So to start this off, the year before last I applied for food stamps and I got a whopping 16 dollars. What the hell is that? That's a snack, that's not even enough for a whole meal.
Then last year a lot happened. I got married and had my first child. My wife then had to stop working for a while to recover and watch over our newborn. Luckily, I'm guessing because of the baby, our food stamps jumped up to 250 dollars. Yay it's actually usable! Then my job got with the modern times and gave wage increases to everyone, which gave me about a 2 dollar an hour raise. All sounds pretty great, right? Wrong.
So apparently me getting that raise is what screwed everything up. But I mean, its 2 dollars an hour so how bad could it really be? Apparently this measly wage increase, which still has me barely scraping by in a 1 bedroom apartment with my family, was enough to send me over the poverty line. So now I'm not seen as poor or whatever, and this meant my taxes got really messed up. I used to get a few thousand dollars on my tax return, but this time around I only got a couple hundred. Luckily my wife got the child tax credit on her end, but I mean damn mine was drastically reduced.
Then let's look at what happened to my food stamps. We just renewed, and it dropped down to 150 dollars. That's a whole 100 dollars. You're telling me that a 2 dollar an hour increase is going to cost me 100 dollars in food? How??? This was how we were doing most of our grocery shopping and now we have to cut that by 100 dollars.
So who knows, by next year I'm probably going to actually owe taxes and lose even more money in food stamps. God forbid I get another raise of 50 cents to a dollar or they might consider me an upper class citizen. I just dont understand why I'm in a position where I can barely afford things now WITH assistance, yet I'm scared to make any more money because I might just lose that assistance. I dont get why the government still thinks that making 15-16 dollars an hour is a lot of money.