We’ve celebrated on this page the fact that a feared recession never materialized this year, that despite inflationary pressure costs haven’t risen as dramatically as they could and that job numbers remain strong and wages up. It’s a much better economy than predicted by most of those whose job it is to forecast these things.
Yet we have a responsibility not to forget about the depth of the challenges that our neediest New Yorkers are contending with, especially in the face of a different financial reality: the end of what was, for a brief emergency period, an expansive federal safety net.
Months or even a year out now from the end of this experiment, we are seeing the dire results, including growing numbers of New Yorkers facing food insecurity. A report released last week by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli found that one in nine New York households was unable to afford enough food at some point between 2020 and 2022, and pointed out that participation in SNAP food benefits trended upward even as job recovery strengthened, before additional SNAP benefits expired last March.
Some of this has to do with the fact that a lot of the job growth in the city has come in lower-paid sectors like home health care, which combines with persistently high rents and the growing cost of living from key spends like childcare. There are some long-term, institutional fixes we need to undertake at all levels, including the construction and preservation of more affordable housing, but there are also relatively simple fixes that we know work because we just tried them.
This includes an expanded federal child tax credit, which provably and dramatically decreased child poverty before it was allowed to expire at the end of 2021. We have yet to hear anything resembling a reasoned argument against an expansion, aside from the same tired teeth-gnashing about giveaways and welfare.
We’re a moment now of plummeting birth rates, and not, as some commentators will argue, just because young people these days don’t want to have kids. The costs of child-rearing are astronomical, and it should be considered a no-brainer to expand government support.
It’s so popular that it has the rare bit of bipartisan support in Congress, except for the fact that it now seems doomed, like much else in our dysfunctional government, by a few recalcitrant lawmakers standing in the way of popular policies.
Some GOP senators who support the expansion in principle — or, more likely, because it’s paired with regressive tax policy, but that’s politics — now seem keen to take it up next year instead. No skin off their backs; whether it gets done now or in 2025 is all the same to the elected officials on six-year terms making comfortable salaries. It is not the same, however, to struggling families living month-to-month, for whom a one-year difference in the implementation of an assistance program can mean depleted savings, the threat of losing housing and other long-term consequences.
It’s unconscionable that people are going hungry in the wealthiest society in human history. Our economy is strong, but rather than mean we should leave people by the wayside, it’s a stronger reason to help them along. Their fate is closer to ours than we might all think.
