I don’t understand why the OP thinks that this elaborate plan would be better than simply restricting more junk food from being purchased with food stamps as a few people have suggested. 
It’s like a rube goldberg project for food stamps.
I’ve heard these kinds of stories quite a few times and I’m not saying I don’t believe them, but it just surprises me because I’ve received food stamps and never had an experience anything like that even when buying a cake for my kid’s birthday and that kind of thing. I’m a reasonably healthy eater but I like my sweets too. And if anyone has ever had any thoughts about what I was buying, they politely kept them to themselves. Actually, they’ve often been friendly and, like with the birthday cake, asked my daughter if it was her birthday and if she was excited and stuff like that, but not in a nosy way, just friendly chatting.
It wouldn’t be particularly hard to restrict those three things (although I’m sure there would be some disputes over whether chocolate-covered raisins count as “candy”, etc.), but I really don’t see the point there. The person who wants to buy a bunch of chips, candy, and soda is not going to switch to whole grains and fresh produce just because those things are restricted. There’s plenty of other junk food to pick from.
And you can’t get TOO restrictive, as a practical matter, because it would just be too complicated for everyone involved. There are new foods coming out all the time and some of them are quite, let’s say innovative, and would be kind of hard to classify (cereal straws? now called cookie straws and moved to the cookie section, but basically the same thing, as far as I can tell?). And there’s a lot of debate over what foods are healthful anyway.
Rea labels more often. HFCS is in practically everything, including things like whole grain bread. You wouldn’t elminate just junk food but 90% of what’s in the grocery store.
You’d also have to individually keep track of everything the shopper buys, and categorize it by junk/not junk in order to enforce that 20% rule. Right now, I believe the only thing that is tracked is ‘has money/does not have money’ Which means a complete restructuring of every food stamp card in the country, as well as increasing complexity ten times. Possibly a hundred times. I don’t mean double, I mean 100x more complicated.
socialism!!
No. Only 2X more complicated. You keep two running balances, one for junk and one for non-junk. If you don’t have any junk balance, you have to pay for the junk in cash.
My credit card currently keeps track of gas, food, regular and “exempt” purchases separately. I get double points on gas, triple on food, single on regular and nothing on exempt purchases.
Even the POS technology exists to process this in real time. Right now I have an HSA card that can be used for OTC medication and prescriptions, but not for other items. When I go to the cash register at one of our stores (I work for a supermarket chain) I can buy qualified items and non qualified items, and run the HSA card the POS system charges the qualified items to it and shows the balance for the non qualified items, which I pay by a credit card or cash.
But how do you define “junk” food?
Chocolate bars and corn chips might be no-brainers, but what about fruit-flavored drinks with 10% real juice? Bottled water? White bread? Iceberg lettuce? I’ve heard all of those referred to as “junk” at one time or another, or unnecessary expenses.
What about meat/fish items? There is much talk of lobster tails and steak, but what’s the cut-off point? Will the poor be forced to buy only the lowest cuts of meat and the cheapest ground beef and restricted to just catfish and cod? Will there be a dollar per pound cut off? What if a store has a special so that, say, sirloin can be obtained unusually cheap, shouldn’t the poor be as eligible to take advantage of a windfall as anyone else? (Arguably, they need windfalls most)
Then there are problems like people who are lactose intolerant, or have food allergies, or celiac disease. They can’t just go with the cheapest jar or box of stuff as such food frequently will make them ill. Someone with, say, celiac can’t eat low-price deli meats full of gluten-containing fillers, they have to buy the more expensive ones. Someone with a legume allergy can’t eat beans, so pushing that alternative isn’t going to work for them. A lot of food programs seem to push dairy, and that won’t work for those who can’t digest it.
Really, the more you micromanage the worse it gets. The current system isn’t perfect, it certainly has flaws, but at least people can get food with it even if sometimes they make poor choices. If you don’t favor the government forcing rich people to make certain food choices you shouldn’t advocate forcing the poor to do so. Poor people lack money, not humanity. They are just as much people as anyone else, and should be treated like adults who need some help, not perpetual children.
Bing-fuckin’-go!
Isn’t that exactly what the food stamp program does?
Think of it this way;
No food stamp program, everyone goes to a local food distribution center. A center that’s part of a much larger distribution program, say county or state wide, that buys food in truckloads sized lots at wholesale prices. With a greater price setting power than a large store chain like Walmart has, I.E. “Want the can of beans contract? Then be the lowest bidder.”
OR
Give folks a “food stamp” debit card (which IS what they’re doing now) so they can pay retail prices at a local supermarket?
And remember this, companies that just make chips, candy, or soda are getting to be a rare thing. Your much more likely to find companies like Pepsico makers of Pepsi-Cola, Gatorade, Tropicana, Quaker Oats, Ocean Spray, and Frito Lay, or Kraft Foods which has so many brands they have a alphabetical index for them on their corporate site. Think those companies might have something to say about taking away their sales and say it in cash to elected officials that need that cash to stay elected officials?
Think it’s just a coincidence that The United States Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), historically and commonly known as the Food Stamp Program, is administered by the Department of Agriculture?
CMC fnord!
Is this the part where I point out that WalMart sells 3.5x the amount of groceries than the Food Stamp program pays for?
WalMart revenue total $400B
WalMart Stores revenue 63.7% = $255B
WalMart Stores Grocery revenue 49% = $125B
Second Link
Food Stamp Program Benefits 2008 - $35B
I’ll also point out that WalMart is one of the best run companies around, low overhead, great logistics, strong negotiators. There is no way in hell that the government is going to build and manage “food distribution centers” that are going to give food away at a lower net cost than buying it at WalMart. At least, not without providing a level of service that makes WalMart look like Nordstrom.
You’re also going to make people travel to one specific government managed store for PART of their grocery shopping, and they’ll still have to do the rest of their shopping elsewhere. What does someone do if they’re not close enough to the gov’t store to shop there? Retail outlets are everywhere already.
So neither of you agree with controlling costs or getting value from tax dollars?
It would be like if the cash for clunkers just wrote people $4500 checks without caring whether or not you turned in your clunker or bought a new car. To see if and/or how successful a program is, you need some type of accounting to see how the tax dollars are being used.
My “value from tax dollars” is getting people fed with the food they want to eat, not punishing them or sneering at them or trying to grind them into the dirt with obsessive restrictions on Mallomars.
All these conversations seem to boil down to is the need for some people to feel like the poor are suffering enough.
Granting that there are scammers, cheaters and good-for-nothing lazy people, what percentage of recipients are we talking about?
Everyone knows someone whose aunt used to trade her food stamps for gin and tonic but the majority of people like that? If it is a majority, the whole program should be scrapped as wasteful.
If it’s closer to, say, 20% it’s probably more efficient to stop trying to micromanage what people buy and give them cash.
The people who are paying for the food have no right to say where it’s going? Their job is to “pay” and then “shut up”.
Perfect encapsulation of liberalism in one sentence!
If the poor want free food, then the gov’t has a right to say what they get. Good food instead of twinkies and yoo-hoos. If you don’t like that, why don’t you and your liberal friends start a food bank giving away junk food to poor people. You’ll spend other people’s money but not your own and then pat yourself on the back for your generosity.
Back to my OP…the gov’t would contract with a supplier for various foodstuffs (lots of rice and beans, brocolli, etc.) and then it would be distributed at Wal-Marts etc. No need for the gov’t to own a beanery or a bean distribution center.
The poor would be much better fed than a POW or a dissident in a Soviet gulag so I don’t think they have a right to complain. If they don’t like it, they’re free to use their own money to buy whatever they want.
It would LOWER costs and IMPROVE HEALTH.
Since the gov’t has to pay the health costs for these people I think the gov’t has even more right to dictate what they can buy with the govt’s money. If health is related to diet and the gov’t is paying for both…dosen’t it have a right to say what you can eat? I think it does!
Either that or just shut the whole thing down. 35B for ‘food stamps’? Let them eat grasshoppers like the heroes of liberals in the Soviet Union used to do. Or rats. It was good enough for comrade Joe’s people, then it’s good enough for ‘the US proletariat’.
The reason they are poor in the first place is because they basically can’t make good choices. Good choices for them are pork rinds, ice cream and gallons of coca cola.
The gov’t would be improving their health greatly by such a program. Lots of legumes, vegetables, etc. Tap water instead of coke…that alone would probably halve the rate of diabetes (cite?!?) in the poor.
If they are basically wards of the state then the state has to look out for them. The state also has an obligation to taxpayers to ensure that the money is well spent and that it doesn’t cause further costs down the road via diabetes and heart attacks amonst the poor (which of course the gov’t is on the hook for).
There’s nothing humiliating or ‘grinding’ about it.
This is an intelligent response. It’s amazing how many people have pointed out the implementation problems of the “no junk food for food stamps” (and the futility of impact that I pointed out, esp. given better solutions are available to improve nutrition), yet people keep suggesting that it’s “obviously the thing to do” etc. Sorry to vent folks. But are people reading and considering the posts by others on how hard this “simple” restriction would be to implement? :smack:
[quote=“bri1600bv, post:74, topic:506742”]
The reason they are poor in the first place is because they basically can’t make good choices. Good choices for them are pork rinds, ice cream and gallons of coca cola.
[QUOTE]
Always nice to see bald-faced prejudice. (No, I’m not flaming, your posts qualifies as prejudiced…just pointing it out.)
Except I’m no kind of liberal.
And it’s nice that you’re going to give the poor better food than a prisoner in a Soviet Gulag.
Thing is, unless our food program is handing out 50 pound sacks of wheat and nothing else, it’s going to cost more. Grocery stores are extremely competitive on price. You think your government bureaucrats can organize a grocery store cheaper than the businessmen who run grocery stores?
If you’re sick and tired of helping the poor and want to stop, just say so. But if we’re going to be in the business of giving food to the poor (and regardless of what libertarians like me think, we are), the cheapest, simplest, most effective, and fairest way is to just give them a debit card to buy food from the grocery store. Just give them the money and let them agonize over whether granola bars are junk food or healthy food. It’s their life, they have more incentive than anyone to make good choices, and if they don’t they are the ones who suffer the most.
The government does have commodity programs. They are small because they don’t work well (expensive to run, wasteful, etc.).
Regarding your last setence: prove it.
Go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/expectmore/topic/Health_and_Well-Being.html if you want to read some basic (very basic) reviews on program effectiveness.
The gov’t wouldn’t run grocery stores, it would contract with a food provider to create a foodstuff and then said food provider would distribute it with the gov’t paying for it.
The foodstuffs could be simple things like brocolli, rice, beans, etc.
As for the “it’s their life and their health”…many of the poor have proven they can’t make good choices. And the gov’t is paying for their healthcare too.
As for the “it’s too complicated to block certain purchases”…it isn’t really. They can’t buy dogfood…why not expand that to all cola products.
It should be tough to be poor. THey shouldn’t eat as well as people who are paying for their own food.
They shouldn’t be able to have cable TV if they are on the dole. Use that money for food is they’re so poor.
People can go buy a “list” for cash. I personally know someone who has done it in the past.