Poor people are reviled in America. I learned this lesson very early on as a child on food stamps in the grocery store. Other shoppers would search for a wedding ring on my mom’s hand and mutter “trailer trash” as we walked by when they didn’t find one. People behind us in the cashier line would swing their buggies around to another line, loudly complaining because my mom didn’t hand over her vouchers quickly enough.

Junk food aroused particular ire, even though the US Department of Agriculture found no food consumption differences between food-stamp shoppers and non-food-stamp grocery shoppers.

Food stamps: a lifeline for America's poor that Trump wants to cut Read more

A cashier once berated my mom for buying a box of cake mix for my brother’s fourth birthday as my worried brother looked up at them. Adults sneered at my sister and me if they spotted the large bag of potato chips and five two-liter bottles of off-brand soda in our cart. But we bought non-perishables in bulk like that because our neighbor only gave us a ride to the store once a month, when new food stamps arrived.

On our weekly long walk home with milk and eggs, people in passing cars threw hard candy and fast food wrappers at my family. And when we arrived back at the trailer, my mom used the leftover coupon ads for toilet paper. People who live in poverty are very good at using what little they have to survive.

My family survived a particularly cold winter without electricity for over a week. The funds from the neighbor-to-neighbor assistance program that paid our bill ran out, so we couldn’t cook our dietary staple of dehydrated beans. Instead we ate cold canned peas and mustard on saltine crackers and dreamed about heat and hot food, a luxury that is prohibited from purchase on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap).

Mustard sandwiches are still one of my sister’s favorite snacks. We are grateful for the $200 that we received in food stamps each month. The program lifts many families out of hardship, but it is inadequate for others. My great-aunt who is elderly and blind receives $24 each month in benefits.

Out of the hustle for survival arises the voucher black market in areas of entrenched poverty. Hungry people here trade their food stamps to pay for rent or gas and sometimes drugs, at a rate of 60 cents on the dollar. My mom once sold $20 worth of stamps to a grocer to pay for a class field trip for me. An acquaintance sells her food stamps card to purchase painkillers that she started taking at 15 as an escape from their father’s physical and sexual abuse. She also uses the cash to buy diapers and pay her mom to raise her son.

This black market is not big business and only accounts for 1% of the total program. Recipients of food stamps are not scamming taxpaying Americans. An acquaintance with addiction problems pays taxes into Snap at a higher rate than a lot of people, relative to her income as a low-wage hospitality worker.

In fact, it’s employers who steal billions from workers every year by refusing to pay minimum wage or overtime. Wage theft causes hundreds of thousands of employees to fall below the poverty line and into the food stamp program. Forced to work 14-hour shifts without any breaks to eat, these underpaid workers get by on cheap candy bars and energy drinks as lawmakers then call them irresponsible for purchasing on their benefit cards.

These workers are considered the lucky ones in areas with nonexistent jobs. And problems beget other problems when a person lives without a steady income. Rent isn’t paid, the phone is turned off, belongings are sold, and what can be carried goes to the homeless shelter or a spare room somewhere. Gas money runs out, car insurance expires, cars break down, and rides from friends and relatives become scarce.

So finding a way to volunteer at a local nonprofit three days a week in order to collect food stamps is next to impossible. It is much easier and less humiliating to catch a ride to the food bank once a month and to sell plasma periodically while looking for work.

In this way, the plasma donation center replaces the social services office. But any real solution to the poverty problem in the US doesn’t leave people to sell their blood to stay alive. Instead, it guarantees good jobs and provides childcare and transportation.

A budget plan that emphasizes personal responsibility through employment without providing a path to it is just passing blame, not policy. This empty rhetoric of responsibility shames people into not applying for food stamps when they are out of work or underemployed and hungry. And it convinces people in the grocery stores that my little brother doesn’t deserve birthday cake.