The number of children on food stamps in 2014 edged up by almost half a million to the highest number it has been since the Wall Street collapse of 2008.
According to US Census Bureau data released Wednesday, the quantity of kids receiving food stamps last year breached the 16 million threshold for the first time since the government agency started publishing the statistic in 2007.
The numbers show that the rate of Americans under the age of 18 receiving food stamps was at 21.7%–also a post-recession high, up from roughly 21.2% the two years before.
The report appears to both backup and undermine assertions made by President Obama in his State of the Union address. The record level of needy children shows that post-recession growth has not been equitable, as he pointed out, due to lagging wages and lack luster spending on jobs programs and infrastructure. But it also shows that the recovery under his watch has not been as strong as he claimed.
“In 2014, an estimated 16 million children, or about one in five, received food stamp assistance compared with the roughly 9 million children, or one in eight, that received this form of assistance prior to the recession,” the Census Bureau said in a press release.
As The Sentinel noted on Jan. 9, this appears to be the result of widespread problems in the labor market. Although unemployment fell to a post-recession low of 5.6 percent in December, as the President has boasted, labor force participation was more than three percent higher the last two times it was at that level, in June 2008 and June 2004.
