ABSTRACT
When I began my experiment, I had assumed that I would be able to go through several two-week pay cycle permutations in which I progressively tightened the screws on a hypothetical working poor person, while remaining above the food stamp–defined nutritional safety net. The food stamp program, available to people whose income is no more than 130 percent of the official poverty level, gives an average of $26 per week per person in food vouchers, and a maximum of $162 in any given month—and it only gives that top amount to extremely poor people. Many seniors, in particular, qualify only for the bare minimum: $14 a month. The idea here is that they still have some assets left to sell off or deplete—cars above a token resale value, more than $3,000 in cash assets—before qualifying as totally destitute. Food stamp architects assume that pretty much anyone with even a bare minimum of paid income is going to be enough above the poverty threshold to be able to spend at least that much on food and thus not need state help.
