Book Review: A Day at the Fare, by Pamela M. Covington
Some things about welfare have not changed much since the 1980s
A Day at the Fare, Pamela M. Covington’s memoir about the three years she and her kids received welfare benefits in Florida, is a gripping story with important lessons for today’s social safety net, though her experience took place in the early 1980s.
Ms. Covington has a gift for narrative. Her story reads like a novel, with characters who develop and change, sometimes heartbreakingly, and a plot with many twists and turns. It is a universal tale of struggle against impossible odds, circumstances compelling the heroine to embark on an adventure fraught with danger. It even has villains—the more memorable ones including an unseen house burglar, a sleazy car rental manager, and welfare agencies that at times treated her like a criminal suspect instead of a mom trying to feed and house her kids.
On another level, A Day at the Fare is a portrait of a dysfunctional and inadequate welfare system that punishes people who are poor because they are poor. The story takes place a decade before President Bill Clinton “ended welfare as we know it,” severely slashing the Food Stamp Program (now called SNAP) and ending the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, replacing it with a block grant to states called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). (TANF is rife with corruption and fiscal mismanagement by state officials and politicians, as well as a certain retired NFL quarterback.)
Yet many of the problems with food stamps, cash welfare assistance, and federal housing assistance that Ms. Covington endured in the 1980s remain true of the current system in 2024. The rule against using food stamps to purchase hot food remains on the books. This absurd rule pushed her ingenuity to the limit in her first Jacksonville, Florida apartment, which had no stove or refrigerator (or heat or air conditioning—in Florida). How was she expected to cook food at home without a stove? She found a makeshift solution to this and the lack of heat in the winter by getting a space heater and using it to heat up food for dinner before moving it upstairs to keep her children warm through the night. A clever solution, but it is depressingly dystopian that this was necessary.
Social safety net programs like SNAP have an asset test with a low ceiling on the assets participants can have, a limit that has not changed meaningfully in decades. The asset test severely limits the financial resources applicants can have or build, trapping them in poverty. In Ms. Covington’s case, she struggled to find a way to verify the value of her old car to ensure it did not put her above the AFDC asset test, and despaired at having to pay for an inspection to demonstrate that her car was worthless so she could prove she was in abject poverty and “worthy” of government assistance.
SNAP still requires participants to report any changes in income as soon as they occur, a rule that tripped up Ms. Covington when she found a job that gave her a small financial cushion on top of her food stamps, cash welfare, and housing assistance. She chose not to report this job to her caseworker, because doing so would have cut her food stamps allotment and made it that much more difficult to feed her children. She rightly believed that feeding her kids took priority over following the food stamp rules to the letter. (She later paid back the difference.)
Receiving government assistance today continues to mandate periodic “recertification” interviews, though these were waived during the COVID-19 pandemic. These interviews are often conducted in person, during the typical work day, forcing participants to take time away from work to do the interview, jeopardizing their jobs. Losing a job can jeopardize SNAP eligibility. In Alaska, the backlog of recertification interviews that resulted from declaring the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in July 2022 caused many families to go without SNAP assistance for months. Senior citizens were going to the hospital because of malnutrition. Bureaucracy can exact a cruel toll.
Ms. Covington found the recertification interviews personally invasive and humiliating; the details of her personal life belonged to her caseworker and the state, and the questions were often repetitive or seemed pointless, like how much she spent on her children’s toys or clothes.
The most difficult parts of the book to read concerned her older child, Cedric. His behavioral challenges were disruptive to Ms. Covington’s efforts to keep the family afloat financially and to improve her own situation by pursuing an associate’s degree. The state child welfare system’s solution of removing Cedric from the family proved no more successful at managing Cedric’s behavior, and came with the sting of disparaging Ms. Covington’s parenting competence. It was heartbreaking to read about Cedric’s extreme alienation from society because it seemed likely that he was suffering from a mental illness, learning disability, or a combination. In the 1980s, the mental health profession lacked the tools it has today to diagnose and treat conditions like Cedric’s. I badly wanted him to get a diagnosis, medication, and therapy that would help him turn his life around. He was clearly hurting.
Ms. Covington concludes that welfare assistance was necessary to her survival and future success. “Although it was never enough,” she writes, “public assistance had served a vital role in helping feed my children and me and keeping us off the streets.” Nevertheless, “the benefits of the system came at a high personal cost—my pride. I was disconcerted by how little privacy I had while on the rolls, how little control I had over my personal affairs when it came to dealing with my son’s issues, and what it felt like to be viewed as ‘one of them’.”
It does not need to be this way. We could instead build a social safety net that ensures everyone can live in safe, stable housing with heat, air conditioning, and basic necessities like a stove and a fridge. That guarantees everyone has enough food to eat a healthy diet. That gives everyone affordable access to health care and day care. In the latter half of 2021, the extended Child Tax Credit (CTC) sent monthly payments to families with children, no strings attached, instead of the typical annual lump sum payment; the value of the CTC was higher as well. Child poverty fell by 46%, largely driven by the CTC expansion. Families reported using the 2021 payments for food, housing, diapers, and other basic needs related to child care. They were able to pay their rent on time. For a brief time, they could breathe a sigh of relief. Those payments ended in December 2021, and child poverty once again soared in 2022, increasing again in 2023.
We can end poverty. We know what works. And if we can end poverty, we must. Anything less is a moral failure.
Ms. Covington (https://www.pamelamcovington.com/) is currently working on a book proposing solutions to improve the American welfare system. She recently created a multi-faceted presentation to help participants of poverty simulation programs understand what living in poverty is like. The performance inspires dialogue, fosters empathy, and encourages action towards the alleviation of poverty.
She is also a storytelling alumna of The Moth. A Day at the Fare is available in print or e-book format from Amazon.