I mentioned in a couple threads how I thought a good idea would be to replace the food stamp program with actual food. The gov’t could contract to make a nutritious foodstuff or foodstuffs and give it out to supermarkets and freely distribute it to the poor.
This would replace the foodstamp program.
Why, you ask?
Foodstamps can be used to buy crappy food, soda, etc. This makes the poor people fat which then burdens the gov’t with diabetes treatments for said poor, fat people etc. Usually people blame the corporations for pricing healthy food more than crappy fat/sugary food. So this would get aroun that by having a nutritious foodstuff for said poor people.
Now the foodstuff wouldn’t taste very good…that’s kind of the point. Why should freeloaders get to stuff themselves with cookies and cakes all day and wash it down with sugar soda, then get diabetes and demand free medical care?
Nonetheless, it would be a diet that most of the people in the world would find very satisfying indeed.
I think it’s fraught with problems. For one thing, you’re taking choice away from people, and poor people need as many choices as they can get. For another, you’re asking the government to make sound nutritional choices. This is the same government that accepts money from lobbyists. Third, it would be nearly impossible to predict what any given family’s specific needs are. Fourth, you’re going on the assumption that nearly everyone on the program is ignorant about nutrition, which I’d bet is not the case.
I also hate the idea of “The rich know more than the poor, so the rich get to control the poor.”
First off, not everyone on foodstamps is a freeloader. Sometimes someone loses a job and can’t feed their kids. Maybe this is a problem with your perspective?
But other than that, this couldn’t work. The government doesn’t have the infrastructure to get food into the hands of everyone who needs it. It would cost way more to ship food to everyone on foodstamps than to just ship a card that they can use to go to a local store.
They might be able to limit what you can buy, maybe non-diet soda couldn’t be bought for instance or designate some sort of “snack food” category, but do you want the government telling people how to eat?
I should note that I skipped a paragraph in the OP, my bad. As for distributing the stuff at supermarkets, it would cost much more to manufacture bad tasting foods and ship them to every supermarket in the country.
One of the major problems with poverty, both rural and urban, is poor access to decent supermarkets. How would you solve this problem? You would rely on an infrastructure that for many people just isn’t there.
I’ve thought that they need a special store for food programs. Just don’t sell crap in it. And DO sell toilet paper and dish soap, some things you can’t GET on food programs that are pretty necessary.
But the transportation is an issue. Most of the truly poor don’t have acess to cars and the bus lines are crappy.
There are already plenty of restrictions on what you can buy with food stamps, and all for good reason. No booze, no cigs, no pet food, etc.
For years there have been calls to add junk food to this list. What exactly is the problem with getting this provision passed? How can anyone argue that giving poor people free soda, candy, cookies, chips and little debbies is a good thing?
It’s an awesome way to make poor people feel worse about themselves and sink into a never ending spiral of depression.
It’s trivially easy to restrict food stamp purchases to items that are nutritious like bread, milk, eggs, lean meats, fruits and vegetables, I believe WIC is quite restrictive. What is difficult is how you restrict the remaining non-food stamp purchases.
On the other side, there’s a lot of noise made about Food Stamp users buying lobsters or other inappropriate things, but AFAIK, there’s no evidence that this is actually a common problem with the system. Until there is such evidence, you don’t make wholesale changes to something that helps people eat.
I’m not in favor of a food stamp family buying nothing but those things, but I think it’s a good thing that a family that gets a shopping cart full of nutritional foods can also get a package of cookies. Everyone needs a little treat now and then. To take that away is to take away a little bit of their dignity.
Well, to many people, a 6 pack of beer or a packet of cigars is a treat too, but food stamp recipients aren’t allowed to use taxpayer’s money to buy them.
And very few people on food stamps have no money at all. They have some, but need the food stamps to bridge the gap. In my profession, I deal with a lot of folks that are on food stamps. Believe me, if they really want a treat (whether it be beer, smokes, whatever), they have the few dollars of their own to get it. Nothing wrong with that either, IMHO, as long as they aren’t spending all their own money on vices then expecting the gov’t to buy their food for them.
Often times, those are people gaming the system. We have a good chunk off food stamp users in our store, and quite a few will use their food stamps to buy lobsters. The problem is that they then go and sell them out of their trunk for cash.
Fine, but where does it stop? It can be reasonably argued that cigars are not food, but cookies are. If we include on the prohibited list “all sugary treats”, then we cut out honey, jam, fruit juice, and fruit. But diet soda is still OK. Making a list of “approved foods” is just inviting trouble.
Isn’t it better to let people try to make their wisest choices than to restrict them even more?
The idea of restricting people has a really punitive feel to me. It’s almost like “we’ll show those freeloaders not to get so uppity.”
Sure some of this goes on, but the vast majority of EBT users are really buying food for themselves.
A much more serious problem is the junk food/obesity link. I would guestimate that well over 90% of the food stamp recipients I know/work with are extremely obese. And they ARE filling their carts up with expensive junk food like cheetos, pop tarts, and sugary sodas. Obesity is an epidemic, especially amoung the poor and it kills. Restricting EBT use to healthy foods would be a very simple step towards breaking the vicious cycle of poverty-poor food choices-obesity.
