The fact that people may have income levels that permit them to receive public assistance doesn't mean they know how to go about getting it, or are set up to do so. You've got to know which hoops to jump through and how. Many of the people the system is designed to help don't know how to find the hoops, much less how to jump through them.

And sometimes the system is set up with absurd hoops: when I was a starving grad student in NJ, my husband and I had an income range that qualified us for food stamps. So we applied. But to get foodstamps, I would have had to sign a form affirming that I would take any job that paid more than I was currently earning. Well, I needed short-term help, but I would have lost my fellowship had I taken additional employment--so we walked away. Could have lied, I suppose, but a system that sets lying as a requirement is a big problem.

And a friend who did take WIC during similar circumstances faced fairly invasive questioning of her family choices.

But it's definitely a very bad financial indicator for people to feel they need to stock up on formula when the check comes in. Truly tragic.

My friend who buys baby formula noticed that in the month of September, Walgreens moved the small canisters of formula to a locked cabinet in the front of the store.

Is that most of these people are probably making what 10 years ago would have been considered a good wage. Between inflation, rising healthcare costs, increasing housing costs and wage stagnation even a job paying $35-40k a year can leave a family living paycheck to paycheck with no means to get ahead.

Good program, if it survives. I've always found it a pity, though, that it only subsidizes animal-based foods. Where are the fresh vegetables and fruits that are ESSENTIAL for a child to grow up healthy? Nowhere in evidence, it seems, according to government regulations. A nice souvenir from the 20th century's obsession with protein.

WIC is a fantastic program. We didn't qualify for it when we had our baby in 1992, however my sister qualified with her first child a couple of years later.

It was astonishingly easy to participate in the program and the benefits thereof are tangible and really can make a difference.

While it is tragic that 45% of new babies need the program, it is encouraging to know that they are being covered through the program.

That is god awfully depressing. The nation is truly going to have to come together to get through this, as I expect the fallout to be a few orders of magnitude greater than anything any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes.

Not to imply in the least that those in need of help shouldn't get it- but somehow the human race survived for quite a few thousand years without corporate created baby formula. Certainly there are some mothers with a medical or other reason that necessitates using baby formula, but nature did provide the perfect food for human babies- its called human breast milk. Why are these people spending good money on something they can essentially 'make' for free?

This article caused me to recall the story my mother told me about her elementary school days in rural California during the Great Depression.

At the lunch break, students were excused from class to gather at picnic tables under a large oak tree on the playground. There, they would open their lunch bags, pails, or boxes and proceed to eat.

Another group of students leaving class gathered at a far oak tree on the playground. They were the students that had no lunch to eat.

The program's reach is so vast that it serves 45 percent of all babies born in the United States, a commentary on how many babies are born into poverty.

Of course, it might just as easily be read as a commentary on the way the behavior patterns of the poor keep them poor.

Having just shopped at 'Wally World' today I'd offer the following observation: empty shelves, shelves with merchandise expanded to fill space, fewer selections, a great reduction in variety in several departments, and of course many advertised price reductions. Perhaps there are other reasons; however, thinning inventory before the Christmas season doesn't seem to me to be a sign of confidence.

P

Andrew, this is not a dig on you personally, so please don't take it that way...

But the feeling that first struck me when I read this post was a melancholy anger that the moderator of one of the places where I regularly go to get smart input from many angles on the state of our economy and what might be done about it did not know that there was such a program as WIC.

It is a serious national problem, in my humble-but-correct-opinion ;), that everyone involved in the real decision making that governs our economy is so divorced from the reality of day to day life for a large percentage of Americans.

Again, it's not you. In fact your post about the Wal-Mart formula spike is a valuable indicator of that reality. It's just that you seemed surprised to discover the existence of WIC; that's what jumped out at me.

I view that as a national failing and an indictment of the vast majority of what passes for journalism in this country. This is big source of the anger and resentment in this country. They've thrown better than a Trillion dollars at Wall Street trying to shore up those idiots, and from what I can see not a penny is coming to Main Street in any meaningful way. They tell us we just don't understand. Bullshit. We understand all too well what's coming down the pike. That's why we're pissed off.

Rant over. Apologies to Andrew.

WIC is one of those programs that people don't hear about a lot, in part because it works so well. The program provides formula, or in the case of breast-feeding mothers and children under 5, specific foods as provided on a voucher: peanut butter, milk, beans, eggs, cereal, cheese. The kind of food you can get is further circumscribed to ensure it's healthy -- cereal is limited to healthy varieties, not sugary cereals, and cheese is not "cheese food". The idea is that if the foods are in the house, children will benefit. As a young parent, I had an entire repetoire of recipes I could make using mostly WIC ingredients -- quiche, bean soup, etc. At least when we had it, the vouchers were dated throughout the month, so that you couldn't use them all at one time, but had to space them out weekly, This prevented getting all the stuff in bulk and using it all up.

I heard a lot when I was young about how "food stamps" were useless because poor people spent all the money on cheetos and Coke. (Well, *we* didn't spend them on that, but supposedly that's why it's criticized.) WIC never had that problem.