(NEW YORK) MintPress – Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker won’t be drinking coffee this week. “I won’t be able to afford it,” he tweeted.
Booker is taking what he calls the Food Stamp challenge. Starting on Tuesday, he will spend one week eating and drinking only what he can buy with the typical allotment of stamps to demonstrate what it is like to live on the the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average monthly food stamp benefit in New Jersey was $133.26 per person in fiscal year 2011. That’s a little over $33 per week, or $4 per day.
Households must meet an income test to qualify for food stamps. For a household of one, that means net income must not exceed $931 per month.
The challenge is being sponsored and promoted by the Food Research and Action Center.
The idea began during a Twitter conversation that soon went viral between Booker and a woman who chided the mayor for speaking out against an imbalance between rich and poor.
“Nutrition is not a responsibility of the government,” tweeted the woman, who goes by the name TwitWit. She is a self described Daughter of the American Revolution and avowed opponent of socialism.
“Why is there a family today that is ‘too poor to afford breakfast’? Are they not already receiving food stamps?” she asked.
Booker responded, “Let’s you and I try to live on food stamps in New Jersey (high cost of living) and feed a family for a week or month. U game?”
It’s not clear whether or not TwitWit is taking part in the challenge.
“You can see from the Twitter discussion that people have a real lack of understanding of the struggles that many families have to go through — hard working families that play by the rules.,” Booker told the Star-Ledger.
“One of my main goals will be to shine light on programs like this and dispel stereotypes that exist.”
The grim reality
Booker was referring to a recent report commissioned by the United Way of Northern New Jersey that presents a harrowing picture of the state’s working poor.
The report, called ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) revealed that a third of the state’s residents, 1.1 million people, are unable to provide the basic necessities of food, housing, transportation, child care and health care.
In addition, more than half the jobs pay less than $20 an hour – most of them far less.
“ALICE represents those among us who are working yet falling behind,” wrote United Way of Northern New Jersey CEO John B. Franklin in the report’s introduction. “These families make more than the official poverty level, but way less than an individual or family needs to sustain a reasonably healthy standard of living,”
The report was authored by Stephanie Hoopes Halpin, the director of the New Jersey Data Bank at Rutgers University, with the support of a committee of research and marketing data professionals.
“There’s a stereotype of low-income people being lazy and milking the system,” she tells MintPress News. “From what we see, there’s a lot of people who are working very hard — one or two jobs for not a lot of money and they don’t have a lot of savings. These families have no room to make a mistake.”
Homeless in New York
The New Jersey findings come at the same time that New York City’s latest figures estimate there are 20,000 kids sleeping in homeless shelters, up from 16,000 last year, a number that does not include homeless kids who are not sleeping in shelters because their families have been turned away. Up to 65 percent of families who apply for shelter don’t get in.
“Some end up sleeping in subway trains,” said Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless. “Some go to hospital emergency rooms or laundromats. Women are going back to their batterers or staying in unsafe apartments.”
In 2005, Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised that he would cut the city’s homeless population of 33,000 by two-thirds by 2009. It hasn’t happened; the total homeless population has reached almost 46,000 this year.
Bloomberg has often blamed the economy, which is certainly a factor, but critics also blame his policies.
“He and the governor have eliminated important programs that helped shift people out of shelters. It is time to restore the cuts and reinstate those programs,” said a recent editorial in the New York Times.
“The Bloomberg administration unwisely ended priority referrals for homeless families to public housing and for federal rent subsidies, which have very long waiting lists. The mayor should find a way to give destitute families quicker access to public housing and rental vouchers.”
Falling off the ‘fiscal cliff’
Meanwhile, politicians in Washington, D.C. are debating just how much more they should slash from federal safety nets as they negotiate ways to keep the country from going off the so-called fiscal cliff.
Last week, the president asked for about $1.6 trillion in new revenue, including about $800 billion from allowing tax cuts on income over $250,000 a year to expire.
Obama also asked for about $400 billion in new stimulus spending, but the plan was rejected by Republicans as a “step backward.”
House Speaker John Boehner on Monday sent President Obama a counter-proposal on how to cut the deficit that he called a “credible plan” to break the stalemate.
The GOP deal would create $800 billion in new revenue through tax reform, but Boehner insisted that tax rates should not go up on the top 2 percent of taxpayers. Instead, the GOP wants lower tax rates after closing loopholes, limiting tax credits and capping deductions.
The offer also proposes $600 billion in health savings, $300 billion in additional mandatory savings, $300 billion in discretionary spending cuts and $200 billion by updating the formula by which the Consumer Price Index is calculated, which would affect all sorts of federal programs from Social Security to pensions.
Hours later, the White House rejected the offer.
Now it’s back to the drawing board for both sides, as tens of millions of Americans in states across the country struggle just to make ends meet.