1) Texas - 3.068 million participants
2) California - 2.99
3) New York - 2.57
4) Florida - 1.77
5) Illinois - 1.71
As of June 2009, Wisconsin has 589,220 persons receiving aid through the SNAP, which represents a 31.7 percent increase from June 2008 to June 2009, http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/29SNAPcurrPP.htm.
While there are many ways to attempt to measure the state of the U.S. economy, the amount of people who qualify for government benefits is one of the few ways to measure the actual human pain in the real economy. Unemployment statistics do not accurately reflect the real amount of people who are out of work or underemployed. Other statistics such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500 may show market gains, but these typically do not apply to those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
A look at the increase in the amount of people who qualify for government benefits paints a disturbing picture. The U.S. is in a deep recession and bailing out banks and industries may not be addressing the core of the problem. There may be no such thing as a "jobless recovery."
For more info:
http://suddendebt.blogspot.com/
http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/snapmain.htm
Comments
Greg, it's the truth -- we have no reliable 'misery index' which truly shows what the majority of us are facing in the Bush- Republican ruined economy. I see the effects all of the time, but that's dismissed as 'anecdotal evidence'.
As we've seen with Rep. Eric Cantor recently, the last thing politicians want to confront is the pesky real people behind those anecdotes -- much better to have a raft of misleading statistics to comfort you.
What Mark Twain said is still true: "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics," and all three are killing our country.
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