As Long As We Are Able

The "cruel irony" of the Bay Area's food insecure: [bold added]

While their income doesn’t keep up with the cost of living in the expensive region, the relatively high local minimum wage can make them ineligible for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. And even when they do qualify, the benefit only covers a fraction of the cost of each meal.

At Home and Hope we can't feed everybody, but we
can feed four families at a time.

Your humble blogger has spent some time with charities that feed the hungry, but I do occasionally wonder why SNAP / food stamp ($73.6 billion) and child nutrition ($24.3 billion) expenditures are inadequate to prevent the starvation of millions of Americans. Government payments dwarf what private efforts can provide.

It turns out that a $50,000 income--about $25 per hour--is too high to qualify for SNAP. Meanwhile payments on an apartment--$2,500-per-month ($30,000 per year) is a bargain in this area, by the way--take priority over eating for most people facing such a choice.

These are the working poor, and we'll help them as long as we are able.