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Bernanke's Poverty Effect: Foodstamp Recipients Jump by 400K In November, Hit New Record Of 43.6 Million
Much has been said about Bernanke's wealth effect and how it impacts a whopping 1% of the US population (traditionally, those very same bail out recipients who would be insolvent had Gen Ben not rescued the entire financial system at the expense of the DXY, which at last check was below 77 again). Unfortunately, a little less time has been spent discussing the equal and opposite effect: that of the poverty effect. Luckily, every month we get an update on this just as useful metric. And as of November, the SNAP program had 43.6 million participants, an increase of 400k from October, and a 14% increase, or 5.3 million from a year prior. We are confident that this 15% of the US population will be delighted to know that their rapidly diminishing dollars will end up acquiring increasingly less and less stuff.
The chart below says it all.
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pennies? This has been the greatest rally of all time, there were more 10 baggers than you could shake a stick at. A moron making a one-way bet based on faith could have gotten filthy rich
Oh snap!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXS5HoKkJ2s&feature=related
That was 9 seconds of my life that I can never get back...
This is why I stay glued to ZH. Excellent work.
Cool, the government know-it-alls have wanted to control everyone's diet for a long time now. It's almost in their furtive little grasp now.
Recovery winter, serfs.
Finally, a graph that definitively shows that the recession is over. Thanks Tyler.
It's a two speed recovery.
Some one care to update the board on OREX. Seems last I heard (Fri.) folks were 100% certain drug would be approved and Steve Cohen would make millions. However, today OREX down 71% on failure of drug.
Forgive my ignorance but I really can't figure when folks are being sarcastic and when they are being serious. Based on the blog I was expecting some ridiculous gains in the stock. It's a good thing I didn't bite and after several years of the two-by-four method of learning I nearly went all in short the stock when I read the blog a couple days ago.
If you now know better than to invest your money based on something you read on the internet you are at the beginning of wisdom.
Learn to do your own research or keep away from the markets completely.
Thanks but not really the answer I was looking for. I always do my own DD and have never invested based on the advice of a blog. I wasted a lot of time in DD based on input from this blog. I actually wasted time doing research on OREX and was very tempted to invest.
What you see happening all over the rest of the world will be coming to a theater near you. With the top 10% hoarding all the wealth and celebrating their POMO paychecks the average schmo is continuing their descent into the abyss. When people lose everything they lose it and this is happening all around us. For some reason the FED and the Government think supporting the criminals that caused the crisis is the answer to correcting it. This mentality will not end well once the dust settles and Americans wake up and realize how badly they have been hoodwinked. Trying to fix a credit crisis with more credit is simply insane. It's nothing more then an elaborate game of kick the can to protect the few and cover up the truth. Time will prove all the concerns of Zero Hedge correct, unfortunately the continued cover up will double the pain when this whole economic pipe dream runs out of dope.
11 days worth of longs were obliterated on Friday.
After today, all those longs are now in a winning position, and 13 days worth of bears are suddenly underwater.
Algo/Igor/Robos must be going crazy.
With Mubarak standing down, oil and metals should resume their interrupted fall. That will drag under a gaggle of momos.
That's a healthy graph. Go long Food Stamps.
Are they making Food Stamps bigger to make up for inflation?
Maybe Obama can copy Hugo Chavez and nationalize the grocery stores,
Then give out "Loyalty Coupons" so only his friends get to eat.
That'll teach people to be more civil..... campaign fusion genius
The grocery store where I buy my food, in the second wealthiest county in the USA, which caters to Hispanics, has 4 checkouts - 3 for those on foodstamps, 1 for those not. And more than 50% of the kids at the well-regarded local public high school, just 7 miles from the Obama residence, get Gubmint assistance for school lunches.
Hope and change, baby.
Not a problem if most are going through the other 3...?
did you REALLY expect hispanics to magically become different than they were in a different geographical location?
Here in San Mateo county, CA. most all of your 'help' is well, hispanic.
You can look around outside and all of the landscapers appear latino as well as the nannies pushing those triple-wide baby strollers through the city parks.
During the day you also see them in the 'regular' check-out lane, buying groceries for their employers. after hours they are in the WIC/snap, lines.
There is 'no' magic wand. Spending has to be reduced or America's problems will continue to get worse. Bernanke and Obama only represent more powerful forces inside the Goverment.
Obama made a great 'State of the Onion Speech'. Unfortunately, they were not his words, they were written for him. He was just the Delivery Boy. He was presenting the views of others.
He started of as Mighty Mouse, signing 'Here I come to save the day', but somewhere between taking the Oath of President and sitting in the Oval Office, I think he got a good kicking and told to behave himself.
"Starve the people to service the banks" is Phil Silver's approach.
I think this is genocidal.
That not what I am proposing. I hate the Banks for what they have done to society.
The Government has to stop increasing the money supply. They have to stop exporting inflation to other countries and causing misery and starvation.
However, if I did have a say, I would propose cutting back on Military expenditure.
Our fate is mathematically certain. I cannot fathom how anyone could say with any confidence that one way or the other, at this juncture, is better (certainly everything I see leads me to believe if we have to choose, austerity is the greater evil). Effectively, the country is so fat we cannot get out of bed and we must be cut out of the room and forklifted onto a flatbed, taken to the zoo to be weighed, get completely embarassed at our condition, only to die a few weeks later from complications of moving, shock, and change.
I'm not sure just going ahead and feeding us til our heart explodes isn't the more humane thing...
What's 'mathematical certainty' when all the numbers are juiced, faked, and fabricated anyway?
Dissolve the banks, cancel the debts.
Sounds pretty easy to me. All the economy loses is dead weight.
I wish it were that simple... Ultimately, that is the path we will take, but it will end in uncertainty... as of now, we are so risk averse, we are willing to put up with anything to keep the status quo... eventually, we will be comfortable for whatever the abyss holds.
What can you buy for those foodstamps?
Does anybody have a detail about them?
What does 1 single mom with 1 child gets for example?
I looked it up myself:
http://www.snap-step1.usda.gov/fns/
For the example I took a unemployed woman of 34 with a kid of 2 years old with 1000$ in unemployment benifits. I don't know how much they get for real but they would get 344$ in foodstamps.
You can eat with this I think. That's pretty generous.
$86 bucks a week?!
That's lunch...one day.
That's eating out for one meal a day (5x week) and cooking the other two with really solid foods... probably can even supplement with vitimins and protein shakes to boot... plenty of money... depending on locale of course...
MM your dreaming...Lets run the numbers, $344 per month divided by 30 days is $11.46 per day to feed one adult and two growing children. Having raised and fed a few teenagers in my day you cannot feed ONE child that is going through a growth spurt on that. I remember my son growing 6" in 14 month period, that kid was always hungry.
When is the last time you checked out the price of baby formula or baby food? ETC ETC.....
The premise was a single child, two (2) years of age. You buy large bags of frozen chicken breasts ($13/6lbs already trimmed @ sams), canned tomatoes ($1/can @ walmart), lettuce (already shredded $1.50), salad mix (~$3 at sams for a week supply), tortillas ($2/for 8), salad dressing ($2.50, lasts for a couple weeks).. add a gallon of milk ($3 lasts a week) and cereal ($3 lasts multiple weeks)... you can get it done for that kind of money easily... and this is eating fairly healthy... if you get into frozen pizzas, etc., it gets way cheaper... you can get a cooked chicken at sams for $5 (lasts 2 meals) or a large pizza for $7 (lasts 4 meals)...
It's all there... people are just sleepwalking in their purchase decisions... my wife and I spend more eating out 5x a week for lunch than we do for all our breakfasts, dinners, and all meals on weekends combined...
Once I start back my health kick (couple weeks away), I'll eat 6x per day... at a cost per meal of ~$3... frozen veggies from the garden... chicken breasts.. pasta... all cheap as hell. Some deer meat... turkey... (I stocked up on turkeys @ $.20/lb from kroger during thanksgiving... then I smoke them and put them in quart bags and throw em in the freezer).
It's not that hard... you just have to look at labels and spend more time screwing around with it... if you only get items that are nutritional, the cost is way cheap... it's all the bullshit people buy that is expensive because it doesn't provide much fuel for the tank. It also requires you buying in bulk at some times so you really have to budget and plan ahead... but, all in all, the cost per meal can be cheap as hell... with minimal cooking effort. I lived on less than $10/day during college with no effort whatsoever.
while I don't dispute that most food stamps go to single parents with children, and many single parents are female, one of the growing groups of unemployed/on benefits is the (ex) military - do you lads really not count all those unemployed construction workers & ex-soldiers when you think of benefits?
myopic much?
If you're smart about cooking, a lot.
4 generations of Americans know 'food stamps,' 'welfare,' or 'SNAP' or whatever the government wants to call it.
Think about that for just one second:
A person now on welfare, grew up seeing their parent(s) on welfare, who grew up seeing their parent(s) on welfare, who grew up seeing their parent(s) on welfare.
In other words. This is all they have known.
This is another form of shackling humans.
It's a simple strategy: Welfare is the new Opium for the Masses
Got to keep the rabble placated with Free Money and Oprah - lest they get, uppity.
What an awful system, that forces people into a condition where they cannot afford to sustain their family.
Maybe this whole greed-pillage-theft racket that has been rolling along for 500 or so years needs to go.
you forgot the adjective "black" and that the family may only span like 45 years in age.
They don't see it as shackles, they see it as free cheese from tha man in exchange for whitey racism.
I'm not sure how it is shackling them; they'd be eating collard greens and lentils otherwise.
Bankers: the biggest welfare cheats in the world.
+ $800,000,000,000
It is estimated that over 43 million people are on food stamps. Food riots have also broken out around the world in various nations. Rice, wheat, cotton, coffee, and many other commodities are soaring higher on a daily basis. Can these high prices be beneficial for the economies in the United States and around the world?
How can a rising stock market and a falling dollar be viewed as a positive?
Right now the United States has over $14 trillion in debt and the market does not seem to care yet. We shall see how far this inflation rally can last.
Its a positive if it means we are closer to our new equilibrium. The sooner we get there the better off all of us will be.
A small price to pay so that the remaining middle class can go to Kroger's without being shot with a 31 clip glock for their food. Remember, circus and bread. Circus and bread! In Egypt they only have machetes and knives; here the newly poor and disenfranchised can do much more damage - please expand this food stamp program to 80M and run Dancing with the Stars and American Idol (with NFL thrown in) 24/7 to distract them!
This is a good thing, right?
Go long ADT security and Brinks when the new congress tries to cut spending and does not pass extensions so easily. Sad figures and things to come indeed
How about going long on firearms?
ADT and Brinks won't save you if the alarm doesn't deter people.
[duplicate]
SUPERBOWL! WHOOO!!!!
Its just bread and circuses.
J.P Morgan gets Rich with Food Stamps and Poverty – Slavery at its Finest http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/j-p-morgan-gets-rich-with-food-stamps-and-poverty-%E2%80%93-slavery-at-its-finest/1960
Gangrenous shoots.
the JP Morgue runs the food stamp program
http://www.realecontv.com/videos/social-costs/jpmorganchase-cash-cow.htmlI am curious how much more poverty there might be with tight money and a flatter yield curve. Are people here really advocating tight monetary policy and higher interest.rates.as a solution?
It won't, of course. It will crush those who are most vulnerable to the exigencies of this crooked economic system.
It's just that ZeroHedgers really don't care much about them.
Capitalism = EPIC FAIL
Time for something different.
There is no alternative... just a pinball game.
Oh, that's just silly. Countless advanced societies existed before capitalism's global rape and pillage of the planet began a few centuries ago. The suggestion that it's the best humanity can do is both wrong and terrifying.
I guess my question is, how did all these countless advanced societies come to fail? The point wasn't that capitalism is the least evil... I have no idea and am not making a value statement on it... I am simply pointing out the fact that we are prone to bounce from one ideology to the next, often in dire contrast to the predecessor.
Simply put, humanity has not found an answer... but, because of the human condition, we are forced to keep trying... best of luck to us.
Most of the ones I'm thinking of - the Iroquois confederacy or Cherokee nation, the Mughal Empire, a whole litany of West African civilizations, the 'Aztec' of Mexico and 'Inca' of Tiwantinsuyu, etc. - were absolutely wrecked by the ruthlessness of European barbarism.
Am I saying that these places were perfect? No. But they were self-sufficient societies. Some of them used markets, and all of them traded.
But these societies never used markets to obliterate and destroy whole civilizations in an acquisitive orgy of slaughter and bloodshed. That was, and remains, the stock-in-trade of European Capitalism.
This remains a fundamental truth of a cruel, cruel world. Your economic system and its political counterpart must be not only sufficient to provide for your populace, but also to defend them from the competing ideals of others... In short, societies fail because their ideals fail to adequately provide for their environmental conditions... simple as that.
Further, I don't think you're painting with too broad of a brush as far as the definition of capitalism is concerned... each experiment is slightly different... and I'm not certain that there are perfect linkages between all... I'm sure there is a case to be made, but I think you're having to stretch to make it... I'm much more inclined to call it the fusion of belligerence and greed than capitalism... mixed capitalism takes the form of virtually all economic systems at some point, in some way...
Just make sure to be good little serfs and pay your taxes (property, income, sales, business, FICA, estate, transfer, permit, license, etc.) so the Squid makes 2011 a banner year.
By Goerge I think I've got it! The next crisis will be JPM sending Jeethner to Congress with the demand that they bail out the SNAP program "or else there will be martial law."
All they need is more people on SNAP, so that available funding will run out....and it looks like they are quickly heading in that direction. Due to the increase risk due to insolvency, JPM will of course have to charge higher fees!
Fuck! These psychopaths have to be the most brilliant criminal minds in history!
Americans aren't starving.
No, really.
The ever increasing distribution of food stamps is just a stealth entitlement. Food is now an entitlement along with everything else. Obama will (make it easy for states to) get as many people as possible under the food stamp umbrella and you just try and be the guy who wants to take them away while courting votes at the same time.
Remember when Social Security was a safety net?
Foodstamps are another deflationary fighting tactic.
Administered by JP Morgan, a fucking BANK heister, the system gets to pump credits into a SNAP credit card. This is fiat "money" in the form of an entitlement- but with no real cooresponding debt. The government prints some credits, throws them at the little people and the government and banking shysters continue on printing themselves more money for lamborghinis.
Its another way the banking heist has controlled momey supply and where it goes.
If government food stamps can buy stuff like real money that means they have been created by debt or dilution. Those are the only two possibilities.
My point is this is primarily a (yet another) way to get as many voters as possible dependent on the government for everyday things and for as many aspects of their lives as possible.
After only a few years, even if the economy comes roaring back from the dead with 1% unemployment, taking those EBT cards away will be politically impossible.
I couldn't tell from the SNAP page, but with 43.6 million 'participating' is that just direct recipients of cards? As in... If there's 5 people in a family and the head of the household gets food stamps, is that 1 participant, or 5?
Makes a pretty massive difference.
If it's 43.6m not counting dependents then there's a whole shitload more than 43m people getting fed by the government.
Plus governmental workers of all levels, plus those persons that sponge directly off of the government (e.g. health care providers, paving companies, etc.)... starts to add up in a hurry...
Read somewhere that the estimated number is 108 million.
Do you think Schwarzman (CEO) of Blackstone is on food stamps, I think not he got a 702.4 million dollar cash/bonus, stock options and restricted shares in 2008. Oracle (CEO) Larry Ellison got 543 million in 2008. Why would anyone buy stock in these companies when these assholes loot the place. You can see General Ben's wealth effect here, one year after the crash!!
The taxpayer funded bailouts for banks lead to lower standard of living for all the citizens of a country except for the beneficiaries of the bail outs. The poor people in any country live hand to mouth and do not contribute to tax revenues. The others who earn their living by small businesses or salaries pay taxes at a much higher rate than the rich individuals or big businesses. This is due to the loopholes in the taxation system which enable them to declare maximum profits in countries which have the least tax rates. So effectively in the long run the governments route the money collected as taxes from the middle class of people to the banks so that the bankers can enjoy enormous bonuses. We are in times of privatizing the profits and socializing losses for those who are well connected to the governments and the law makers.
Apart from this the rampant speculation allowed on the commodity exchanges is causing a havoc in the lives of rest of the population and pushing them towards poverty as they can no longer afford the basic necessities of life.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article24581.html