SNAP

The US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program released their most recent data yesterday. At the moment, a record 23,116,441 American households are receiving food stamps. To put that in perspective, let’s assume that the average frontage of a household is 25 feet (houses would be bigger, apartments would be smaller). If you lined them up side-by-side, the total frontage would equal 577,911,025 feet or 109,452 miles. If you got in your car and drove 60 mph for 10 hours a day, every day, it would take a full six months to drive by all those households. And, yet, the DOW is trading at all time highs. Something is seriously amiss here. It looks like the dual policies of zero interest rates and sustained Quantitative Easing by the Fed are creating a Potemkin Village economy, where the facade is represented by the apparently robust stock market and the enrichment of a few while, behind the scenes, the bitter reality is that millions of people are descending into poverty and despair. This will not end well.