But so far we’ve seen no persuasive evidence that replacing a cheap, fast and flexible virtual-money distribution system for providing nutritional assistance benefits with a costly, slow and unwieldy physical-food distribution system actually would save any money. Quite the contrary.
I’m fascinated why you would think this sounds like even a halfway plausible idea. Do you generally find it’s cheaper and more efficient to physically transport material objects than to electronically transfer their equivalents in some virtual medium of exchange?
For instance, do you have your employer direct-deposit your paychecks to your bank account? If your employer announced that as a cost-cutting measure they were henceforth going to send a Brinks armored car to your house every payday with a box of cash instead, would that strike you as a sensible thing to do?
Even if the food-crate scheme would save taxpayer money, I’d still want to seriously weigh the savings against the increased inconvenience and disadvantages for the benefit recipients. But what’s smacking my gob at the moment is the very notion that this bizarre proposal should be regarded as a credible money-saver in the first place.
There’s probably no way it could save money. It’s an insanely inefficient idea. Individual delivery drives up costs. Maybe if they’re getting the goods at some insane discount? Or they’re trying to unload the mountain chain of subsidized cheese no one really wants, again, but that amounts to chemical warfare on your own people. Do you want shock and awe? Because that’s how you get shock and awe.
It’s a very silly plan, if you understand that people necessarily have different diets. It involves sending wasted products to people who won’t use them. For example, I rarely buy sweet corn for myself, and if you give it to me every month, it may sit on a shelf 'til it rots, because I can actually spend money on some other form of insoluble fiber, like a wooden mousetrap, and eat that. And sweet corn is something I can physically eat without it promptly and painfully trying to escape in fluid form, unlike some other things.
So, what’s my point here? Given a decent government that really wants what’s good for the people, we wouldn’t need a public option for food. We could just cancel all of our bad subsidies, replace them with good subsidies, and let people eat what they wanted.
Given our existing government, it shouldn’t be let within a light-year of getting to determine anybody’s diet. Speculating that maybe the people who administer the program will be virtuous competent individuals who act for the good of the public, is saying that the thing which has already happened won’t happen.
I mean, sure, maybe one of Nathan’s dozen competent people who could run the program correctly will get in charge. But then why haven’t they been put in charge of our agricultural subsidies? Why haven’t they been put in charge of the dietary guidelines? Why aren’t they in the White House?
You have a disturbing amount of trust in the Government for a republican.
Well, for starters, there’s the estimate that it’d save $12.9B per year. I haven’t seen much of any evidence to disprove that aside from a lot of “well of course it won’t save money”. Much like your post above.
Here is one way I think it might be plausible: The federal government has a fair bit of experience buying food in bulk. They’ve got a pretty good handle on what that costs. I don’t, but let’s pretend for a moment, that they could get it for half of what you and I might pay for something if we went to the grocery store. SNAP costs ~$70B per year. Something like $65B of that goes to direct benefit payments. Just as a WAG, let’s pretend that this plan would reduce that $65B to $32.5B and spend another $16.25B buying bulk food to replace the lost electronic deposits (remember, we’re pretending they get it for half off by buying in bulk). If my math is right, that’d leave them with $3.35B to figure out the distribution, and savings of $12.9B.
I swear, this administration is so shameless that it is hard to tell a genius negotiation tactic from just them being complete selfish assholes.
I’ve called it out in past threads how liberals are getting played. And it really depresses me as a liberal.
For example, Trump created an executive order to end the DACA program. But that is not a talking point. The talking point from the Democratic party is that they need to reinstate DACA and that families are getting torn apart by this. So, now the Democrats have to save DACA and the conservatives obviously know this… and Trump pays lip service to wanting to fix it. Why couldn’t he just cancel his EO? Nope, this is a carrot and the dems will feel great when they trade-off a principle to get this carrot, even though it was completely fabricated by the Trump admin. Fuck that. Call their bluff and let them narrow their base even more. That party just deserves to die.
You know this is going to create a huge government bureaucracy, don’t you? Full of accusations of corruptness and “why do they buy from this certain company” and “why do they buy their cheese for more than I can get at the grocery store?”. And you’ll hear complaints about recipients that are allergic to certain gov’t delivered foods or maybe they have celiacs and depend on a gluten-free diet, something they can relatively effortlessly do at the local grocer.
It’s weird seeing you as a conservative support this idea. It’s like you’re suddenly not sure of free market economics and competition for the SNAP dollar. Have you lost your belief in the free market?
I don’t understand why conservatives are so concerned with how people spend their SNAP dollars. Whether they buy healthy food, or unhealthy food, the cost to the taxpayer is the same.
It isn’t like buying steak and lobster causes recipients to receive more money than if they bought broccoli and green beans. All that happens is they run out of food money sooner that month and maybe will have learned their lesson.
But there’s nothing but a few digits on a single piece of paper to back up that estimate, either. For all we know, those savings could be based on providing 20% less nutrition to SNAP receiptients, as opposed to creating a program that’s 20% more efficient.
And by the way, putting this into perspective, who is it again that supported the bill to eliminate $136 billion in revenue in this year alone? Was it… you? The Trump Administration? Republicans in Congress? D’Anconia? The other conservatives in this thread and in the real world?
Yep.
So once again, any implications that cutting SNAP is about fiscal responsibility are incorrect. We are talking about fiscal conservatism here, in which the general priorities of things are something like: cutting taxes has a priority of 10, cutting spending has a priority of 4, and cutting the deficit has a priority of 2 (during Republican Administrations only).
If your only concern is minimizing costs, there are many better ways to accomplish that. Just say that SNAP is limited to a very restricted set of cheap food products, such as dried rice, flour, dried beans, powdered milk, etc. Many cultures subsist on such a diet. Why go through the costs and effort of putting together a box and shipping it out?
But regardless, in one of the richest countries in the world, why are so many people worried about pinching pennies over this? If they’re concerned about the effects of debt, there are many, many places where much greater savings could be made with much less human cost.
Anyone know what percent of SNAP recipients can securely receive packages at home? I know I couldn’t when I was low income. Sucks enough when it’s your Amazon sci-fi novel, but I wasn’t eating those.
I’m sorry. I should have tried harder to not be a jerk. It’s just…
This rhetoric bugs me. It really, really bugs me. It’s like, “Hey, look, the republican party is doing X, Y, and Z that is awful. Man, it would be better if they weren’t so successful.” And then comes this dismissive response, “Ha ha well we’re winning, so suck it.” And it’s like… Wow, that’s the response? Really? Thumb your nose and say, “Yeah, well, we may be doing awful things, but we’re really really successful at doing awful things, so suck it!” Congratulations, your party is really good at getting away with doing really awful things.
I mean, I guess I shouldn’t expect a huge “The republican party really isn’t that bad response”. Most people aren’t XKCD enough to take that bait, and it’s really really hard to make any kind of convincing defense of the republican party. But if your response to, “A group you support and enable is doing something really bad and probably shouldn’t exist as a result” is “Yeah, well, we’re winning,” congrats, all you’ve done is say, “I’m okay with this group doing this really bad thing. Go ingroup!” It’s incredibly frustrating.
Do you really think that the govt has a better handle on buying in bulk than walmart does?
Anyway, just like the plan itself, the savings numbers are something they just made up as well. This was never a real plan, so they never made any cost estimates, they just pulled a number out of their ass.
The taxpayers pay for the health care of the poorest and the oldest - where you do think the money for Medicaid and Medicare comes from? But hey, poor diabetics don’t need as much treatment as wealthy diabetics, right?
It’s all part of a whole picture - feed poor people shitty food and don’t provide basic heath care you get all sorts of health disorders that cost a lot of money to fix, or, if not fix, treat for a lifetime when it could have been prevented if society had paid up front for healthy food and basic care. Classic penny wise and pound foolish.
You’re cheerleading a food box that would be terrible for diabetics (too carb heavy), that could hospitalize or kill people with food allergies, and while it could sustain life for the currently healthy is not nearly as good as a more varied diet with fresh or frozen foods from both a health standpoint and a morale standpoint.
OK, let’s say a miracle happens and this “saves” 12 billion in food aid - how much more are you going to spending on diabetics with complications like blindness, amputations, and kidney failure? How many allergic kids winding up in the ER because they got into the peanut butter they shouldn’t be eating? How many celiacs are going to have to throw out the wheat products because otherwise eating them means illness or even a trip to the hospital? How many people are going to have to toss the milk products due to either allergy or inability to digest them? How much more hypertension from the heavy salt in canned items is going to occur, and how many strokes and cases of kidney failure will come of that?
Even in the bad old days of government cheese and commodities in the early 1980’s there was some choice - you could have either a 5lb bag of wheat flour or a 5lb bag of cornmeal, for example.
This is leaving aside the fact that different people have different nutritional needs. Young men eat a lot more than young women. People doing physical labor need to eat more than sedentary old people. Women need more iron, but men need less and are more likely to have health problems from eating too much of it. Lack of nutrients and vitamins can contribute to vision loss in the elderly and frankly this “food box” is a bit spare on those items.
This is either a one-size-fits-all, which will inevitably harm groups of people who don’t fit whatever pre-defined norm is established, or else you’re going to have to have an extensive database of needs and issues to customize the boxes, and the cost of that customization. Neither of those is compatible with saving money.
The current system gives people a budget with which they can buy food compatible with their needs. Is it perfect? No - no system ever will be perfect. But apparently the poor make no more worse choices than the non-poor, and given restricted funds have plenty of incentive to shop frugally even when making poor choices.
I paid into the system for 30 years and when I was laid off and unemployed for a while due to a shit economy I viewed collecting EBT like I did collecting unemployment: I paid into the system for years and years so if I ever needed it, it would be there. AND at the same time I was “sponging” off the public teat I was also working, looking for better work, and growing an extensive garden every summer and damn well was trying to feed myself. I wasn’t taking “your” money, I was taking back some of the money I paid in over the decades.
Yeah, I know you like to think everyone on EBT is a lifetime deadbeat but that’s not the case. Most of them are only on it for a short period out of a lifetime, then get themselves organized, get re-employed, and get off the system (like I did). About the only people on it for life these days are the disabled or elderly, and I for one don’t think people who can’t work should be shit on for being in such an unfortunate position, particularly as making their lives more miserable won’t do a damn thing other than making them miserable. Cutting benefits for someone who can’t work is not going to magically make them employable.
It’s only the poor where people feel entitled to make these calls for intrusion. Do you want the right to dictate to cops what to feed their families? Why not - your tax money pays their salaries. Do you want to dictate to your mayor and city council whether or not they can buy soda? Why not? Your tax money is what pays their salaries, too. Isn’t that the same reasoning you use to dictate to the poor, that your tax money pays for them and therefore you have a right to dictate what they eat?