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I appreciate the effort in attempting to try "make the government numbers work." Spoiler alert: they seldom do.
Welfare programs that try to hypertarget one subdomain of life are hopelessly naive because they fail to accurately model individual financial realities as what they are - a complex system. As an analogy, it's like looking at an estuary in Mississippi that has run dry and saying "I'll solve this! By dumping this one bucket of water into the Mississippi river. In Minnesota"
Food stamps are only a part of a household's budget - yes, even for food. And it's not as if these kind of households are carefully categorizing different budget allocations. It's much more of an ad hoc "use whatever you pull out of the drawer" situation. In my experience, a poorer couple with or without kids has an income that's a mix of legal and grey market. One or other of the couple has a totally "straight" job with W-2 income or, at last, 1099 income that's being accurately reported. The other picks up a lot of cash odd jobs and semi-work and/or cash-tip heavy jobs. Sliding down the scale, you have strippers and onlyfans (I'm not really joking about this) and light "community" drug dealing.
The straight job is used on paper for a lot of these benefits programs and for apartment rental needs. The cash is used to finance a lot of the "operations" of the household - food, car and gas, clothing purchases. Savings aren't non-existent per se, but "savings" as a concept is just different. When you have leftovers from dinner, do you consider that "food savings?" No, that's just some extra that didnt' get consumed today but probably will in the next 1 - 3 days.
So SNAP and WIC are just other handfuls of money (albeit arbitrarily limited to grocery stores). They aren't conceived of or employed as the cornerstone of a family diet, or even supplement diet enhancement.
Beyond the raw numbers, this is the larger failing of government "assistance" programs. They are all built and deployed with these actuarial and academic economic concepts of complex systems of behavior. "Of course these folks will recognize the marginal benefit of this proportional 8.7% increase to their income for primary goods!" Not only is this elitist, it's stupid (a frequent pairing). The endemic illness in poverty is the mindset that sprouts within in [^1].
And this "mindset" argument is where progressive and liberal policy thinking really goes off the rails. "They need help! counseling! therapy! They've never been told how to make a budget etc. etc." You can see the surface level attraction here. People love to feel like they're doing something in the face of a problem wildly out of their control (hashtag Ukraine Flag). But run the thought experiment out; anybody who's sitting around going "Gee, I really wish there was a better way to organize my money so that I could maintain some consistency month to month" is miles ahead of the median reality - "I want food now. Food time!" Impulse control and (slightly) delayed gratification are things typically developed in later childhood and refined during adolescence. Yet the very people to whom we send SNAP and WIC "benefits" are those who fall on the sad end of the distribution of these traits!
Government cannot (and absolutely should not) be in the business of trying to re-shape an individual's character. State mandated virtue ethics? No, Thank you. This is a duty that falls to families and local communities. And, therein, we get to one of the stickier realities of poverty - it has areas of hyper concentration. Almost as if some folks revel in it. The very communities that most need to shape the character of their children are those most suffering from long term degeneracy in family formation, social and civic engagement, and long term consistent employment.
But here's $9.50 / day for Dr. Pepper and Hungry Man.
[1]: To some extent, it never totally exits a person. My father, now a boomer-multi-millionaire, stashes large boxes of raisins in odd spots around his house because he remembers what hunger felt like. It's a benign enough eccentricity we mostly joke about it, but it's plainly unnecessary - I've seen him order uber eats when he doesn't feel like cooking. This has precisely zero percent impact on his retirement budget and future year allocations.
You briefly mentioned it with "This is a duty that falls to families and local communities", and I'm interested in hearing what are the solutions you advocate for. I suppose maybe we can define the problem as "people/families/communities with food insecurity". FWIW, I'm interested to hear your opinion cause it seems you've thought quite a bit about this and because I've recently gotten involved in weekly volunteer session at the local soup kitchen. I've never really thought about the macro/root-cause-analysis/solution-space of this issue.
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