My thoughts are that the imagined savings are a load of shit, and would be an even bigger load of shit in the astonishingly unlikely event that the program was run properly, with oversight, quality checks, and efforts made to prevent giving people inedible waste products.
At best the estimates might merely be being deceptive by only talking about part of the program, like say saying that the federal part is only so big, and ignoring that the states will suddenly have to pay for their own parts of the program, to whatever greater or lesser extent that they bother to implement it.
My thoughts are that you should take that $2.5B per year and divide it by the 22.5M households in the US that receive SNAP. Then explain to everyone how $111 per year per household will cover all that shipping and handling and administration.
I already gave my thoughts. Something like that might work at the local level, but it’s nuts to try and do it at the national level. The country is just too big to be sending out food boxes from Washington DC (not literally, but I think it’s clear what I mean).
“Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) awarded a nearly $156 million contract to a one-person company that delivered just 50,000 of the expected 30 million meals.”
“The lawmakers said documents showed the company, Atlanta-based Tribute Contracting, had a history of problems handling smaller government contracts worth less than $100,000 and had been barred from government work until 2019.”
How anyone can trust any proposals or assurances coming from this White House right now I can not comprehend.
I didn’t realize there were other programs like this within the USDA. The “Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations” delivers food packages. In 2017, 69% of the budget went towards food, 31% went towards administrative costs. In 2017, on 6% of SNAP’s budget went towards administrative costs.
Yum canned vegetables because eating fresh vegetables should be reserved for the elite. And peanut butter for those allergic to peanut butter, just don’t eat it you say, just toss it out? Shelf stable milk, now we’re going to punish them? Awesome idea, teach them never to ask for help. And diapers for new moms, and baby needs, they going to be in the box too or will this require 2 boxes? What about old people, diabetics, etc. with special diets? Have you really thought this out?
Have you seen the cost of fresh fruits and veggies lately ?? I think this a horrible idea ! People will be getting fake milk and canned meat which is ‘spam’. I have seen the kind of food trump want to give people ,it’s welfare food ! I had a friend that got it and it was junk ! trump wouldn’t eat this fucking shit !
Why would we do that? That’s the primary benefit I see in the proposal. $12.9B/year.
I don’t know. I’d be interested in some additional analysis of the “America’s Harvest Box” proposal. For example, if it would lead to healthier diet choices, or less fraud and abuse, then it might still be worth pursuing even if it were perfectly budget-neutral. In other words, I’d weight the other pros and cons, and I don’t have enough information about them currently.
A sandwich with rotting meat because your work situation doesn’t provide for refrigeration has even less nutrition in it.
Actually, chips ARE a vegetable, their main drawback is the calories added by frying them to a crisp. Otherwise, they’re as healthy as any other potato (or sweet potato, taro, parsnip, beet, or whatever other vegetable they’re made from). When I was working construction, doing physical labor, the extra calories were actually a good thing because I was burning them off doing my job.
I’m not sure if this is a serious post or intended as satire. Assuming it’s the former until proven otherwise, what does “Have you seen the cost of fresh fruits and veggies lately ??” have to do with anything? If anything, that sounds like it’d be an argument in favor of the proposal, but the rest of the post makes that interpretation seem unlikely.
The main reason to disregard it is that pretty much nobody you’re talking to believes these “savings” are real. You could just as easily, and plausibly, and logically, be saying that we should be sending food crates out because doing so will cause the party fairies to give everyone involved a pony.
Until you plausibly sell us on the idea that the government can actually make these savings happen in the real physical world, you can’t really use those savings as a premise in further argument. Not and convince anyone, anyway.
In fact, as far as raw calorie intake goes, junk food is actually the most economical.
When I was going through my bout of poverty a few years back, I read the nutritional info for all the foods (I was working in a grocery store), and found that hot pockets and cans of peanuts gave you the best calorie per dollar.
It’s empty calories, to be sure, but it’s calories.