I was curious, so I tried to answer this question. Problem being, detangling the cause/effect and interactions of e.g. employment with food stamps isn't immedi

I was curious, so I tried to answer this question. Problem being, detangling the cause/effect and interactions of e.g. employment with food stamps isn't immediately obvious to me. To give some of the examples I was looking at: Overall, social security and disability spending per capita, and overall enrollment, is up. (at a very high rate since the 90s, comparatively to prior).[0] However, out of pocket costs and private insurance costs have been increasing at even higher rates [1] To look at food stamps, SNAP participation has been going down rather significantly in recent years.[2] It's an open question as to the relative contributions of increased employment rates vs. changes to eligibility (often via republican states imposing work requirements), let alone normalizing this against the various unemployment/"workforce participation" measures to find the "real rate" of unemployed, un-protected individuals, which has certainly not recovered since the recession [3]; implying that the SNAP cuts may not be from the "good signal" (employment is found) precondition. Something that's not well captured in the above (chosen because they were a few "notable social programs" I could think about off the cuff) and someone more informed than I could likely tell me what the core metric for this would be; but there's an worrying pattern I keep hearing about regarding schools pushing for a four day school week. (here's an analysis showing the motivation of cost cutting, and the unfortunately lacking results [4]) If the implied need to cut costs is _that severe_, for whatever reason (my assumption would be a combination of state funding and taxbase) one can reasonably see this as another eroding facet of state/social support, if not necessarily intentionally. All in all; I get the feeling that while local benefit cuts (and more importantly aspects such as increased out of pocket costs for healthcare) are probably not helping, it's only one aggravating facet along the side of a core deeper systemic trend(s). [0] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/disability_trends/sect01.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/disability_trends... [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-care-index/articles/2015/05/07/us-news-health-care-index-shows-massive-increase-in-consumer-costs https://www.usnews.com/news/health-care-index/articles/2015/... [2] http://www.newsweek.com/people-food-stamps-snap-decline-participation-640500 http://www.newsweek.com/people-food-stamps-snap-decline-part... [3] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 [4] http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/93/69/9369.pdf http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/93/69/9369.pdf