It’s not a bad idea to institute a ban on some basic junk foods - cookies, chips, soda. Like I’ve said on the Dope before, there are a lot of things posing as good food but is really shit for you.
I’ve definitely fed my kid mac n cheese when that’s what we could afford. Not even the Kraft kind, either. I’m not even sure the multivitamin helped during those bad years. Right now I’m about to enter the ‘oh crap it’s summertime and we’re not going to have a lot of money as I’m an hourly-paid teacher’ thing. We went grocery shopping yesterday, skipping a lot of the fresh stuff and grabbing canned soups and frozen veggies. (Frozen veggies aren’t bad for you, btw, but I like cold food.)
Just because you can’t ban all junk food doesn’t mean you can’t ban the basics. Policy doesn’t have to be perfect to make it good policy.
Again - I think benefits should go up – in correlation with restricting cookies, chips, soda, etc. There’s really no reason for the government to buy those things. Of course major food companies (including the parent company of KFC and such) lobby for EBT cards to cover their junk.
It’s not that poor people don’t have the “right” to cookies. It’s just not a necessity.
Some of the opposition I heard when ‘stamps’ became EBT cards blew my mind. Really? You have an objection to EBT cards that reduce fraud?