Free The Working Poor by David K. Shipler Page A

Institute concluded in a 2002 report, “lose other supports designed to help them, such as food stamps and health insurance, leaving them no better off—and sometimes worse off—than when they were not working.” 1
    Christie considered herself such a case. The only thing in her wallet resembling a credit card was a blue-green piece of plastic labeled “Ohio” and decorated with a drawing of a lighthouse projecting a beam into the night. Inside the “O” was a gold square—a computer chip. On the second working day of every month, she slipped the card into a special machine at Walgreen’s, Save-A-Lot, or Apple’s, and punched in her identification number. A credit of $136 was loaded into her chip. This was the form in which her “food stamps” were now issued—less easy to steal or to sell, and less obvious and degrading in the checkout line.
    The card contained her first bit of income in every month and permitted her first expenditure. It could be used for food only, and not for cooked food or pet food. It occupied the top line in the balance sheet she kept for me during a typical October.
    “2nd Spent 136.00 food stamps,” she wrote. So the benefit was all gone the day she got it. Three days later she had to come up with an additional $25 in cash for groceries, another $54 on October 10, and $15 more on the twelfth. Poor families typically find that food stamps cover only one-half to three-quarters of their grocery costs.
    Even the opening balance on the card was chipped away as Christie inched up in salary. It makes sense that the benefit is based on income: the less you need, the less you get. That’s the economic side. On the psychological side, however, it produces hellish experiences for the beneficiaries. Every three months Christie had to take half a day off from work (losing half a day’s wages) and carry an envelope full of pay stubs, utility bills, and rent receipts to be pawed over by her ill-tempered caseworker, who applied a state-mandated formula to figure her food stamp allotment and her children’s eligibility for health insurance. When Christie completed a training course and earned a raise of 10 cents an hour, her food stamps dropped by $10 a month.
    That left her $6 a month ahead, which was not nothing but felt like it. Many former welfare recipients who go to work just say good riddance to the bureaucracies that would provide food stamps, medical coverage, and housing. Some think wrongly that they’re no longer eligible once they’re off welfare; others would rather forfeit their rights than contend with the hassle and humiliation. Quiet surrender ran against Christie’s grain, however. She was smart and insistent, as anyone must be to negotiate her way through the system. She never flinched from appealing to higher authority. When she once forgot to put a utilities bill in her sheaf of papers, her caseworker withheld her food stamps. “I mailed it to her the next day,” Christie said. Two weeks passed, and the card remained empty. Christie called the caseworker. “She got really snotty,” Christie remembered. “ ‘Well, didn’t I tell you you were supposed to send some documentation?’
    “I was like, ‘Have you checked your mail?’ ” No, as it turned out, the caseworker’s mail had piled up unread. “She was like, ‘Well, I got people waiting up to two, three months on food stamps.’ And she didn’t get back with me. I had to go to her supervisor.” The benefits were then restored.
    It is easy to lose your balance having one foot planted tentatively in the working world and the other still entwined in this thicket of red tape. Managing relations with a boss, finding reliable child care, and coping with a tangle of unpaid bills can be daunting enough for a single mother with little such experience; add surveillance by a bureaucracy that seems more prosecutor than provider, and you have Christie’s high blood pressure.
    While she invoked the system’s rules to get