by Don Birkholz

Created on: February 10, 2010   Last Updated: February 11, 2010

I have been studying the food stamp and food bank surveys that ask for the reason people need food stamps or food bank assistance and  I do have a  concern.  First of all, when the food stamp people draw up a survey with a long list of fed answers, it is easy to see where something might be missed.  For example, if 10 per cent of the respondents said "unusual expenses", wouldn't that beg the question "What was the unusual expense"?  Was it drugs, a new refrigerator, a vet bill for your pet, a 500$ driver's license reinstatement, a car repair bill, a 700$ mandatory auto insurance cost, etc?

So, the best approach to finding out the reasons for needing food stamps would be an open-ended question: What was the main reason (trigger) that caused you to seek food stamps? There are two main reasons for seeking food stamps and they would be a decrease in income (loss of job, divorce, etc), or an increase in expenses (medical costs, etc).  I did a food stamp survey on the Yahoo Answers web site, asking for the main reason for needing food stamps, got 54 responses and they fit these categories:

Divorce-16

No job-12

Single parent-9

Disabled-8

Was at college-4

Low wages-3

Drugs-1

DUI-1

From 1987 to 1996, I obtained the food stamp numbers for the 50 states and located the various food stamp skyrockets and tried to find out if there were any food stamp skyrockets linked to mandatory auto insurance laws. This was at a time when many states did not have mandatory auto insurance laws and some states that had the laws, did not have the food stamp numbers.  My attention was quickly diverted to all the many food stamp skyrockets linked to DUI school laws. But I did find a fair amount of food stamp skyrockets linked to mandatory auto insurance laws in Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Maryland. 

So, I went thru a local representative, who went thru the Montana DPHHS and in October of 2004, they did a poorly produced food stamp survey in Billings, MT, which found that 18 of the 96 food stamp applicants said auto insurance, fines, or mandatory auto insurance was a reason for needing food stamps.  Billings, MT has a 100$ DUI school, and it would have been better to use a city with a 250$ school since the higher the expense, the more likely it would cause an indigent to go on food stamps. But that would equal 70,000 over the last 20 years in Montana that would have listed DUI, fines,

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