HIGHER WAGES AND THE HUNGER PARADOX

If low-wage workers got the minimum wage increased from $7.25 an hour to the $15 an hour that they have been demanding in protests, it would still leave many families dependent on social services, because earning more paradoxically can create more food insecurity.

The complications of families that need help were highlighted recently by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s decision to make food assistance more easily available for Pennsylvanians who had been shut out — not because the applicants had too much money, but because the test for food assistance was cumbersome.

The change, which went into effect Monday, eliminates the asset test imposed by former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. Under the Corbett administration, people applying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program had to show that their family had just one car and no more than $5,500 in savings.

Advocates argued that those applying for food assistance rarely have any money in savings. But if they had two cars, it was because they needed them to get to work.

The state Department of Human services said the cost of administering the asset test was $3.5 million and mostly affected disabled and older residents.

As of January, 1.8 million people in Pennsylvania were receiving food assistance.

Just Harvest, an advocacy group that aims to end hunger, applauded the decision to drop the asset test, saying that the money was misspent.

Kait Gills, spokeswoman for the Department of Human Services, said the first year the test was imposed — from June 2012 through May 2013 — there were 6,198 cases closed or denied because the families exceeded the asset limit, but the state also had an error rate of 35 percent to 40 percent.

For families climbing out of poverty, the loss of food stamps, even when replaced by extra earnings, can leave them vulnerable to hunger.

A study by Pathways PA, a Delaware County-based social service agency, has determined that the amount a single parent of a preschooler and a school-aged child in Allegheny County would need to be self sufficient is $23.14 an hour, or $48,868 a year.

That would be enough to pay for food — if the family never eats out — as well as child care, rent, transportation, taxes and incidentals such as diapers, cleaning supplies and clothing. The same parent would need a higher hourly wage of $23.29 if she were living in Pittsburgh because of the cost of higher taxes.

But higher wages can trigger a cut in government benefits, diminishing the impact of a wage increase.

A family of three can be eligible for up to $511 in benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as SNAP depending on their family income, with the amount of aid diminishing by $1 for every additional $3 earned.

The challenge is that those increased earnings are not always spent on food, which Marianne Bellesorte, the vice president of advocacy for Pathways PA, said leaves families more vulnerable to hunger.

When medical bills are high or there’s a family emergency, money that would have been spent on food is shifted to those needs. When food was paid by SNAP benefits, previously known as food stamps, it could not be used for other purposes.

Peter Zurflieh, an attorney in Harrisburg at the advocacy group Community Justice Project, said

the food stamp program was designed to be scaled back as families earned more. “Families experience this as a setback,” he said, because of the increased vulnerability to hunger.

Mr. Zurflieh said the shift doesn’t create a so-caled “cliff effect” — a situation where making more money means having fewer resources because of a decline in benefits — but it does create a loss.

But there may be a cliff when the cost of childcare is factored in.

Child care, which is essential to working parents, is the highest cost of having a young family. It adds up to more than food, rent and transportation combined for the family imagined by the self-sufficiency standard.

According to the Pathways PA report, childcare runs about $700 a month for an infant, $870 for a preschooler and $590 a month for older children who need after-school care.

Pathways PA studied the effect of pulling back state childcare subsidies and found that when a single parent of two young children received a wage increase that took her from $22 to $23 an hour, she lost subsidies worth $500 a month.

That set families back to where they would be if the parent earned $8 an hour but received benefits for food and child care, as well as the earned income tax credit for the lower wage level.