While Ms. Stewart skipped meals to keep Jack fed, there were days when he ate a single meal. “You hear him say ‘I’m hungry,’ and your heart breaks,” she said.
Penned by Jason DeParle of The New York Times, "A Year of Hardship, Helped and Hindered by Washington" Is an important article about what we can learn about government support from the ways the safety net flexed during the pandemic. This past year, the experiences of the working class have served as a testament to the need to mobilize aid.
For Kathryn Stewart, a struggling single mother in Michigan, the past year showed how much safety net programs can help — and how the nation’s fickleness about them can add confusion and uncertainty to fear and worry.
When the coronavirus pandemic struck last March, Kathryn Stewart was working at a gas station in rural Michigan and living in her mother’s trailer with eight relatives, three dogs and a budget with no room for error. Her mother, who is disabled, soon urged her to quit to avoid bringing home the disease. Ms. Stewart reluctantly agreed, wondering how she would support herself and her 10-year-old son.
An expanded safety net caught her, after being rushed into place by Congress last spring with rare bipartisan support.
To her surprise, Ms. Stewart not only received unemployment insurance but a weekly bonus of $600 more than tripled her income. A stimulus check offered additional help, as did a modest food stamp increase. Despite opaque rules and confounding delays, the outpouring of government aid lifted her above the poverty line.
Six months later, after temporary aid expired and deadlock in Washington returned, Ms. Stewart’s benefits fell to a trickle, and she was all but homeless after a family fight forced her from the trailer to a friend’s spare room. She skipped meals to feed her son, sold possessions to conjure cash and suffered anxiety attacks so severe they sometimes kept her in bed.
Just as Ms. Stewart finally found a job, celebration turned to shock: The state demanded that she repay the jobless aid she had received, claiming she had been ineligible. That left her with an eye-popping debt of more than $12,000.
“I spent the whole day just trying to breathe,” Ms. Stewart said the day the notice arrived. “I’m really confused about the whole thing. I’m trying not to panic.”