; that is less than one in 500 participants—about the same odds as catching a ball at a Major League Baseball game. Nationwide, 50,178 of 33.5 million recipients were disqualified from the Food Stamp Program in 2009 for abuse, less than one-tenth of one percent.

This move to impose asset limits was sparked by reports that a man who had won the lottery was receiving food stamps. The MILHS supports an alternative bill that would require information sharing between the lottery and the Department of Human Services, which they say would “specifically address the problem at hand without subjecting everyone to unnecessary and punitive policies.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that new data (.pdf) from the Department of Agriculture shows that in the U.S. “some 70 percent of households that relied on food stamps last year had no earned income”:

While the recession technically ended in 2009, a sluggish economic recovery left millions out of work or underemployed and leaning on the government for assistance last year.

The Agriculture Department’s annual snapshot on the characteristics of food stamp households, released Friday, shows that seven in 10 households receiving food stamps had no earned income last year, though many got other forms of government benefits.

Nearly 21% of households on food stamps also received Supplemental Security Income, assistance for the aged and blind. Some 21.4% received Social Security benefits. Just 8% of households also received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the cash welfare program.

But some 20% of households had no cash income of any kind last year, up from 15% in 2007, the year the recession began, and up from 7% in 1990.

That’s partly because most household heads who were receiving food stamps were also out of work. Just 21.8% of them had jobs in 2010, while 19.8% were jobless and looking for work.

According to an interactive map on the Journal’s website, Florida had among the highest percentage of people on food stamps without an earned income. The states with a higher percentage included Kentucky, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Massachusetts reported the highest percentage: 80 percent.

The Journal also reported that “food stamps may be emerging as a lifeline for families after their unemployment insurance expired [and] just 6.7% of households who received food stamps were getting jobless benefits.” It as also reported that “nearly half of all food-stamp recipients, 47%, were children under the age of 18. Another 8% of recipients were age 60 or older.”

Poverty and unemployment has been a persistent problem in Florida. The last Florida jobs report shows that unemployment remained unchanged from one month to the next. In August, Florida also had the second highest number of mass layoffs in the nation. Many of Florida’s largest cities are struggling to rebound from the recession.

Gov. Rick Scott maintains the state is on the “right path.”

AP reports:

Michigan has determined food assistance eligibility based only on income for roughly a decade. A new policy will include a review of certain financial assets starting Oct 1. The requirements will affect new applicants right away and existing recipients when their cases come up for review, which typically happens once every six months.

Those with assets of more than $5,000 in bank accounts or some types of property would no longer be eligible for food assistance. Other assets that would count against the cap include vehicles with market values of more than $15,000 and second homes, depending on how much is owed on the properties.

Some assets, such as primary residences and 401k accounts, would not be considered for determining food assistance eligibility.

Advocates for the poor say the new policy will make it more difficult for the unemployed to qualify for the program and discourage people from saving. Almost 20 percent of Michigan residents currently receive food stamps.

The program was set to expire on July 1 since the legislature did not appropriate money for it, but Martinez continued the program through September with Recovery Act funds.

The program costs about $50,000 a month to run and ensures that New Mexicans receive at least $25 in food assistance per month, while the minimum federal benefit is $16 per month.

South Carolina’s more than 236,000 unemployed workers could have to take a drug test in order to receive jobless benefits, according to a proposal by Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley on Tuesday. [...] Haley said testing the unemployed was one of several steps in ensuring the newly restructured Department of Employment and Workforce — now a cabinet agency — only pays benefits to those who have earned them. “We will make sure, above all, that there will be no … benefits if they do not pass a drug test,” Haley said.

It is a bad idea, though not an original one; Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested the same this summer. In other class-baiting news, check this out from Newt Gingrich, perpetual almost-candidate for president:

[Gingrich] is advising Republican candidates on November’s ballots to frame the choice for voters between Democrats as “the party of food stamps” while selling the GOP as “the party of paychecks” [...] He told reporters later that Republicans can campaign as the party of opportunity. “Most Americans would like to get a paycheck,” Gingrich said. “Most Americans would not like to be forced to have food stamps handed out by liberal Democrats.”

Where to start? Haley makes the classic mistake of thinking of unemployment benefits as welfare, rather than insurance. But they don’t call it “unemployment insurance” for nothing. Recipients need to have been working, and need to be looking for work — and workers pay into the system to ensure they have some income safety in case they lose their job. The program is federally administered, of course, but so is, say, flood insurance. Consider Haley arguing that South Carolina residents whose homes were damaged by a hurricane should have to pee in a cup before getting payments to help rebuild. As for Gingrich, he seems to conflate food insecurity with joblessness. Most SNAP recipients do actually work. They just don’t make enough to feed their families. And surely no SNAP recipient would prefer bigger benefits to a better-paying job.

Both Haley and Gingrich, in their class-baiting, also forget one of the fundamental reasons the United States makes access to these programs easy: Children are primary beneficiaries of unemployment insurance and food stamps. Both programs exist not just to reward the lazy adults (as horrible a stereotype in contemporary American politics as there is), but to keep kids out of abject poverty.

And those programs aren’t doing enough. The Economic Policy Institute, for one, notes the child poverty rate has soared through the recession. One in five children still lives in poverty. And in no state is the child poverty rate lower than one in ten.

Many customers in the Houston Wal-Mart during the wee hours Friday were young mothers whose WIC money had just kicked in on their Texas Lone Star benefits cards.

“The real troubling part to us is why [they are] out shopping at that hour,” Dave Dillon, chief executive of Kroger, said in an interview, adding that the supermarket giant adjusted its shelf-stocking patterns after witnessing the same phenomenon as Wal-Mart. “We clearly see an increase,” he said.

Wal-Mart declined to disclose details, but it has also responded to the early-morning spike on the first of the month. It increases staffing and ensures that its shelves are stocked with the necessities customers are seeking, a spokesman said, though he stressed that the number of shoppers involved at midnight is relatively minor compared with peak periods such as weekends.

“We know our customers are living paycheck to paycheck as they continue to struggle as a result of the economy,” said Wal-Mart spokesman Lorenzo Lopez.

The phenomenon underscores the extraordinary hardship the recession has imposed. But it also does speak to WIC and SNAP’s efficiency as government programs. They are nothing but voucher systems. The government gives families the equivalent of cash, and lets them spend it in local stores as they see best fit. The arrangement benefits the businesses — Wal-Mart and Kroger’s clearly feel for the young moms stocking up, but profit from the transactions. And it benefits the families too. They get what they need, as soon as they need it, as efficiently as possible.

That was a point Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger made to me last week, discussing passed and pending cuts to SNAP.

We come at this from a moral position, a nutritional position, and an economic recovery position. This cut is so insane from an economic position as well — we know food stamps are the most effect form of stimulus. The jury is still out on parts of the stimulus — but the jury isn’t out on food stamps. It was a 1,000 percent, beyond home run grand slam success, if you’ll excuse me mixing metaphors.

The money went to people who needed it, rapidly, and without a lot of bureaucracy. Actually, SNAP used to have something like a 15 percent administrative overhead drag. Since the stimulus bill increased benefits and boosted the number of people getting them, administrative costs are down to 7 percent. For all the conservative ranting — vouchers, vouchers, vouchers — food stamps are a voucher program! You’re not being sent to a government-run food center. You’re getting a voucher to use in the private market. It is good for businesses too.

The child nutrition bill that might have cut SNAP again, though, has stalled in the House.

House Democrats refused to cut food stamps — a voucher program that helps 41 million of the poorest Americans, many of them children, pay for food — once more.

Politico reports that the White House, including Michelle Obama herself, lobbied for the House to move the bill, which will now wait until after the midterms.

Despite personal appeals by the first lady, the Democrats balked at what they saw as a plan to pay for the nutrition bill by quietly cutting SNAP — an essential food safety net that lawmakers had already borrowed from to pay for emergency aid to states.White House spokesman Reid Cherlin said the administration has committed to restoring any proposed cuts to SNAP and will do all it can to move the $8 billion bill forward.“SNAP is not blocking the bill,” he said. “We’re working with the House leadership to schedule the bill as soon as it fits into the House schedule.”

But Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who co-wrote a letter to the White House opposing the use of SNAP funds, told POLITICO that he and 106 others who signed it “have been saying everything we possibly could to make it clear that this would be a problem.”

As I reported earlier this week, anti-hunger campaigners broadly support the child-nutrition bill, which provides more funding to school lunches, beyond changes for inflation, for the first time since the 1970s. But they were incensed at the food stamp cuts. Joel Berg, the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, explained that the SNAP cuts would mean less food for low-income families, full stop — therefore, he would not support the child-nutrition bill.

“I’ve been pulling my punches, and my progressive colleagues have been pulling their punches, because we’re rooting for this administration to succeed,” he said. “But honestly, if George W. Bush did what they’re trying to do, we’d be camping out in front of the White House. Goodwill only goes so far when tens of thousands of children need food.”

“I had done it in 2007, as well,” he said. “This time, it was much harder, because the price of food has increased more than the benefit has increased. Last time, for instance, I ate an apple a day, along with other food. This time, I couldn’t afford a single piece of fruit.”

Berg is the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, which represents New York’s 1,200 nonprofit soup kitchens and food pantries and its 1.4 million residents that cannot afford enough food. (A more extended version of our conversation is below.) He and other hunger advocates are incensed over the SNAP cuts, which will pay for a sweeping child-nutrition bill. The First Lady–supported legislation is pending in the House, and has passed the Senate. In essence, Congress is planning to rob a very poor Peter to pay a very poor Paul.

The cliff in food stamps means that one month, a family will receive a set amount of money, about $4.50 per person per day. The next month, they will get less. In his week eating according to the SNAP budget, Berg shopped for the first three days as if he received full benefits. For the second two, he shopped as if he received cut benefits. The result? Less food, or less healthy food.

He took photographs to demonstrate. Here’s what he could buy for a week with current benefits:

Here’s what he could buy with the cut benefits:

That means he does not get this food, under an Obama-supported plan:

Berg and I spoke briefly about this change. I lightly edited the transcript for clarity, and trimmed it down for length.

TWI: What is the real impact of this cut?

Berg: The change cuts future benefits and also restricts people from entering, or qualifying for, the program. This is the first time in the history of the program that recipients of the benefit will actually get less.

Some progressives are making a claim that this is not actually a cut, that this is somehow just a return to the baseline benefit. But that claim is really preposterous and offensive. The Center for Science in the Public interest, they’re progressive, but they have put that idea forward. If they had a cost of living increase and wage increases over five years, but then we returned them to the salary that they had five years ago, my guess is that they would see that as a cut, rather than a return to the baseline.

People in America have been socialized into expecting some sort of Frank Capra-esque happy ending all the time — somehow, magically, in the end, this will all work out. I’m sorry, but for low-income people, that is not what happens. This means people are going to suffer more. Low-income people are already in trouble due to the recession. They are suffering mightily to make sure that there is food on the table for their kids. And now, they’re going to have less of it.

As for the claim that we’ll fix it later, and we should pass the child-nutrition bill now: whether or not the House or Senate ends up changing parties at the midterm elections, we are going to have a more-conservative House and Senate. And it is also clear that the deficit is going to be bigger next year than it is this year. So people really expect that even though Congress can’t find the money now, they’re going to find it down the road — with a less-progressive Congress and a wider deficit? They’re magically going to be able to come up with funds for this later? They won’t.

TWI: How different was living on the cut benefit than the full benefit?

Berg: Well, I spent a week on food stamps — I had done it in 2007 as well. This time, it was much harder, because the price of food has increased more than the benefit has increased. Last time, for instance, I ate an apple a day, along with other food. This time, I couldn’t afford a single piece of fruit. On top of that, there was the increase from the beginning of the week to the end of the week.

People forget that the president pledged to end hunger by 2015 — they remember that he pledged to make kids healthier, but not that he also pledged to end hunger. The administration doesn’t seem to understand, or care, that this is going to increase obesity. If people on the program were buying apples a few years ago, and they can’t afford them now — we know that when the benefits are less generous, that means people aren’t buying as healthy foods.

TWI: And what will the impact be for kids?

Berg: This cut is taking something away from every other meal for children in low-income families, to help get them a better lunch. Someone in the White House last week, I saw, claimed that the child-nutrition bill will dramatically reduce child obesity.

That’s ridiculous. They are cutting the budget from kids at home to pay for kids in school. If kids eat in school every day, in a year, that’s still only 16 percent of their meals, because there are weekends, there are holidays, there are nights, there is summer. There is no way that marginally improving 16 percent of your meals is going to dramatically change your diet — especially not if you are taking away from the rest.

People want to claim victory. They want to make exaggerated claims that the child-nutrition bill will help. The most heartbreaking thing about it, for advocates, is that this is supposed to be our great champion bill that was going to solve everything! We thought it would dramatically decrease child hunger. But, the fact is, you have hunger advocates lobbying against its passage. Our emotions are ranging from outraged to heartbroken. I’m really just gobsmacked that this happened.

TWI: Did the stimulus bump help?

Berg: We did a study — we do it every year — examining the number of people going to pantries and soup kitchens in New York City, and then asking whether those groups have the resources to meet demand. In 2008, two-thirds of the soup kitchens did not — they had to reduce portion sizes, or turn people away. But in 2009, that fell to 50 percent.

Some of that was increased direct funding for pantries and kitchens. But a lot of it was the food stamp boost — it kept people from having to use food banks.

And we know that we aren’t only feeding people. We come at this from a moral position, a nutritional position, and an economic recovery position. This cut is so insane from an economic position as well — we know food stamps are the most effect form of stimulus. The jury is still out on parts of the stimulus — but the jury isn’t out on food stamps. It was a 1,000 percent, beyond home run grand slam success, if you’ll excuse me mixing metaphors.

The money went to people who needed it, rapidly, and without a lot of bureaucracy. Actually, SNAP used to have something like a 15 percent administrative overhead drag. Since the stimulus bill increased benefits and boosted the number of people getting them, administrative costs are down to 7 percent. For all the conservative ranting — vouchers, vouchers, vouchers — food stamps are a voucher program! You’re not being sent to a government-run food center. You’re getting a voucher to use in the private market. It is good for businesses too.

TWI: Are you preparing to explain the cuts to SNAP recipients? Are we going to have to prep them, so they know their budget is getting tighter?

Berg: I won’t know what there is to say. I’m rarely at a loss for words. But what do I say to these people? You were screwed? You were shafted? Your children have less food? I couldn’t look in some one’s eyes and tell them that, and I don’t know how a senator could either. What do you say? Your kid’s need for food was temporary?

TWI: What aren’t we in the press focusing on?

Berg: Everyone is focusing on the child-nutrition and obesity pledge. But Obama made a hunger pledge too.

With Matt Lauer yesterday, Obama was asked about poverty, and he basically gave an answer that George W. Bush would have given. He said that increasing economic growth will help poverty. It will. I agree that job creation is the most important thing. But when the unemployment rate was a lot lower, there were still millions of Americans who needed these benefits.

I’ve been pulling my punches, and my progressive colleagues have been pulling their punches, because we’re rooting for this administration to succeed. But honestly, if George W. Bush did what they’re trying to do, we’d be camping out in front of the White House. Goodwill only goes so far when tens of thousands of children need food.

The paycheck cycle we’ve talked about before remains extreme. It is our responsibility to figure out how to sell in that environment, adjusting pack sizes, large pack at sizes the beginning of the month, small pack sizes at the end of the month. And to figure out how to deal with what is an ever-increasing amount of transactions being paid for with government assistance.

And you need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it’s real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs,and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when electronic — government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.

And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they’ve been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours — come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason.

To put this in perspective, 40 million Americans currently rely on food stamps, and one in seven falls below the government’s very low poverty threshold.