This seems like a good modification to the program if it will save ~12.9 billion a year as promised, but I feel like the analysis of the cost of deliveries must be faulty.
Of course, I am no expert on this topic and am making some assumptions. First, I am assuming the food bought on food stamps is delivered to grocery stores by a highly efficient delivery system forged in the crucible of the market (not the supermarket, but the Market). Second, I am assuming the proposed system would use something like the US Postal Service to deliver food packages to individuals’ homes, which sounds inefficient and prone to much error, especially in poor and rural areas.
Given the contrast in these assumptions, this proposal will
[ul]
[li]not reduce the nutritional value of the food provided by SNAP[/li][li]it may reduce costs in supplying nutrition and calories versus how it is done now[/li][li]but the delivery system will be costly[/li][li]overall, the efficiency gains, if any, will be minimal[/li][li]there will be a cost permanently etched in public debt in changing from the current to the new system.[/li][/ul]
How would this program address dietary restrictions individuals may have?
Will the food packages be labeled [del]“Poor People Food”[/del]“Government Food”?
Will there be money to buy fresh fruits and/or vegetables?
If you’re taking more than $90 assistance / monthly half the additional assistance comes from these canned goods. So there should be money to buy fresh fruit if desired.
I don’t see how canned versus fresh fruit is important really. Canned produce is less likely to spoil and is just as nutritious as the fresh food.
Who pays for storing and handling of the food?
Who manages distribution?
Who staffs those warehouses/offices?
Who handles purchasing, negotiates contracts, etc etc?
There is already a pretty efficient vector to get food to people’s tables. I’m not sure what the argument is for replacing it with a whole new infrastructure, and a whole new set of government employees and private leaches, um, contractors to re-create it extra-specially for poor folks.
This “plan” doesn’t save money by getting food more efficiently to those who need it, it does it by limiting the things available for purchase with SNAP funds.
If Republicans really want to save money, they should cut the budget, and just limit purchases with SNAP funds to “shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit and vegetables.” (Maybe there’s a SNAP A account for soda and lobsters that gets X dollars, and a SNAP B account for government-sanctioned necessities). This “deliver it to your door in a box” idea is an expensive red herring that belies an alterior motive to “cost savings”.
Much has been made of the food deserts in poor communities – it may be a faulty assumption that SNAP benefits spent in person are spent at (market) efficient grocery stores. At least some of it is probably spent at corner stores with steep markups.
Also, the government is buying in bulk and appears to be making more… disciplined purchases (beans, cereal, pasta). They may be replacing $45 in benefits with the equivalent of $20 in actual groceries, depending on how the benefits are typically used.
I remember government commodities-powdered eggs, Karo syrup, cans of “pork product”, bags of “oatmeal” that had dust and corn in it and various other food items of poor to mediocre quality.
Since Trump is the one proposing this, I would hazard a guess that the bids to provide these staples will go to the lowest bidders and/or friends of his, and that there will be nothing in the budget for extra food inspectors(not that they have enough now.)
Oh, and “Buh-Bye” organic food.
For sure there are issues in the current system. This solution possibly addresses them in some communities by accident.
This is exactly it. If the government wants to tell people that they can only buy certain things with SNAP (or a portion of their SNAP), then they should implement that (or try to, and see how successful they are). This shipping food direct to poor people plan smells of pork (no pun intended) to private enterprise who’ll want to manage/run the program, and will also create more government jobs. The economic component of this plan is, at first glance, practically anti-Republican (he says sarcastically).
But, it’s pretty obvious that this is about making sure poor people don’t get more joy than they deserve, and the economic arguments are after-the-fact, unsupported bullshit.
One of the questions asked in one of my Economics exams was:
Why do we have the government distribute education, but not food?
It was an essay question but long story short: The market is incredibly good at distributing food. Ridiculously good. The market (in a free country) distributes food as well as anything CAN be distributed. It distributes food with incredible logistical skill, to as many people as have ever been fed in human history, in the quantities needed, with surprisingly little waste and overhead.
The chances the government could do this within a million miles as well as the market are zero. None whatsoever. It will absolutely result in the delivery of food being screwed up, or being wildly more expensive, or both.
Step 1: Acquire the food.
Currently supermarkets buy food to sell. They attempt to get food at low prices so they can make as much of a profit as possible.
In theory, the government could buy this same food at these same prices and avoid taking a profit, reducing the total cost to the consumer.
Or, alternatively, they could just set up some fat profitable contracts with food suppliers in return for ‘campaign donations’, with no particular concern for saving money.
Step 2: Ensure the food is of decent quality.
Currently stores are motivated to screen their sellers for ones that provide bad food. This food is sold to everyone, and if it’s bad then the wealthy people who come will take their money elsewhere.
The government would be significantly less able to either screen sellers or change sellers if one was shipping rotten food. Also, with the massive amount of food being shipped it would be easy for the sellers to slip in their lesser-quality product among the rest – preventing that from happen would require frequent costly quality checks and audits, with punishments for infractions. That or the government could just choose not to care, allowing the sellers to use the system as a method for offloading lesser quality and/or rotten food without fear of reprisal.
Step 3: Figure out where the food is supposed to go.
Currently people pick out their own food. It works great, except to observing assholes who think they should only eat dirt. The stores, for their part, only have to keep track of the total overall sales in their area to estimate how much food the area needs. This process is streamlined from a cost perspective.
Under the new system it would take a staggering amount of work to figure out which people get which food - which families are larger? Which people are gluten intolerant? Which people are diabetic? Which people have life-threatening allergies? Organizing this would require positively boggling amounts of bureaucratic effort and invasive tracking. It would probably cost more than the raw food does.
Or they could just ship everyone the same generic box of food-from-highest-donators without concerns about whether it’s enough to feed them or whether it will kill them. Peanut butter for all, yo!
Step 4: Deliver the food.
Currently stores have food shipped to themselves via efficient trucks. Consumers fetch the food from there and deliver it to their own front doors for similarly low cost.
The government has a few potential approaches for this. The absolute dumbest would be to ship everything from the central warehouse via a private carrier - the costs would be staggering. (The politicians would get a nice ‘donation’ for that though.) The USPS could do this for closer to costs, but there’s no way they’d be as efficient as the stores themselves are.
Summary of steps:
Maybe a little cheaper but probably more expensive.
Way more expensive unless the government decides to ship people rotten food.
Staggeringly more expensive unless the government decides to starve/kill people.
And there’s a reason such fell out of favor. It just costs more doing it that way. And that was even when they weren’t doing much of anything.
And, more selfishly, I can’t imaging grocery stores enjoying the lost revenue. Sure, they may not make as much with SNAP: I don’t know if they get the full price or not. But some is better than none. And grocery store profit margins aren’t actually all that great, especially in the types of stores that poorer people shop in.
This sounds like an idea to appeal to the ignorant, anti-poor base, but without much reason to worry it will be carried out. I mean, I could be wrong, but that’s what I’m seeing right now. Though, question is, how many of those Trump supporters are poor enough for food stamps? I know that I know a lot of people on food stamps, and most of my state voted for Trump…
I think it’s a great idea! I’ve thought we should do it ever since I first heard of this service. Fresh, nutritious ingredients pre-measured right down to the organic turmeric, and easy instructions to put it all together in no time. Yep, Hello Fresh and Blue Apron can solve our food-desert problems and put poor kids on the road to a lifetime of healthy eating.
My first take on it was…how will some poor cook the food? Not everyone has access in the US to a full or even partial kitchen, which is one of the reasons why a lot of poor end up eating take out or fast food or junk food that doesn’t take a lot of preparation.
It’s an interesting idea, at least conceptually, to do something like Blue Apron (which is how I saw it described)…you could really produce meals that were healthy and fairly easy to prepare and ship them to those who most need it. But I think moving from the concept to reality is going to be problematic, especially considering who is proposing it (I seriously doubt Trump et al are going to gear the program to really assist those who need it most, as opposed a scheme to cut the budget so they can spend the money on other things).
This is more of a general budget comment, but I loved this little exchange this morning that served to remind me of the real impact of Presidential Budget proposals.
Steve Inskeep - Q: “Does Congress care what the President puts in a budget proposal?”
Tamara Keith - A: “Here’s how I like to think of it - It’s like the advice that your parents give you on how to live your life, you say ‘Thanks’…”
Are we sure that these packages are going to be delivered? Maybe the assumption is that the food will all be in some central location, and that it’ll be the recipients’ responsibility to go there to pick it up. That’d certainly save money.
Topeka is a central location. Maybe that’s where they’ll have the food.
Instead of letting the private sector handle the problem of food distribution, which they have been highly successful at for decades and have all the infrastructure in place, we will run giant government program in parallel with them built from scratch at enormous cost to the tax payer.
I challenge part of your assertion. One of the reasons we have an obesity epidemic is thought that in the free market race to the bottom, the food that does the best - it tastes the best in the short term, it’s cheap - is things that are basically carbs and enormous amounts of sugar. Also, it’s possible that certain cheap and commonly used ingredients, like high fructose corn syrup or transfats, are actually in fact a form of poison that causes obesity.
This would probably be an example of market failure. Without the government to step in and ban the unhealthy food, the average adult (myself included) tends to make short sighted decisions (junk food is so cheap and delicious!) and gets poisoned by it.
With that said, in most areas, healthy food is available at a higher price.
Now technically you could make this program work, I think. You could have existing stores prepare government approved packs, or have commercial vendors allowed to produce them. There could be a variety of flavors, though they would need to meet some standard for content. These “packs” would be on the shelves at major retailers and could be traded for points on a food stamp card.
Blue Apron meals are really expensive because they have high quality ingredients, are made on a small scale, have to be packaged and shipped rapidly with chemical cold packs, just not feasible for this.
MREs cost the government more than EBT. Each meal is actually about $4.30 to the government, and you need about 1-2 MREs a day to feed someone. While food stamps is just a flat $200/month.
Technically, by preventing the poor from buying all pretzels and doritos with their EBT card, it might improve their health. I am skeptical that it would save any money. You’d have to pay the store for the shelf space, deal with the issue of people who live too far from any store, etc.
The problem here is essentially it’s just a sideshow. We’re gonna “make up” for giving the rich 1500 billion dollars in tax breaks by trying to steal a few crumbs from the poor. Because the poor are an easy target. Even though, somewhat hypocritically, many Trump supports are rural and poor themselves.