No doubt, food stamps aren’t enough. But on my “month” I also found there were people at the local park, two groups of them, handing out meals twice a day. Bland, but they came with fresh fruit. The big Catholic Cathedral had food boxes with rice, beans, govt cheese, no-name corn flakes, powdered milk, tortillas, etc. Interestingly, many of the local homeless did not want the rice or beans, so one could find the 2# bags here and there around downtown, discarded.
The other local church had 25# bags of potatoes and onions, plus a HUGE amount of day-old bread, courtesy of Trader Joes. They were concerned not enough dudes were coming by to get it. They insisted I take a armload of the bread, even tho I explained what I was doing. (I made a donation, of course.)
Honestly, I could have eaten just fine on my month, even without food stamps.
Now yes, I realize that this is San Jose, a very rich city, and things may well be different in Appalachia.
The local homeless probably didn’t have the facilities to cook the rice and beans, and same with the potatoes and onions. If they’re street homeless, or couch-surfing, or living somewhere where they can’t store food, then anything that can’t be eaten right there or carried easily and eaten within a couple of days (ruling out the cheese and powdered milk) is pretty much useless.
It’s also much easier to last for a month on almost nothing than month after month after month.
I can understand the homeless not wanting the rice or beans, both of which require a pot, water and cooking time. Same for potatoes, although a fire and a stick will work. What does one do with an onion if you don’t have a frying pan and something to mix it with? Onion sandwiches sound kinda bleak.
San Jose has money, but it’s also CA, where fruits and veggies can be acquired more easily. I’d bet that if there is a poorer section of town, produce in stores there is minimal, however, and the prices are high.
True, a lot of homeless don’t have much in the way of cooking facilities. But the working poor, which is what we’re mostly talking about here, certainly do. In fact, a industrious Mom could very well pick up another half-dozen bags of rice & beans.
But the powdered milk and cheese stays good for a while and are always a big hit.
Note that still the homeless have those two meals a day at the park, and you could cadge a meal from both sources, making it four meals a day.
But the point is- it’s not ‘almost nothing”. There was a LOT of food. Filling, nutritious but bland.
True enough. We used to deliver food bank boxes to disabled elderly once a month , which contained bulk foods like rice and beans. The problem today is that the food banks and charities can’t keep up with the demand in most places. Stores donate food that is past its sell date, and while most of it is still fine, people are often leery about giving it out. Demand goes back to burgeoning population, and the reluctance of governments/churches to educate people and provide contraception. This is a problem that is going to get worse, rather than better, given the present mentality in this country; it doesn’t have to be the third world for things to go radically bad in a hurry (I would offer the favelas of Sao Paulo and Rio as prime examples). Americans are far too complacent, IMO. As Dickens warned about the girl and boy named Want and Ignorance: “Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
Yes, I have different priorities for funding. And that applies to those on assistance who chose luxury items over the basics.
If society is paying for someone’s living quarters and part of their food budget, and the person buys cable TV and expensive TV’s, what is society actually paying for?
If society is paying for part of someone’s food budget, and they choose expensive food items at the beginning of the month, what is society paying for? What if that person smokes?
The answer is lifestyle. In many cases we’re paying for lifestyle choices which harms everyone in the equation. If we don’t efficiently control how tax money is spent then everybody loses. It means less money gets to people who need assistance.
I’m not suggesting everybody on assistance does this but the examples I’ve given are not isolated by any stretch.
Complicated, ain’t it? Handouts are handouts, and no different than if you gave money to a relative. Once given, you have no say in how it’s spent (food stamps being an exception). You can only hope that people make intelligent choices. As for buying luxury items, I think I covered that previously. You can’t make a judgment on what you see without knowing the story behind it. If I had a relative on the outs and I had an extra TV, I’d likely give it to him. Or if he had a TV, I might pay for his cable service. If the person is in Section 8 housing, perhaps he used the savings on rent to buy the TV and pay for cable. I’m not at all a fan of food stamps, for a variety of reasons already stated. But food delivery for everyone who needs it requires enormous logistics problems and just isn’t practical on that large a scale.
Who cares if he goes golfing? If he was actually doing “work” it would probably end up costing the taxpayer even more money. Bombs are expensive. I’d rather have him making a fool of himself playing games with his sports idols like a manchild.
there is no logistical problem to a soup kitchen. It combines the food wasted by a variety of sources and allows for control over nutrition. It requires no judgement or oversight because no money passes into the user’s hands.
Really? No logistical issues? If you live ten miles out of town, how do you get there? How do you keep the kids away from the mentally ill street people? What happens when you have food for 80 and 100 people show up? How about the problem of theft? - very often people show up with most of their possessions, and theft in a soup kitchen can be a huge issue. For every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas, staffing most soup kitchens is a problem.
There are a TON of logistical issues in a soup kitchen.
They rely on donations and volunteer help, like most any relief organization. Often the kitchen help is recruited from people who frequent the places. Nutrition is hit or miss, depending on what is donated, and as Dangerosa mentioned, a soup kitchen in the city doesn’t help someone who lives in a rural area. But all that aside, not all who are hungry are homeless, which are who soup kitchens normally feed.
I would be very happy if the president was barred from leaving DC except for important diplomatic visits. I’ve witnessed several presidential visit and participated in the security for a couple. It is staggering the time, effort and expense that every movement of the president. I participated in the security detail for a visit which shut down two towns, took 90% of the police in those two towns away from their normal jobs, emptied the Secret Service offices for NYC and took them away from their cases and snarled traffic for hours. Not to mention the expense of multiple helicopters, transporting his whole staff, the huge security detail, advance visits, dry runs and full dress rehearsals. All so that the president could have lunch with a couple small business owners and talk about a proposal. Just a photo op that got a 20 second sound bite on the evening news.
Overtime? They who? Secret Service? No. The guy I was working with got pulled off his cases and thrown on the detail. As it happens everytime the president visits the area. My department? No. We just got pulled off our normal duties and the town was covered by a skeleton crew. The businesses near where the president was going? No. They had to shut down because the roads were closed. All those people stuck in traffic when dozens of roads were closed? Nope. Sure those of us working were getting our salaries. But not for serving the people we were hired to serve. And it was literally for a photo op and a short sound bite. I’m not complaining because I had to work. It was easy for me. I got to ride around and bullshit with a Secret Service agent for several hours. He was a nice guy and had some good stories. But the incredible waste pissed me off as a taxpayer. In this instance it just happened to be Obama. But I have seen 8 lanes of the NJ Turnpike shut down between Newark and New Brunswick so the HW Bush could drive from the airport to a fundraiser. I was locked in a parking lot for two hours at a college because Clinton came to make a speech in front of a couple hundred people. I don’t begrudge any president getting a chance to relax. But the cost on many levels which they incur anytime they move is immense. I would be happy if it only happened for the most important reasons. Like a G-192 conference.
So you are going to add a soup kitchen in a town of 200 with that has a mini mart to serve the twelve people in town that would qualify for food stamps? That doesn’t seem efficient.
(My sisters live in rural North Dakota - there is a poverty being served out of mini marts in towns of 200 people. The 180 people who can afford to drive into Jamestown go to a real grocery store. The poor use their food stamps at the mini mart, well, that is a lot of Northern Minnesota as well).
Handouts are handouts, and no different than if you gave money to a relative. Once given, you have no say in how it’s spent (food stamps being an exception). You can only hope that people make intelligent choices. As for buying luxury items, I think I covered that previously. You can’t make a judgment on what you see without knowing the story behind it. If I had a relative on the outs and I had an extra TV, I’d likely give it to him. Or if he had a TV, I might pay for his cable service. If the person is in Section 8 housing, perhaps he used the savings on rent to buy the TV and pay for cable. I’m not at all a fan of food stamps, for a variety of reasons already stated. But food delivery for everyone who needs it requires enormous logistics problems and just isn’t practical on that large a scale.