The military doesn’t have the budgetary constraints of the social welfare system. They do a good job, but it doesn’t come nearly as cheap as either SNAP or your local grocery store.
Then we should focus on things like worker’s wages and working conditions rather than depriving poor people of food benefits.
A person familiar with history will know that we used to distribute actual goods to the poor (in the Great Depression it was called “being on relief”). We moved to the current system because it was more efficient and had less opportunity for fraud and diversion.
That is available to poor people who want to opt-in even now. There are several non-profits offering this service. The USDA is currently experimenting with allowing on-line purchases of food with EBT via companies like Amazon which deliver direct to the customers door (or wherever they want it sent). And yes, many people on SNAP have a smart phone - it’s not a great one, and the minutes are sharply limited, but it does enable them to get on-line for tasks like job applications.
So, the USDA is already trying to find ways to accommodate those in food deserts or who can benefit from delivery. But it’s not trying to set up a parallel food system, it’s trying to use the infrastructure already in place in a better manner.
How about “catering” to those with food allergies, lactose intolerance (a genetic state the MAJORITY of humanity has), diabetes, or other medical conditions? Or should they just go into a corner and die so they don’t bother you?
It would need to be a custom box. Not everyone receives the same level of assistance or gets the same SNAP benefits. I was imagining something more like an online grocery store, where SNAP recipients spend virtual currency (depending on their level of benefits) on items they want, and the government delivers them.
The savings would come (primarily) from using more inexpensive/less perishable foods, efficiency of scale gains over local neighborhood stores, and eliminating the retail profit margin. Extra expenses would be handling and shipping. To be completely honest, I don’t actually know if the savings would outweigh the extra cost, but I would be in support of this even if it cost extra in taxes.
I know people currently on SNAP. I have been on public assistance myself, although it was a lifetime ago. Some people can’t realistically get to a grocery store, because they live in a food desert and lack reliable transportation.
It’s not a “broken” system, per se, but it could be a lot better.
It doesn’t help when people eat lunch by “sampling” the produce area. But really, it’s in the interest of groceries to reduce the amount of waste of that sort because it eats into their meager profits.
My store, which is part of a company with 200 stores, has at times either asked neighboring stores to make up a shortfall, helped neighbors are having a shortfall, or offered excess stock to other stores in the company. Again, there is a strong incentive to do this sort of thing to minimize stock loss.
Also, the inventory and shipping are studied quite intensely, and even weather reports are taken into account for logistics. We have very little “overstock” at any one time, particularly with fresh items. Almost anything we can get delivered overnight so we don’t need to keep days and days worth of anything in the back storage area.
I’m sure Aldi will be surprised to hear that. (Although Aldi the company is advertising these days, almost everything in the store is NOT a major brand name)
Because SNAP recipients buying habits aren’t that different from non-SNAP recipients. There’s no way to really separate out what they’re buying from the rest of the inventory using statistics. Also, since the amount of SNAP benefit is relatively inflexible raising the prices just means they purchase less overall. Unlike a middle-class shopper who can forgo various little luxuries to spend more on food, SNAP recipient budgets are not so flexible.
Why does agriculture have government subsidies?
Why does the government write contracts with private industries to provide services like food rations for the military, or uniforms for the military, or supply jet fuel to Air Force One, or pay private gun manufacturers for arms for the Secret Service instead of creating a parallel handgun industry just for the President’s body guard?
Because sometimes it’s more efficient and cheaper to use what private industry has built rather than the government having to reinvent the wheel.
Given that he’s responding to a refusal to cater to the wishes of the receiver of the foods, he was sort of on topic.
Presuming that the goal isn’t to make poor people miserable (which it is) or kill them (can’t say on this point), then individual people are going to have to get individually customized shipments. Obviously the best way to do this would be to let them pick their food choices themselves, because otherwise you have to have the government rather invasively tracking the needs/medical data of millions of people, which is costly to implement (among other problems).
Currently this is accomplished by handing them an allotment of money and letting them pick things themselves, but sometimes they buy potato chips, which makes sadists unhappy. So you could (sigh) set up an extremely expensive and complicated system to deliver food separately from stores, which would be stupid, or you could just adjust SNAP slightly to cap the type and quantity of tasty foods people are allowed to buy with it. (This could have been done decades ago of course, but we didn’t have evil people in charge back then. Well, as evil.)
Regarding the delivery, there are various actual real stores that are showing interest in delivering groceries. The government could, in theory, incentivize this - or just make it possible for customers to pay the fee for it with SNAP, which of course only people who desperately need the stuff delivered would do.
Of course all these approaches (the ones that involve existing stores) have the obvious downside that they’re not spectacularly stupid, and it’s harder to offload substandard “food” on poor people through them.
I don’t know how cheaply that comes, and I suspect you don’t either. Do you have any data about how much it costs the government to deliver food to soldiers at war?
I support addressing workers’ wages and working conditions, and am against depriving poor people of food benefits. This is not a “one or the other” issue. The current SNAP program is corporate welfare, pure and simple.
Your comment made me read into the history of food stamps. If you’re interested, I found a good site about it here. The program has evolved quite a bit since its original inception! I didn’t know that the first food stamps were things you actually bought from the government, for example.
What I didn’t find is that the SNAP program is particularly resilient to fraud and diversion, or significantly cheaper than direct delivery of food.
That’s a good start, but paying Amazon to deliver food instead of Walmart is still just another version of corporate welfare. Also, if we’re willing to pay the money it costs Amazon to deliver food to SNAP recipients, why wouldn’t we just do it ourselves? Again, we’d just be paying for Amazon’s profit margin, and retail brand premiums.
Some of us are arguing that there would be no savings and in fact the overall cost of the program would be more than the present one.
Currently, the USDA reports only 1% of SNAP funds are diverted to fraud. I know my private company I work for takes about a 2-3% loss from fraud/diversion/waste every year because they keep emphasizing to us what the current number is and what we can do to reduce it (if we meet the goal it figures into our quarterly bonuses). 1%?
That is a damn small loss to fraud, I’m not sure it’s possible to improve on that.
Also, though I bear no love for Morgenstern he also reported in another post that he worked in the welfare office and his estimate of scammers to legit recipients is somewhere like 100 or more legit people to 1 fraudster.
The health issues regarding the proposed list of items has been posted several times by me. It is questionable how “healthy” they actually are.
So I don’t see where we actually gain a benefit from this proposal.
I was working at a grocery store, mostly in the garden section, and burning quite a number of calories. I figured I was taking in about 3200 calories a day, and I still lost 40 pounds over 3 months.
That’s going to increase cost substantially
You think that govt can have efficiency gains over walmart?
No, to be honest, I would be in favor of something like this, even if it cost more in taxes, if it actually ended up being a better system. Saving people a trip to the grocery store when trips to the grocery store are a bit of a logistical challenge is nice. If they are able to get higher nutritious foods, that’s great too.
But I don’t see how this system, as currently devised, will either save money or increase the utility of the system we have now.
And getting onto SNAP is a pain in the ass too. When I was having severe financial difficulties in 2010, and literally starving, I tried to apply for benefits, and was told by a rather nasty lady that I should find a job. Too stubborn/proud/lazy to fight it, I just went without food.
I agree, I just don’t see this proposal as being in the “better” catagory.
If we paid the money it costs Amazon to deliver food to SNAP recipients, then we’re not paying for their profit margin at all.
Also, Amazon has streamlined the living hell out of delivering things. I consider it extremely likely that if we paid their costs with a little profit on top it would still be cheaper than anything the government could do, simply because Amazon is as big as some governments and if there was a cheaper way they’d already be doing it.
We could provide a few variations of menus. A-F, where A is standard, B is lactose-intolerant, C is low-carb, etc. They’re already talking about sizing them to match current benefit amounts, so I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to offer a few menu options to match some specific dietary needs, without the need for individual customization.
For someone doing manual labor who needs the calories for energy yes, they are healthy. For an six-figure-year office worker sitting on his ass all day doing strictly mental labor (when he’s not checking his e-mail and facebook), no, not so healthy. A real dietitian understands that different people have different needs. Look up the caloric requirements for, say, working outside in winter some time. Growing young men need more than sedentary 80 year old women.
Real dietitians don’t label foods as “unhealthy” so much as “eat only in moderation” or “eat rarely”. Like the sugar-coated processed grain cereals proclaiming they’re “**part **of a healthy diet”. Yeah, PART. Actually, sometimes the cereal is the most calorie-laden, nutrient poor portion of the spread but they don’t want you to read between the lines on that.
You’re not doing a very good job of it. There’s a lot of sputtering rage, and not a lot of cites or evidence to support the position that “the overall cost of the program would be more than the present one”. If that were true, I’d be onboard with opposing the change, but I don’t think it’s true.
The study I saw said it was slightly more than 1% diverted to “trafficking”, which is one rather specific type of fraud, not all fraud.
Anyway, again, I think that conceptually this could work, but not as it seems to be being proposed and there are some serious issues regardless…and I doubt that even with economies of scale it’s going to save anything (of course, it will, because what this really seems to be about is cutting money from the program, not finding better ways to distribute better and healthier food to the poor).
This is also true. For most of my childhood, our family income was well below the poverty line, but we couldn’t get food stamps because the welfare office couldn’t believe that a woman with a Master’s degree could possibly be that poor. For the record, she was actually working part time-- It’s just that teachers in the Catholic schools don’t make very much.
I’m not sure how relevant that is to the current discussion, though, since I don’t think these changes would make a difference in how hard it is to get on the program.
