Ask the managers of the Fortune 500 about the economy and they’ll tell you that ours are the best of times in a generation. Look around your neighborhood and you know that’s not true. It’s clear that the peculiar flavor of U.S. capitalism has soured; gone well past its best used by date. Capitalism - at least the way it’s practiced in the U.S. - has clearly gone off the rails. Today’s New York Times has a small example that tells a bigger story.
In his story, “Selling to Poor, Stores Bill U.S. for Top Prices,” Robert Pear reports 7.7 million woman and infants are fed each month by exchanging vouchers for approved food - infant formula, juice eggs, milk, cheese, cereal, dried beans and peas, peanut butter, canned tuna, and carrots - through the government’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, commonly known as W.I.C. In a typical American capitalistic twist, W.I.C.-only stores have begun to appear in most cities. The twist is that the stores don’t accept any form of payment other than W.I.C. vouchers and carry only W.I.C.-approved food items. And they charge up to twice the market price. It works because, after all, how price sensitive can one be when exchanging vouchers - not cash - for the food.
The states set the prices for the W.I.C.-approved food items, but the price ceilings tend to get set relatively high to ensure that isolated rural residents can obtain the food they need. As a result, the W.I.C.-only stores tend to set prices that are at or near the state’s ceiling. Some of the W.I.C.-only stores provide incentives like free transportation, baby clothes, pots and pans, diapers, bicycles, and soap and some actually send recruiters to the local hospitals to sign up new mothers as customers.
That’s all indicative of a broken system in need of a relatively easy fix, but it’s not the real story here. The real story is the alarmingly high number of babies served by the program:
“About four million births occur each year in the United States. W.I.C. serves nearly two million infants in the first year of life, plus 5.7 million pregnant women, new mothers and children age 1 to 4. Family income may not exceed 185 percent of the poverty level. For a family of three, the maximum income is $28,990 a year.”
That’s embarrassingly pitiful; we can do better. We have to do better, but it’s a much harder fix.
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