Last Thursday, September 19th, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would severely cut the funding for the food stamp program, removing 3.8 million needy recipients from the rolls next year. The lead editorial in the New York Times the next day opined: “The vote came two weeks after the Agriculture Department reported that 17.6 million households did not have enough to eat at some point in 2012 because they lacked the resources to put food on the table. It came two days after the Census Bureau reported that 15 percent of Americans, or 46.5 million people, live in poverty.”
In an ostensibly unrelated article on the same day the Times reported that the largest buyer of raw cotton in the US had returned from abroad to South Carolina to manufacture its textiles. The major reason for such companies to have exported jobs originally was the high cost of US labor. And their return to American soil is due in part to the greatly reduced cost of labor. But these savings aren’t found in reduced wage disparity–American workers remain more expensive to employ than workers in most Asian countries. The savings are realized instead through automation. These days when manufacturing returns to America it does not bring significant numbers of new jobs with it, just new machines. The textile factory would have needed to hire 2,000 workers in 1980 to do the job now done by only 140 workers! This automation trend is not about to slow (see Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?), and it seems clear that the unemployment situation–originally a product of wage-war outsourcing–is now more deeply entrenched. This new labor landscape, occurring in the wake of widespread technological transition, is exactly the sort of situation government assistance programs were created to counter. It may be that the current level of food stamps (or higher) will be needed for a long time. // Howard T. Bellin
