Many provisions of the CARES Act ran out in July. Soon, state unemployment insurance will start to run out for people who lost work at the beginning of the pandemic. Congress and the White House have failed to pass new support, and even if an agreement is reached, Senate Republicans have signaled that they’ll prioritize confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court before the election.
On this episode of the podcast Social Distance, the executive producer Katherine Wells and the staff writer James Hamblin talk with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University who studies the social safety net. She describes a dire situation for poor Americans and a tremendous need for new relief funding.
Listen here:
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What follows is a selection of the conversation, edited and condensed for clarity:
Katherine Wells: One thing I’ve had a hard time grasping is the scale of the problem we’re facing right now. How do you describe it in a way that people can understand how big it is?
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach: A way to think about it is through the access to food that families have. And we’ve got two broad measures of that. One is food insecurity. That’s the idea that families don’t have enough money to buy the foods that they want to eat. Sometimes it means hunger, and sometimes it means shifting to cheaper foods. And the rate of food insecurity—especially among families with kids—has skyrocketed during COVID-19. The best estimates are that the numbers have tripled. It used to be around 10 percent. Now it’s around 30 percent. Three out of 10 people with kids are food insecure right now.