Abundance market tweaks left millions hungry during SNAP shutdown

The central challenge faced by the welfare state is still the simplest one: funding.

Last month, I noted the right’s proposal to feed millions of Americans through private charity during the government shutdown. “I’m calling on private charities…to step into the breach here,” Tyler O’Neil wrote for The Daily Signal.

Predictably, that experiment was a catastrophic failure. O’Neil proposed that The Heritage Foundation, the Reason Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute “develop a program that will meet the unmet needs of SNAP,” but no such program ever emerged. Neither did any wealthy billionaire materialize to solve the problem. Government programs attempted to incentivize private donations with matching funds, but even though they surged, they simply could not keep up with the shutdown demand that reached 1800% in some places.

Food banks around the US closed early and could turn hundreds of families away in a single day. Though hard numbers on the catastrophe are difficult to come by, those that we have paint a grim picture. In New York, one charity announced that 44% of respondents to a poll had skipped at least one meal. In another poll by Navigator Research, two out of every three respondents said they would be affected by the government shutdown, and “Americans overwhelmingly cited SNAP benefits” as the reason.

Though basically no one in the media framed the story this way, the lesson is crystal clear. During the SNAP shutdown the private sector catastrophically failed to provide for the welfare of society. Capitalists often claim that charity would surge if government welfare programs went away, but nothing on the scale of what was needed actually emerged.