Monica Potts, Author at Ms. Magazine https://msmagazine.com/author/mpotts/ More Than A Magazine, A Movement Tue, 11 Nov 2025 20:56:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://msmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-ms-logo-32x32.jpg Monica Potts, Author at Ms. Magazine https://msmagazine.com/author/mpotts/ 32 32 Playing Games With Hunger https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/11/food-stamps-republicans-congress-working-poor-2014/ Tue, 11 Nov 2025 15:38:45 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=388359 Gail Todd lives with her husband and three daughters in the southeastern section of Washington, D.C., and works at a Walmart in suburban Maryland. Her husband is a shift manager at a fast-food restaurant. Food stamps—the common name for the vouchers or debit cards supplied by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP—helped Todd when she struggled financially after her first daughter was born. She had to turn to them again four years ago because her job, combined with her husband's wages, doesn't pay enough to feed her family.

Before Walmart, Todd, pregnant now with her fourth child, worked for $8.35 an hour at McDonald's. Walmart's $10 hourly wage was better. In the beginning she worked roughly 40 hours a week, but since May her weekly hours have been reduced to between 16 and 28, earning her no more than $900 a month. The loss in income coincided with a cut to the family's monthly food-stamps benefit from $339 down to $239—the lowest she's ever received—because a temporary boost to the program in the stimulus bill was allowed to expire Nov. 1, 2013.

"The food stamps, they help, but it's not enough because I can't feed my family," she says.

[From the Spring 2014 issue of Ms.]

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