About one in six West Virginians receive food stamps, according to the Charleston Daily Mail. This amount of government aid marks the state’s highest level of participation in at least 30 years, and the article attributes the increase to the fact that aid allotments don’t adjust for rising food and gas prices. The Daily Mail claims that as more people take advantage of Food Stamp Program benefits, the value of the aid decreases, so families are struggling to get by on the amount of aid offered.

However, as Tom Blumer, contributing editor to Newsbusters.org, points out, this isn’t true.* As the USDA Web site shows, the state determines maximum allotments on a family-to-family basis, using a low-cost model diet plan called the Thrifty Food Plan. The state calculates the amount of aid a family receives by subtracting 30 percent of the household’s net income from the TFP’s maximum allotment for their household size.

The TFP is based on dietary allowances from the National Academy of Sciences, and it is also modeled after the food choices of low-income households, so the provisions should be realistic for each family to cover their grocery bills. The state adjusts the amount for annual changes in food costs and for inflation, so maximum allotments in 2008 are 4.4 to 5 percent higher than previous years.

On the other side of the spectrum, an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reporter in 2005 shows that at the time, half of Seattle’s residents who qualified for Food Stamps chose not to use them. Many families are confused about who qualifies, but others simply do not want the government handout. These excuses are becoming null because the state replaced paper coupons with debit-like cards that offer more anonymity and sophistication in 1999. Regulators are also working to report rules in simpler terms and drop some of the restrictions that keep families from obtaining needed aid.

Correction: WoW originally misidentified Tom Blumer as CEO of News Busters. He is contributing editor.