Recently, 63-year-old Danny Blair waited in a mile-long line in the Appalachian foothills for free food. Days before, he had received a letter announcing his pandemic-era benefits to help buy groceries would be drastically slashed.
In his own state, lawmakers voted to end the state’s health emergency last spring, cutting food stamp benefits created to help vulnerable Americas like Blair weather the worst of COVID. Blair had been receiving $200 a month, but the government reduced his allotment to just $30.
“I thought, ‘Wow, the government is trying to kill us now,” Blair, who survives on his Social Security disability check and lives in a mobile home with his wife, told MSN.com. “They are going to starve us out.”
This is the normal for many Americans says, End Times expert Michael Snyder. And the Biden Administration says the American economy is good right now? Not a chance.
Snyder says that several factors are coming to push millions of Americans into a state of “food insecurity.”
“We haven’t seen anything like this in a long time,” Snyder said on his blog themostimportantnews.com. “Food prices have been rising aggressively throughout the past year, and so our money does not go nearly as far as it once did.
“Meanwhile, food stamp benefits are being slashed. The federal government had greatly enhanced food stamp benefits for many Americans during the COVID pandemic, but now, that emergency program is coming to and end. What this means is that many Americans are going to have very little money to spend on food at a time when economic conditions are starting to get really tough.”
Check out James Lasher’s interview with LA Dream Center’s Matthew Barnett, who talks about food insecurity and emergency ministries in this dire time of need for American families:
Most Americans, Snyder says, understand that something has seriously gone wrong, and this is pushing consumer confidence lower.
Food insecurity, as defined by mealsforgood.org, is when you don’t have enough money to buy the healthy foods you need, or if you have to skip meals because you don’t have enough money to buy food.
In fact, the website says, if you counted the number of healthy meals missing from food insecure households last year in New York City alone, they would add up to a whopping 242 millions. The statistics for the entire country are staggering. In 2016, 41.2 million people lived in food-insecure households.
And there is no single demographic that food insecurity hits most. It affects people of all ages, and man fall in and out of being food insecure, depending upon their situation.”
Moverforhunger.org states that over 34 million Americans face hunger each and every day, including one in eight children. Food banks, shelters and soup kitchens may seem like the answer to hungry in America. But many of these are a short-term response.
Today, there are more than 400 emergency food programs, which serve 63,000 affiliated pantries and shelters. Feeding Children Everywhere is but one program that reaches out to the impoverished and destitute.
Somebody Cares International is another, as well as Convoy of Hope. Many churches throughout the country serve the hungry with outreach programs, including New Life Church, under Senior Pastor Choco DeJesus, in the Chicago area.
But these noble programs simply aren’t enough,” Snyder says.
“This is the country we live in now,” Snyder says. “Once upon a time we had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now the middle class is being systematically destroyed. The cost of living is increasing faster than our paychecks are, and that means that our standard of living is going down.
The Atlanta Fed’s Housing Affordability Monitor reports that housing is more unaffordable right now than it was at any time during the last housing crash.
Auto loans have become extremely oppressive, and now that the economy is going downhill, the number of Americans getting behind on their payments is rapidly increasing.
Unfortunately, Snyder says, this is just the beginning. “We are in the early chapters of a major economic downturn, and the tsunami of layoffs that we have been witnessing is going to get a lot worse.”
And, Snyder says, when “people don’t have enough food to eat, they tend to get really angry,” he says. “And at tis moment, hunger is spreading like wildfire all across America.
“In the meantime, Blair and his wife will continue to arise at 4a.m. so that they can be the first in line to receive handouts. It’s what Blair and his wife believe they must do in order to survive.”
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Shawn A. Akers is the online editor at Charisma Media.
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