Don’t all poor people need help? Don’t tax payers need to have their money spent wisely? Is there some reason this is mutually exclusive?
Of course they need help. But once the money is spent, it’s no longer yours – it now belongs to THEM. The only thing this does is punish people because they’re poor and being helped out by the government.
And as others have pointed out, it would be a bureaucratic nightmare. There’s no “one size fits all” scenario. Some people have allergies. Some don’t have time to cook. So once people get their food stamps, it’s now THEIR money, and THEY are the ones who should decide what to do with it.
It shouldn’t be any of YOUR business.
It is not your choice to make. You should grab someone who is not on food stamps to make the decision for you. By the fact they are working, they have proved that they are better and smarter people. Because you are out of work, you are stupid and incompetent. Accept that you are a second class citizen and ask someone else to decide for you.
Annie ,I am sorry for your circumstance and I don’t think a lot of idiots making judgments about you is right. It really pisses me off.
The woman in the earlier post was receiving welfare checks. It was in the 1960s. I don’t know if they did food stamps back then. She put the money she saved in the bank, but when she filled in her annual welfare paperwork she told them how much was in her bank account, and she got cut off.
When I was working in a convenience store, this is basically what people did to get booze and cigarettes. They’d come to the counter and buy one pack of gum with a food stamp dollar, and get change. Rinse and repeat until they had enough change to get their booze or tobacco (we actually sold hard liquor as well as wine and beer and malt beverages). This is, supposedly, what having benefits cards will prevent…that is, the card will have a certain amount of credit loaded onto it, but the credit can’t be applied to non-eligible foodstuffs, and the user can’t get cash back from single food stamp dollars to use for booze or cigarettes or even something like a bar of soap.
I’d really like to see a list of eligible foodstuffs, and see a lot of things made ineligible. Sure, candy is nice, but it’s a luxury, not a necessity. I UNDERSTAND that a lot of times, people might not have a lot of storage or cooking items available, and so they need to buy food that requires little or no cooking. I also understand that the candy and chip industries want their products to be available to people who purchase food with food stamps…and I think this is the reason why we don’t have more restrictions on what can and can’t be purchased. I also understand that some people will try to game the system, no matter what system they encounter.
When my husband was in the Air Force, a lot of people took their kids to see the medical personnel at the base hospital for things like colds. When they did this, the doctors/NPs would give out cold packs, containing Tylenol and various other cold remedies. The parents knew that the doctors couldn’t cure the colds, but it saved them some money if they could get those OTC medications for just showing up at the hospital, rather than buying them at a store or even the base exchange.
It’s a dollars worth of luxury, that you’d like to see denied them because they’re poor.
Sure, no one should live on junk food. But junk food eaten by the middle class also results in an eventual taxpayer burden, and yet many of the people who’d like to prevent a poor kid from buying a twinkie would scream bloody blue murder if the government tried to impose a twinkie quota on them.
It’s a dollar’s worth of luxury that I’d like to see them pay for out of their own pocket. That’s the thing. People are quite willing to spend OTHER people’s money on stuff that they aren’t willing to pay for out of their own pocket. If someone is willing to spend their own money on candy, fine, even if they use food stamps to buy staples. I’m willing to buy someone else’s necessities, but I’m not willing to buy someone else’s luxuries. I’m perfectly willing to allow someone who uses food stamp benefits to buy whatever items s/he wants…as long as s/he doesn’t use the food stamp benefits to purchase the luxuries. I also don’t want food stamp money spent on tobacco or alcohol. I guess that I’m just a big meany. I assume that if candy is all right to purchase using food stamps, then you’re OK with purchasing booze and cigs with it too, right? Those are just little luxuries that some people “need”.
You have kids, right? Have they ever told you that they desperately need some fad item? When they’re told they have to pay for it out of their allowance, don’t they suddenly need that item a lot less? Look at the executives who expect the company to pick up their gym memberships and magazine subscriptions…if that money has to come out of their own pockets, suddenly they don’t need the luxury office furniture quite so badly. It’s human nature to want the best when someone else is picking up the tab.
I’ve been poor, and it sucks. I had to make sacrifices, and I hated it. And that’s what being poor usually means, that you can’t get the luxuries that other people take for granted. However, nobody has a right to luxuries if they can’t afford them. I think that there are enough people who are genuinely in need of assistance that we (as taxpayers) must do our best to ensure that people who need things should get them, and that means making sure that benefits are spent in the most cost-effective way. When everyone is fed properly, THEN we can look at giving out free candy for those who can’t afford it. But right now there’s really not enough benefits to go around, and if some people use food stamps (and here I’m talking about food assistance money, I do know that physical stamps are not used any more) to buy luxury items, that means that someone else is not getting nutritional food because of the misuse of the public funds. We don’t have unlimited public funds. Most places are having to cut back on public benefits, and so we need to review what’s a necessity and what’s a luxury.
Food stamps, as in the pieces of paper that were used in place of money, were commonly abused. I’d lend money to people, and they’d want to pay me back in food stamps, rather than in the cash that I’d lent them. And some merchants were willing to look the other way when people paid for non-eligible items with food stamps. Like I said, some people will ALWAYS try to game the system.
Yes. I think that is exactly the motivation for most people who support such restrictions. This is a nation filled with people who have a deep hatred of the poor. During the debate over “welfare reform” way back when, I heard quite a few people spew white hot outrage that poor people were even allowed to own furniture. Most people in this country as far as I can tell regard the poor as evil, as deserving constant punishment and humiliation.
My daughter is supposed to bring a “healthy snack” to school. We usually send raisins or goldfish crackers or pretzels or string cheese. Her teacher tells of one girl who brought Twinkies. The teacher called mom to explain Twinkies were not a healthy snack and Mom started yelling that that was what she could afford.
I have one of those tubs of pretzels in my basement that showed up after a poker night or something - its like a seventeen gallons of pretzels for $4. I’m exaggerating obviously - but the point is that there are “healthier” things available than Twinkies, Dr. Pepper and Oreos for the same or less money if you are INTERESTED.
(Yes, pretzels are not the be all and end all of “healthy snacks” - but on a scale that has Twinkies on it - they are not bad.)
Yeah, the tenant I was posting about upthread (who orders food from Schwann’s), wanted to pay her rent in food stamps one month (she generously offered to pay an extra $25.00 above her normal rent in exchange for me doing her this ‘favor’), and it really pissed me off. I mean, in addition to EBT, she gets a welfare check on the first of each month. I don’t know if she gets child support from her children’s fathers. But my first thought was that if I took her EBT in exchange for rent, what are her kids going to eat this month? Of course, I also thought, it’s illegal for her to do that, and I don’t want to get caught up in something like that. I really toyed with the idea of reporting her for the episode, but decided it was her kids that would end up on the losing end, so I didn’t.
Perhaps you don’t understand how this works.
Family A gets $X worth of food stamps. Whatever ‘savings’ are incurred by them not buying candy bars is not then transferred to Family B, or back into the communal pot.
Being poor doesn’t mean that you forfeit the right to make your own decisions about how to spend the money you have. And make no mistake, it’s *their *money. The fact that my tax dollars help to fund it doesn’t make it *my *money, I don’t get to direct traffic on Route 1.
There is, of course, a middle ground between ‘nothing but made-from-scratch, healthy ingredients and I should get to run my grubby hands through to make sure you get NO luxuries’ and ‘anything goes’. However, the big issue of deciding where that middle ground is has been determined not by what is nutritious but rather what is least expensive to monitor.
It’s relatively simple to exclude things like alcohol since they already have special controls. However, once you start moving into the food aisles, there are a thousand judgement calls to be made.
Should people be able to use food stamps for nothing but cookies and candy? Most people would probably say no. But then, how much do you restrict? What about on their kid’s birthday? Still no junk foods whatsoever? Well, then what classifies junk food? Think about it. Where is the cut off between junk food and acceptable food in a span that goes something like:
Cupcakes - Reduced fat cupcakes - Chocolate chip muffin with icing - Chocolate chip muffin with no icing - Bran muffin with chocolate chips - Mixed box of muffins including bran, banana, blueberry and chocolate chip flavors - Just bran muffins - Bran muffin mix - Components to make bran muffins
Imagine that there has to be a government rule for EVERY food in the grocery aisle. How much chocolate makes something junk? How much fat? If you can’t have potato chips, what about pretzels? What about baked potato chips? Are crackers okay, or just certain kinds? If chips are verboten, what about other fried foods? What about frozen french fries - are they OK if you don’t fry them first? What about just buying oil and potatoes? What if a food isn’t fried, but more oil is added than the original fried version?
Then imagine for every one of these rules, manufacturers have to hire people to play the game of getting the most possible foods within these rules, and the government has to hire a huge staff of people to handle everything. Individual grocery stores take on the burden of dealing with people - labeling what’s allowed and what isn’t, dealing with people who want to argue that something should be covered. And so on and so forth. Everywhere along the line where food is being manufactured and sold, extra costs are added.
Are you willing to pay all of these extra costs and taxes just to make sure that someone isn’t buying junk food on food stamps? Is this really worth our time and money to be doing? Do you want to stand in the grocery line behind someone navigating such a system?
QFT. I already said it earlier in the thread, but Lynn said it better.
I don’t know if it’s quite the same with LINK, but the EBT system we use in WA, depending on their needs, certain people get food money and cash money, they are seperate catagories. The EBT FOOD at the debit machine will ONLY pay for food, as determined by the barcode of the item. The EBT CASH can pay for anything.
I know not everyone who qualifies for EBT can get the cash, so I am not sure what the criteria are, but it is LITERALLY as good as cash, so you can buy alcohol with it. Which pissed me off at the time as a poor person not on public assistance who couldn’t afford booze…
Then THAT is a loophole that needs to be closed. However, it’s not going to be fixed by forcing people to only buy certain kinds of food.
I suppose I should keep my mouth shut about an acquaintance on benefits who makes his own vodka (in his opinion the stuff sold in America isn’t strong enough for a White Russian). He buys all his raw materials with an EBT card. People who like (or who are addicted to alcohol) will game the system and parasites are inevitable to any successful system.
I believe that’s called “good old fashioned American ingenuity.”
Um, aren’t the raw materials for vodka things like, well, potatoes? Banning potatoes to stop the distillment of vodka brings to mind sayings about babies and bathwater.
Throw all the babies out with the bathwater you want, but you jokers aren’t taking my potatoes.
And I believe you think this because you have demonstrated a disdain for this country in many threads. Your opinion of how other people think is dark in a very sad way.
The idea that money is spent wisely is completely foreign to you. It doesn’t register that entire states are teetering on bankruptcy and cannot make payroll. Not only are the coffers empty there is a note of debt sitting where the money use to be. The higher the debt, the less money there is available to spend. Every dollar wasted is more debt. How you don’t understand this is mind numbing.
I’ve been unemployed for 2 1/2 years. 2 weeks ago I spent the afternoon lying in grass looking at the trees that I was supposed to be cutting. I threw my back out trying to earn enough to eat and pay a few bills. I eventually finished the job in extreme pain.
Listening to the likes of you telling me I shouldn’t be concerned about how tax money is spent is a joke without a punchline. Every dollar spent, whether it’s for social programs or paved streets, needs to be spent wisely. The realityof the situationis in plain sight.
Congress is up against a wall and they are making hard choices. Recently they trimmed food stamp money.