Tag: assistance

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The Shaming of Single Moms

Today’s social media tragedy was a mom on Threads bashing single moms for ‘living off the system’ and getting thousands of dollars in SNAP, WIC, and LIHEAP benefits. This stigma isn’t just unfair, it’s rooted in outdated ideas and stereotypes and totally ignores the structural barriers single mothers face. As a single mom, I can tell you just how hard it is to work while being the primary parent without family support.

Where Did the Stigma Start?

Well, traditionally, the nuclear family (a mom, a dad, and a couple kids) was considered the perfect family. And until the 70s and 80s, many women were trapped in bad marriages because they couldn’t have a bank account in their name, couldn’t necessarily own property, and could be excluded from a job simply for being a woman. Our grandmas’ marriages weren’t ‘better’ – our grandmas were trapped because they had no options to survive without a husband.

When women finally could leave bad marriages, society didn’t celebrate their independence—it vilified it. Ronald Reagan started the stereotype of the ‘welfare queen’ on his political platform, and sadly, it stuck around. Even today, the media often portrays single moms as being irresponsible or a big drain on their community.

But here’s the thing. Women simply don’t leave good marriages. Divorce is hard; divorce with kids is even harder. If a woman has left a marriage, there’s a reason.

I can’t stand the thought that says “if you can’t pay for your kids, you shouldn’t have had them.” Okay, well, no one gets married and has kids expecting to end up a single mom. It just doesn’t work like that, but roughly 40 to 50% of marriages end in divorce, with the rate of divorce for second marriages being even higher according to Census and Pew Research data. And if the person you are marrying isn’t already a parent, you cannot possibly know how they will be as a parent. You might think you do, but there is actually no way to know for sure.

There are some harsh realities in our society that many don’t want to admit, especially conservatives who ascribe to a more patriarchal view of marriage.

The Pay Gap Is Real

Women still get paid less than men. Women make roughly 80 to 85% of what men make “depending on dataset (BLS, Pew). Women still bear the brunt of childcare responsibilities, even when they are married. And women are still more likely to stay home with their kids and experience career disruption, which makes it hard to return to the workforce if they end up divorced.

In a divorce situation, trends are showing that roughly 80% of mothers are the primary custodial parent. That means the moms have the kids most of the time, are primarily responsible for their day to day physical, health, and educational needs, and the dads legally are not required to take their parenting time. That leaves 50/50 custody to just a few – around the 20% mark.

Childcare Costs Are Astronomical

In 2023, the average US cost for childcare was $11,600 for one child for the year. It isn’t much better for school age children because it’s much harder and more expensive to find childcare that covers random half days, holidays, and you certainly aren’t going to find someone to stay home with their kids when they are sick.

That’s like paying an $11,000 tax per kid just to go to work.

In my family, which is larger than most, we generally have one doctor/dentist appointment per week, and from October to March, we typically have one child home sick per week. That’s a lot of missed school – and work. How is a mom supposed to hold down a full-time professional job if she has to miss that much work? Especially considering she didn’t choose to be a single mom – who would? Unless being single was significantly better than being married.

And since many moms, who sacrificed their careers to manage the kids and households so their husbands could have a career, find themselves going back into a job after not working, they aren’t going to just start getting professional level pay. And if you have to work around your kids’ schedules, you’re going to have to make even more compromises on what kind of a job you can take. Jobs that are flexible enough to work around kids don’t pay well.

Let’s Break It Down

For example, even working for the school district as a food service worker – you probably only make $14 to $16 an hour. Walmart – $18-$20. Amazon delivery- $20-$22.

If you made $20 an hour full-time with no missed days, you’d have about $41,000 gross. Minus taxes, you’d have about $36,000 left. Subtract $11,000 for childcare, and you’re done to $25,000 for the year. A little over $2,000 per month. Rent is easily $1500 per month. The USDA suggested amount for groceries – the bare minimum – $432 for a mom and a child. So just covering the cost of childcare, food, and housing leaves you with about $68 per month to cover utilities (heat and electric), health insurance, copays, school expenses, oh and you need transportation to work!

She may get a little child support, but that’s probably only several hundred dollars – according to the US Census Bureau, the average payment is $430 per month, if it comes in consistently. There is a lot of resentment towards paying child support. That’ll cover sneakers, clothes, sports fees, and school supplies. We all know that doesn’t go very far.

It isn’t doable. And that isn’t the mom’s fault – it’s that the entire system is stacked against her from the very moment she got pregnant. She isn’t mooching – she’s pinching every single penny and still not able to make it work.

Safety Nets

This is why our government has safety nets like SNAP, WIC, and LIHEAP. This is to help families, the disabled, the elderly – who just can’t survive. This is the government recognizing that many full-time jobs do not pay enough to survive on.

It’s sad that we shame single moms for needing help. They didn’t choose to have to live this way and the whole welfare queen stigma is a farce (a political stereotype that’s been kept alive for decades, often for partisan gain) even though fraud rates are incredibly low.

Let’s stop framing poverty as a moral failure. It isn’t. It’s a systemic problem that needs to be addressed at the corporate level. Let’s stop shaming single moms for not being able to work a full-time professional job while single-handedly raising kids. There just isn’t enough flex time, PTO, and vacation time to make that feasible.

Instead of looking down on single moms, get to know one. Offer to babysit (if appropriate), pick up groceries, mow the yard, teach a kid to drive, or help with school carpooling. And most of all, when you hear single moms being shamed, speak up! I promise – they’re doing their best to survive and raise some really good humans.

Single moms aren’t drains on society—they’re proof of its resilience.

When we invest in them, we invest in children, stability, and the future.

The real shame isn’t that moms need help—it’s that we make them feel ashamed for asking.

Edited: Shoutout to Jenn Riedy for catching my child support error! The average amount across the US is $430 per month, but that amount can vary widely depending on the number of kids, parents’ incomes, etc.

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Why Does America Hate Snap?

Scroll through any social feed and you’ll see the same fight: who ‘deserves’ help eating?

America. The wealthiest country in the world. The country whose capital is getting a golden ballroom. And the country that still debates whether hungry people deserve to eat. SNAP is under fire; it helps millions, yet it’s highly stigmatized to the point that everywhere you look, people are arguing about this much-needed safety net.

How is this evening happening? I guarantee that someone you know – and probably someone you like – is in a position to need them. They just don’t talk about it because of the stigma, vitriol, and misinformation from people who argue without doing their research.

Hopefully, by now, we all know that SNAP is federal nutrition assistance for low-income individuals and families. Its scope is quite large, considering that over 40 million Americans rely on it. That’s about 1 in 8 people. I’m sure you know more than 8 people, so there are probably a number of people that you know who quietly rely on SNAP. Maybe if you knew who they were, you’d have more compassion.

SNAP mostly benefits children, seniors, people with disabilities, and working families who struggle to bring in enough money. SNAP is just a supplement, though; it doesn’t fully cover food costs.

Myths That Won’t Die

I’ve heard so many tired arguments over why people should not be on SNAP. Misconceptions like:

• Most people on SNAP don’t work.

• It’s full of fraud and abuse.

• It’s a handout for people who won’t help themselves.

• It’s easy to qualify and live off the system.

• People are buying steak and lobster.

• They don’t want to pay for someone else to get free stuff.

But the truth is:

• Many recipients are employed, but their low-wage jobs don’t cover necessities. Corporations depend on SNAP to cover the difference so they can pay their employees less and get a tax break for doing so.

• Fraud rates are actually very low, as low as 1-2%. Most fraud comes from people skimming SNAP benefits. And once benefits are stolen, they’re not reimbursed.

• Most benefits go to children, people with disabilities, or older adults who cannot work.

• SNAP benefits average around $6 per person per day. That’s not enough to feed a person; it just helps.

So Why Are People So Angry?

So why all the resentment? It’s not really about the food.

• In America, poverty is framed as a personal or moral failure. If you’re poor, it’s your own fault for not working hard enough. You should suffer because you didn’t do the right things or you made bad choices. But that’s not actually true; poverty is a systemic issue because wages don’t keep up with the cost of living.

• I see a lot of hidden resentment. Some people feel left out for not getting the ‘free handouts’, so they have a deep-rooted “what about me attitude” that just fuels their hostility. Why should someone else get a handout when I work so hard?

• SNAP has gotten stuck in partisan identity. It’s becoming a political symbol, divided along party lines, rather than a practical tool to fight hunger.

• Racial and Class bias is fueled by stereotypes about who uses assistance, which just amplifies the stigma and the anger surrounding it.

• Media distortion portrays high rates of fraud that aren’t actually there. But people get angry thinking their tax dollars are being wasted on criminals.

The Application Gauntlet

The application process is not easy. You can file online, but the website is not very intuitive at all. The questions are complicated. You need to provide your income, your expenses, citizenship, criminal history, bank statements, assets, utility bills, W-2s, child support, and proof of all of it.

Different supervisors have different interpretations of what counts as evidence, so if you are self-employed or have adopted children, things can get very complicated. Then you have to do an interview, which can be done over the phone. But if you miss the call, you usually can’t call them back directly. You have to leave a message with the call center and wait for them to contact you again.

If your situation is complex, you may need to talk to the supervisor a few times. But you can never directly call a caseworker or supervisor. It takes about an hour to get through on the main number; they take a message for you and present it to the caseworker, who will call you back within 3 days. If you miss the call because you are working, it can take a long time to actually speak to a real person.

A lot of people never apply because the process is so overwhelming, and they may not even realize they are eligible. It usually takes a month for benefits to begin.

If you see figures flying around online, they usually use the ‘max amount’ as evidence that people get ‘too much’ SNAP. But almost no one gets the max amount. It’s usually around $6 per person per day, which is very little compared to today’s cost of groceries. But SNAP is awarded on a sliding scale: higher income means fewer SNAP benefits, and lower income means more SNAP benefits. So someone just below the threshold may only get a few dollars in assistance each month, yet people get upset about that.

The Real Numbers

• About 41 million Americans use SNAP (roughly 1 in 😎.

• Around 65% of recipients are children, seniors, or people with disabilities.

• Fraud rates are under 2%.

• Economic benefit: Every $1 in SNAP generates about $1.50–$1.80 in economic activity through grocers and local economies.

• Lifting power: SNAP kept nearly 3 million people out of poverty in 2022.

• Undocumented immigrants do not get SNAP.

Why It All Matters

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs states that kids need to be fed before they can learn. Adults need to be fed before they can work. But SNAP offers more than that. It offers stability. It helps people recover from poverty. It improves morale. It even keeps people alive.

Food insecurity and poverty are public health issues. It affects health, education, productivity, and family stability. You simply won’t have the energy to work hard or even concentrate if you are hungry. If you want people to work, they need to be fed enough to be able to do it.

I once knew a single mom who did everything she could to make it on her own. She made so many sacrifices, including barely heating her apartment, doing things in the dark because she didn’t want to use the lights, and ‘holding it’ so she could save pennies by not flushing the toilet. Imagine trying to make dinner for your toddler in the dark, risking bladder infections to save pennies so you have enough money to feed your child. That isn’t living, and that shouldn’t be happening in America when we have the means to stop it. The only thing we are actually lacking is compassion.

If you’re angry about SNAP, that reflects more on your personal beliefs about poverty than on the SNAP program. We have got to stop judging every minute detail of someone’s life just because they receive assistance. Let the experts handle that, trust me, they go through a complicated process to get those benefits.

We need to stop arguing and start looking for ways to make real change so people can thrive without assistance. We need to raise the minimum wage to a livable level, ensure affordable health care for all, and work together as a society.

If you’re angry about SNAP, channel it into curiosity. Look up how it actually works. Talk to someone who uses it.

Compassion and facts do more good than outrage ever will.

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Churches and the Baby Formula Scam

I saw a content creator call a whole bunch of churches pretending she’d run out of formula and her baby was hungry. Very few churches were willing to help. Now, I’m not thrilled with tricking churches like that. That’s a pretty dirty tactic, and it’s possible some of those churches saw through it and just declined politely. But it still exposed something: there are a lot of churches that are either unable or unwilling to help someone in immediate need.

Then I saw another creator completely lose it. She was crying, yelling, and cursing because the church does not and has not done enough. Her argument was, “If the church was doing its job, we wouldn’t have people on SNAP.” It was hard to watch her raw emotion and her pain for the church at large, but there was definitely some truth in what she said.

I grew up in a family that believed in small government, more freedom, and that it was the church’s job to care for the poor and the sick. The church I grew up in, along with several I worked in, had a discretionary fund the pastor could use to quietly help anyone in need, whether they were part of the church or from the community.

But here’s the part people don’t want to say out loud: if you want small government, you have to fund the alternative. If you want churches and charities to handle poverty relief, then churches and charities have to be resourced at the level of the need. If the alternative isn’t actually funded, society won’t just magically be okay.

I was taught by my church that government assistance was a concession. Because the church at large wasn’t doing enough. And while I have seen churches make herculean efforts to help their communities, they simply can’t do it all. At the same time, there are just as many churches that think having a few dollars a month in a discretionary fund is enough to say they “help the poor.”

There’s also a structural problem we never name: even if every church were generous, churches in poor areas have fewer donors and more need. The places that need the most help tend to have the least church money. That’s not a compassion problem; that’s a math problem. That’s why public programs exist, because they can pool resources across regions and income levels in a way a single congregation can’t.

What makes this even stranger is watching some evangelicals vote for “Christian identity” issues like putting the Ten Commandments in schools, prayer, abortion, whatever, while Jesus’ most concrete commands about money and poverty don’t show up in their policy priorities. They aren’t willing to vote for the things Jesus actually did: feed the hungry, heal the sick, help the poor. He literally told the rich young ruler to sell everything and give it to the poor. If we want the public sphere to reflect Christian values, why don’t we start with the ones about the poor and the ones Jesus actually repeated?

Meanwhile politicians keep saying the U.S. is the richest country in the world. If that’s true, why do we have people who can’t afford to eat? Why are we criticizing single moms, disabled people, and the elderly because they can’t make enough money?

I can’t believe that in 2025 this is still a polarizing issue—that so many people are genuinely angry about other people having basic necessities. That so many people think most folks on SNAP are freeloaders. I’ve seen the comments:

• “Most SNAP recipients are scammers.”

• “People don’t want to work.”

• “It’s all single moms making bad choices.”

And those are just a few.

But that’s simply not who most benefits go to. They go to kids, to the elderly, to disabled people, and to the working poor. The people we claim to care about. The part that disturbs me most is that these stereotypes exist mostly because of misinformation and people only looking to confirm what they already believe instead of finding out what’s actually true. Some of these people are so angry about the government helping people.

But the fix doesn’t have to be government or church. It can be both.

The local church can and should be out there meeting the community’s needs—because churches can do things the government can’t: build relationships, know names, offer encouragement, pray, walk with a family. And the government can do the things churches can’t: provide consistency, scale, and a floor that isn’t dependent on whether donations came in this month.

The truth is, the church has the calling but not always the capacity. Charity is beautiful but patchy. Government is impersonal but scalable. When we insist the church should do it all, while refusing to fund it anywhere near the level of national need, we create a gap and then we blame the people who fall into it.

So now what?

If you love the church, support policies that make sure people eat even when the church can’t. Do both. Get out there and love your neighbor, even the poor ones.

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Confirmation Bias

Do you know what confirmation bias is? Confirmation bias is the phenomena where we only take in evidence that supports our personal opinions and biases. And, when confronted with new information, we have a tendency to see that information in a way that supports our bias. In short, we look at everything in a way that supports or confirms the opinions we already hold.

The latest rage bait on Instagram is creators daring people on snap to try to steal their groceries as they are leaving the grocery store. I try to avoid interacting with these as I don’t want to lend them any more attention than absolutely necessary.

But these miserable people really highlight the stereotypes of people who are on government assistance. This is a huge issue because Instagram and Tiktok algorithms are notorious for giving us what we want and playing right into our confirmation bias. So if you watch one of those demeaning videos, you’re going to be sent more and more in your feed. The more you consume, the more you are given, and the more your opinions and biases are confirmed in your own mind.

The same thing goes for the AI videos of people crashing out over losing food stamps or claiming they get thousands of dollars in food benefits each month. The more of those you watch, the more you will be sent. The more you listen to them, the more likely you are to believe them. And they are wrong.

You’ve likely seen these statistics already.

41.7 million people per month received SNAP benefits in the year 2024.

That is 12.3% of the total population, or around 1 in 8 people. In Pa, that number drops to 1 in 10.

The average benefit is $187 per person per month, or around $6 per day. That isn’t going to get you very far.

First, I want to address the stereotype that is being propagated. I was absolutely shocked and dismayed to find a commercial on YouTube promoting this as well as content creators. SNAP recipients are not criminals. They aren’t lying in wait to ambush you as you saunter out of Costco. They aren’t feasting on surf and turf with their SNAP bounty. They aren’t lazy, dirty, or anything else that is being put on them.

Don’t get hung up on race, either. The largest racial/ethnic group that receives snap benefits are WHITE.

The largest group is white.

Many people on SNAP have full time jobs and just can’t make it.

You literally cannot raise a family on $20 an hour, yet minimum wage is still only $7.25. The national average for childcare for one child is over $1300 for the year. If you make $20 an hour, that’s almost half of your pay just for childcare for one. But if you don’t have childcare, you can’t go to work. So what are you supposed to do? As a single mom, I personally don’t have any family members who are capable, let alone willing, to watch my kids for even an hour. So no, RFK Jr, my parents can’t help with the kids.

We have people berating moms for not working, but childcare for 3 kids is more than you’ll even make if you only get paid $20 an hour. In Pa, the average pay for a Walmart employee is $16 per hour. If a mom has no family, how will she provide for her kids? It isn’t possible, yet we expect single moms to magically make that happen and blame them when they can’t.

Second of all, these videos disparaging people on SNAP benefits are horrific, pitting the ‘right to bear arms’ in self-defense against the right to eat and survive. Assuming that someone is going to steal from you because they aren’t getting their government benefit sets them up to be put in harm’s way by the extreme right who is just looking for a reason to fight someone and make good on those 2nd amendment rights. These creators flat out state they are looking for a fight.

And yes, for every system there is going to be someone who tries to cheat it. Let’s just get that out of the way. But the actual number is very low due to the rigorous and robust process you have to go through to be able to get the benefit. And do you really want to take away support for the majority of people who are doing everything right just because a handful of people are trying to beat the system? What are they actually going to get out of it? More food?

Next, let me shout this out loud for you: undocumented immigrants aren’t getting SNAP benefits. They cannot quality nor can they sneak through the documentation system. There is no way to fake it. You aren’t losing money at the grocery store to hungry immigrants. Your food isn’t more expensive because immigrants exist. However, the more SNAP benefits that have been poured into a community, the more the grocery stores and even farmers and suppliers will benefit from them – not just the families in need. If you shop at a store that accepts SNAP, then you are also benefitting from the economic support that grocery receives from accepting SNAP.

Everybody wins when families eat.

Just remember, when you are doomscrolling today, that you have trained your algorithm to feed you exactly what you want to see. If you aren’t seeing any opinions other than your own, you might want to close the app for a bit and go talk to some real people. And really listen to what they have to say.

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What’s a Living Wage?

The federal poverty line is $15, 650 per year for a single person. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and has been since 2009. If you work 40 hours per week, every week of the year (no sick days, no holidays etc), you will make a grand total of $15,080 per year (gross, meaning before taxes are taken out).

If you are a single person, and you make double the minimum wage (which is roughly what big box stores like Walmart, Target pay) you might still qualify for SNAP benefits. What does this say? This says that double the minimum wage is still not a living wage. Remember, these figures don’t account for sick days, store closures for holidays, etc.

That is for one single person working full time.

Let’s say you make $15 per hour. If you work 40 hours per week, you’ll make $2400 for the month if you don’t miss any days due to illness, etc. (40 hours per week, 4 weeks in the month – keeping figures simple here).

Your tax rate will be somewhere between 18-22%, so for the sake of math, let’s say 20%.

So your take-home pay will be $1,920.

If you live in downtown Allentown, you MIGHT be able to get an apartment for $1000 a month. Where I live you are unlikely to find a place for less than $1500.

That leaves you with $920. You need some utilities: internet, electric, phone, and some sort of heat source. If you use Mint Mobile, you can get some slightly sketchy internet and cell phone service for about $45 per month. Your electric will likely be $100 and more if you have electric heat.

Now you are down to $775. But you still need insurance and transportation.

My cheap car insurance on an old, paid-for van and a clean record is $75 per month. Car maintenance can easily cost $100 per month (just think how often you need routine items like tires, brakes, oil change, etc). The average amount spent on gas is around $150 per month.

If you go to the USDA website and look at their food plans, a 20-50 year old male would need at minimum (the cheapest food there is) $310 a month for food.

If your employer sponsors your health care, you might be able to get a basic plan with minimum coverage for $110.

Now you are left with $30 in the month, as long as you haven’t had any sick days, flat tires, you don’t have any credit cards, school loans, or a car payment.

That $30 has to cover everything else – toilet paper, laundry soap, shampoo and conditioner, and an occasional bottle of Pepto Bismal or Draino.

Or say a $10 per month rental insurance plan which might be required by your landlord. A new pair of sneakers once in a while, since you’re probably on your feet all day if you work for $15 an hour. This budget doesn’t include water, sewer, trash pickup – hopefully that’s all included in your rent, but it might not be.

You can’t afford to go to McDonald’s even once, get a parking ticket, give to your favorite charity, or buy your mom flowers for Mother’s Day. No Christmas presents. No new clothes. No Netflix. No extras to make you feel better about life. Your apartment doesn’t have a washer and dryer – so off you go to the laundry mat. How much does that cost?

This doesn’t give you room to save for an emergency fund, retirement, or a new car. If you do any of that, you’ll need a second job. You won’t have time to go to school to get a better job because you’re working so hard already.

And even if you have health insurance, you can’t afford the copay. You can’t even afford to be sick since you can’t take any days off of work. Dave Ramsey says skip the latte, eat rice and beans and you’ll build the American Dream. Dave Ramsey is dead wrong because wages haven’t kept up with the cost of housing, and this is our problem.

The reason SO MANY people in America – like 42 million – need SNAP and medical assistance is because they cannot make a living wage. Meanwhile, profits for the shareholders of large companies like McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, just to name a few – are raking it in on the backs of people just trying to get by. I’m not anti-capitalism here, but it absolutely needs to be bridled if we don’t want people needing more government assistance.

Someone making $15 an hour as a single person MIGHT quality for SNAP – at about $24 a month. Less than $1 a day. Maybe they get some extra protein for that, or a bag of apples and some salad. But they aren’t getting rich. They’re barely getting by. A can of chicken is $3.99, a bag of apples is about $4.99. It doesn’t cover much.

People can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps – the don’t even make enough money to afford the boots! We need to seriously consider what is a living wage and who deserves to earn one. (Hint: it’s not just the people at the top).

By the way, if you make $15 an hour, at the end of the day, you’ll bring home $96 max after taxes. Congress, on the other hand, gets $79 for lunch every day they show up to work. And that isn’t their paycheck. That’s just their lunch.

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The Poor Tax

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You’ve probably heard of the ‘pink tax’ – where manufacturers will make something in pink or even something breast-cancer related and charge extra for it.

The poor tax is even more insidious.

The poor tax refers to the phenomenon that it actually costs more to be poor than to be middle or upper class. So if you’re wondering why poor people can’t just ‘do better’ – this is one of the reasons.

For example, if your grocery budget is small, you’re being as frugal as you can. But you don’t have any money to buy more than exactly what you need. So maybe you buy smaller packages with less food in them – but food packaged that way actually costs more per ounce. You don’t have extra cash to take advantage of sales, either. Whereas someone with a little room in their food budget, or someone who has a full pantry they can rely on, can stock up on major sales. They might be able to buy a month’s worth of cereal when it’s only 1.77 a box, but someone who is poor can only buy one because there’s no wiggle room to stock up, even though it would save money in the long run. So although they are spending less per week they are paying more for the food they actually eat.

Someone who has a lower income is usually paid by the hour, which means if they have to miss work due to anything from the flu to jury duty, they’re out an entire day or more worth of income. That’s a big deal, so maybe they have to put this week’s groceries on the credit card. But because their income is low and their credit isn’t great, their interest rate is 34%, which makes that food cost 1/3 more! They’re trying to make the payments, but just putting a little bit of food on that card has maxed it out, because low income means a low credit card limit. So their score drops even more, and their interest rate might go up even further.

Now that they’ve missed work and have another bill to pay, they accidentally overdraw their account. Now, on top of being short money already, they have to pay a $35 per day fee for overdrawing their bank account. Where are they going to get the extra funds?

If you only make $15 an hour – which is double minimum wage by the way- it’s going to take you a long time to recover from even missing a couple days of work.

You’re trying hard to build up an emergency fund, but if you get more than $3000 in the bank – which is less than say first and last months rent if you need to move to a new apartment – you lose your SNAP benefits. So you can’t just move and find a cheaper place to live, you’re stuck where you are. Because if you save up money and lose snap, you’ll have to use that money for food.

Let’s talk about cars! You had an old but very reliable car to get back and forth to work. It wasn’t fancy, but it was paid off. You get rear ended at a stop sign, and because the car is old, the insurance company considered it totaled. They gave you $2000 to buy a new car. So you search FB marketplace and you put that money plus all your savings into the best car you can find. You don’t have money to get it checked out by a mechanic first, so you pick one that looks reliable and has an up-to-date inspection sticker.

You drive the car for 2 months, but you didn’t realize that the car was never maintained and the transmission goes. Your savings are gone, your car is too expensive to fix, and now you can’t get to work. What do you do?

Uber is expensive. You can’t afford that. It’s too far to walk because you can’t afford to live near where you work. Oh, and since you live in a semi-rural area (the only place you could afford) there are no buses. You can ride your bike, but the road is sketchy and all of the drivers get mad at you because there isn’t a shoulder to ride on. What do you do? (This is a true story, btw, although it didn’t happen to me).

Your only option now is to finance a car. So you go to a sketchy car dealership and they do give you a $2000 car, but they charge extra fees because you don’t have a downpayment. It has an R title because it was underwater once and everything smells bad.

And because your credit cards are maxed from buying groceries when you were sick, your interest rate is 29% over 3 years. How much more does that car cost verses someone who was able to buy a newer car at a much lower interest rate?

These are just a few real life examples of why it costs much more to be poor. Just getting a few hundred dollars of SNAP benefits a month doesn’t make up for this low-paying, hourly income and the extra cost of goods. You would love to enroll in school so you could get a better job, but you can’t afford it. And who would watch your kids while you go to class? It’s hard enough working while they’re in school, with all of the half days, holidays, and sick days. What do you do?

How are you supposed to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when there aren’t options for you to do so? You’re not lazy at all, you work really hard at your job and you show up. But you are stuck and worse, you are hated because you can’t ‘do better.’

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Shady AI Videos

This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. There are a number of AI-created videos rolling around on TikTok and Instagram solely for the purpose of perpetuating the myth of the welfare queen.

These videos usually portray a non-white, non-skinny, non-educated person crashing out at the cash register over frozen food stamps. They’re threatening to steal food or cause harm. There are a few variations and they just seem to further ignite hatred towards people who get assistance and push the stereotype about who gets help and why. That’s the whole point.

These videos are shared by creators looking to get extra views by promoting harmful stereotypes. Don’t fall for it! AI is quickly improving in its capabilities and the best thing you can do is arm yourself against falling for it.

Remember, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Maybe you’ve seen videos of a small child being rescued from a tree falling by a dog. Another video depicts a bull defending a toddler from another bull. Bunnies or raccoons jumping on a trampoline. Grandma taking a herd of cats on leashes for a walk. And my personal fav, Grandma getting in trouble with the police for feeding a bear.

How can you tell if it isn’t real?

Look for a watermark or a blurry spot where someone used poor editing to erase a watermark.

Look for a timestamp that doesn’t make sense.

Watch for strange body parts – such as odd shaped fingers and hands, a weird arm, etc.

Keep your eye on the background – parts will move or not move in ways you would expect.

Watch facial expressions – those faces may look overly botoxed, filtered, – AI doesn’t make the face move as much as it normally would.

Any unusual artifact – objects in the video don’t look right, the video may be blurred in areas you would expect detail, or you may see spots where the AI didn’t generate everything that should be there.

Security cameras. The trampoline bunnies look like the footage came from a Ring camera at night – this is intentional, because it’s easier to cover up the AI mistakes. Also, the videos of animals bringing random animals into their owner’s beds – these are AI. Who films their bed with a security camera while they are sleeping?

Things that are out of character. I watched a video of Mr. Rogers crashing out and screaming obscenities. That is completely out of character for his personality, both real and on-screen.

If you have to question if it’s AI, it probably is.

AI videos are a lot of fun to play with but they can be very damaging, especially when they are used to further stereotypes that can cause significant harm to people (imagine the ramifications of the ‘welfare queen’ video or a video of real person doing something illegal they never actually did).

Use your common sense and please stop the stereotype narratives at every opportunity.