Last week, I attended the Columbus Metropolitan Club’s forum on ending hunger in central Ohio.
I will admit: often when I go to public forums on these sorts of topics, I can be disheartened. Ohio is an individualistic state, which means that much of the public discourse revolves around interest groups advocating for why they should “get theirs” when it comes to public programs.
What impressed me so much about the conversation at this forum was how much the panelists were focused on concrete, root-cause solutions to hunger.
Matt Habash, President and CEO of the Mid-Ohio Food Collective, has been a passionate advocate for public involvement in hunger issues for years. He has talked about the massive number of missed meals by people in central Ohio and how food banks will never have the resources to combat this on their own. This leads naturally to saying the public sector needs to be involved.
This led Habash to talk about important public programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as “food stamps,” free school breakfast and lunch programs, and the child tax credit.
Even more surprising to me, though, were the words from Dr. Mysheika Roberts, who has served as Health Commissioner for the City of Columbus’s Public Health Department for the past seven years. When asked what can be done to reduce hunger, she had three words that received applause from the audience: “universal basic income.”
I was surprised not only at the boldness of her opinion, but also at the reception from the audience. A proposal that seemed like a pipe dream five years ago has sprung into the forefront of conversations about poverty even in the public discourse social circles of a fairly moderate city.
But I still had questions. SNAP, free lunch, child tax credits: these were all policies that could only be addressed at the state level and above. What can local leaders do to address hunger?
I posed this question to the panel. Dr. Roberts’s answer? “Universal. Basic. Income.”
Habash tacked on his agreement, saying it was income issues that were driving hunger in central Ohio.
Amartya Sen famously argued that a famine has never occurred in a functioning democracy. His explanation for this observation is that famines are not technological problems, they are social problems. Yes, there are food shortages in democracies, but in a government that is built to respond to the needs of its citizens, democracies find ways to get food to people who need them. In autocracies, this does not happen.
In a way, Habash and Roberts are making a similar argument. That it is lack of resources that drives hunger, and that by solving the resource problem, we can solve the hunger problem.
Habash argues this is partly because food budgets are actually more elastic than other budgets like rent or transportation. If you don’t pay rent, you will lose your home. If you don’t pay for gas, you won’t get to work. If you skip a meal or two? Well, you kick the consequences down the road. Resources-constrained families will do what they need to do in this case.
So what is our shortfall? Feeding America estimates there are 44 million food insecure people in the United States. They estimate that the nationwide food budget shortfall (at a per-meal cost of $3.99 based on spending by food-secure households as reported in the Current Population Survey conducted by the Census Bureau) is $33 billion.
$33 billion is not a small amount of money. But it’s also not a completely ridiculous amount of money to spend compared to what we already spend on hunger. The USDA estimates the federal government spent a little over $110 billion on SNAP benefits in 2023. So this would represent a 29% increase in SNAP spending if that was how the federal government decided to bridge that gap.
How could we find $33 billion? Well, let’s go to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Debt Fixer tool. This is a fun tool that can be used to create your own federal budget using policy options estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. So lo and behold: here are 33 options that could be used to create a balanced-budget (or revenue-positive) end to hunger in the United States according to Debt Fixer.
Limit annual defense spending growth to 1% (average savings of $51 billion per year)
Limit annual nondefense spending growth to 1% (average savings of $41 billion per year)
Eliminate farm subsidies (average savings of $39 billion per year)
Replace Obamacare with state grants (average savings of $80 billion per year)
Increase Medicare premiums for all beneficiaries (average savings of $76 billion per year)
Reduce Medicare advantage costs (average savings of $53 billion per year)
Reform Medicare provider payments (average savings of $36 billion per year)
Allow private plans to compete with Medicare (average savings of $36 billion per year)
Eliminate Medicaid provider taxes (average savings of $59 billion per year)
Block grant Medicaid and grow per-person spending with medical inflation (average savings of $60 billion per year)
Set social security benefits to a flat amount (average savings of $42 billion per year)
Raise the payroll tax cap to cover 90% of earnings (average savings of $89 billion per year)
Subject earnings greater than $250,000 to the payroll tax (average savings of $161 billion per year)
Raise payroll tax rate by 1% (average savings of $68 billion per year)
Limit highway spending to current revenue (average savings of $46 billion per year)
Rescind Inflation Reduction Act climate tax credits (average savings of $71 billion per year)
Devolve K-12 education spending to the states (average savings of $81 billion per year)
Repeal the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (average savings of $52 billion per year)
Increase taxes on capital gains and dividends (average savings of $34 billion per year)
Enact a 25% ultra-millionaire tax on unearned income (average savings of $58 billion per year)
Impose ultra-millionaire wealth tax (average savings of $308 billion per year)
Eliminate the mortgage income deduction (average savings of $39 billion per year)
Limit the charitable deduction (average savings of $43 billion per year)
Eliminate the state and local tax deduction (average savings of $151 billion per year)
Institute a cap on the health insurance tax exclusion (average savings of $72 billion per year)
Increase corporate tax rate to 25% (average savings of $67 billion per year)
Increase corporate tax rate to (average savings of $117 billion per year)
Enact a financial transactions tax (average savings of $112 billion per year)
Enact a carbon tax (average savings of $91 billion per year)
Enact a value-added tax (average savings of $259 billion per year)
Restore estate tax to 2009 levels (average savings of $37 billion per year)
Increase taxes on foreign-earned business income (average savings of $63 billion per year)
Cap the pass-through business deduction for high earners (average savings of $33 billion per year)
Maybe you don’t agree with all of these policy changes. But do you agree with one of them? Do you agree one of them could be worth ending hunger in the United States? If anything, this list tells me something. We have no excuse to say that hunger is an inevitability in the United States.