The position you’re arguing is that grocery stores are grossly inefficient at delivering food cost-effectively, because the free market doesn’t work. Note that unless you can point to something that interferes with the free market forces (as can be found in the health care/insurance market), you’re arguing that capitalism itself doesn’t work.
Pardon me if I think you’re the one who has a point to prove.
Calories do not equal nutrition, as I’m sure you’re aware.
Before I answer, let me state that I have been both a pilot (and therefore paid to fuel airplanes) and I currently work in the grocery industry, including about a year and half involved in the inventory tracking part of the store.
The mere fact the military delivers things like food using jet airplanes will make it cost VASTLY more than the typical by rail or by truck delivery of food in the civilian sector. ANYTHING that is airlifted is going to cost more to transport than it would to deliver by truck, and rail is cheaper still. Add into that the military sometimes having to fly supplies literally half way around the world - distance increases transport costs.
It costs lots of money to fight a war. Or to provide disaster relief via military hardware, like flying food and water to a disaster zone.
Does it cost more to walk or drive your car? Drive you car, of course - not only do you have to pay for the machine, you have to pay for fuel, too. Same principal.
With the “side effect” of actually feeding poor people, just as the house mortgage deduction (which is “middle-class welfare”) has the beneficial side effect of increased home ownership and and good investment opportunity for millions.
Profit is what makes capitalism work. Next you’ll tell me government workers should not receive a paycheck because it’s wrong for a private individual to take public money in return for laboring in a job that benefits the public sector.
Yes, and I expect it will continue to change - I just want the change to be of actual benefit to the recipients.
Here’s some information about fraud and SNAP.
As for being cheaper than direct delivery - there are economies of scale in delivering larges amounts of stuff to a central location. The final delivery - central depot to individual door - requires human labor and a fleet of trucks. Sending SNAP recipients their card and benefits the way we currently do means the government doesn’t have to pay for that last bit of the process (nor does the grocery store, for that matter). The recipients themselves pay for the final leg of the distribution process. If you do direct delivery then you’re adding that final leg to the process and adding more delivery/transport is going to cost money because nobody works for free and gas costs money.
If Amazon is doing a job why do you object to it being paid for that job? Do you object to government workers being paid? The only difference is that it is a corporation and not an individual receiving the money, but that money is then distributed to the workers.
Do you object to the people in the grocery stores being paid for their work?
Do you expect the government to find people to deliver this stuff for free? You are aware that government workers tend to have much more expensive benefit packages than the private sector, right? That’s why the government has been moving more and more toward private contracting, it’s cheaper than hiring actual government workers. Government workers aren’t going to be able to do this cheaper than the private sector unless you’re using forced labor, and I’m not sure there are enough prisoners even in the US to provide sufficient laborers for this initiative, and they sure as heck aren’t going to be the ones driving around city streets making the deliveries.
We’ve shown you that managed delivery programs like this have a much higher administrative overhead than SNAP.
What makes you think that this will be the exception?
Please tell me how calories are not essential for growth and the maintenance of life.
But if your state doesn’t give a flip you get NO flexibility, just like a lot of states opted not to take Federal money and expand Medicaid, leaving people without access to health insurance.
And… existing infrastructure? Like… *grocery *stores? Wait, wait - don’t we already do that?
…it sounds like you want lootboxes? Maybe the government could put together 5 types of box, 1 one them containing premium items like steaks, and the other 4 full of less appetizing food items like potatoes or rice. You could call them SNAP boxes! Most of the time you would get boring stuff: but if you strike it lucky its a lobster meal!
They are part of nutrition. If you lack adequate calories over a long enough period of time you die. As was demonstrated in work camps in WWII were part of the “efficiency” was in feeding workers just enough food to maximize the time they could work before dropping dead to minimize overhead like food.
Office workers who worry about having too many calories and pay to go to a place to burn them off often do not understand that there are still people who perform manual labor and they people actually do need to eat more than the standard 2,000 calorie a day diet to maintain their body weight at a healthy level. Those jobs often do not pay well, and thus those people who require more than average numbers of calories are often those most likely to need SNAP as well.
Not to mention things like allergies, intolerances, and people who do (not) eat certain things because of ethnic or religious traditions.
I said, here and elsewhere, that it wouldn’t surprise me if, in the occasion that something like this is implemented, it will be delivered in a vehicle that is plainly marked, so that everyone in the neighborhood will know who the leeches are. :dubious:
I’ve never been on food stamps or SNAP, although I was probably eligible when I was in college; I did not apply for it because I didn’t need it. However, I’ve had friends, acquaintances, and relatives who did, and were VERY grateful for the ability to buy better food than they otherwise would have been able to afford.
Was this your family’s only income? If so, your family should have been eligible! Good grief.
You know, it just crossed my mind that having each family get a ‘standard’ crate of food, even if it’s marginally customized to avoid the allergic person getting a crate full of peanuts, would have a very high probability of being hated by everyone within months.
I was raised middle class, but I have a friend who was raised poor, and due to circumstances they ended up eating chicken near-daily for several years. And now he hates it. To this day, he will not eat anything with chicken in it.
So, given that the whole entire intent of this plan is for poor people to hate what they’re eating and be as miserable as possible, this crate stuff is a gold mine! Whatever you stick in these unvarying boxes, they will hate. So it’s perfect! They’ll hate it for the rest of their lives!
Given that, it would almost be worth putting actual healthy food in the crates - you’d have the extra bonus of making the poor people hate and avoid several varieties of healthy food for their entire lives, hastening their deaths! Of course this wouldn’t happen - the desire to pay favored companies top dollar for substandard crap would be too much to resist. But still, think of the possibilities!
Or we could, hold on a moment because this is a totally revolutionary idea and it is going to blow your mind, have the government create infrastructure to deliver items to peoples homes. We could pay for this by having people buy things, we could call them ‘licky stickers’ that you put on the items. Then, assuming the item has the correct number of ‘licky stickers’, the delivery people whom we will call ‘letter walking people’ could deliver the items to the the physical address. We could even set it up so that you could give an item to a ‘letter walking person’ and then, assuming it had the correct ‘licky stickers’ on it, it would be delivered to whomever you wished. Once we had that in place we could use it to deliver the food boxes.
Seriously, we already have the infrastructure for delivering goods to homes in the U.S. Why not set up the post offices as distribution centers? Shouldn’t be that hard, the infrastructure already exists, the drivers already have routes, it will cover the vast majority of the U.S. and most of the work is already done.
Slee
Yeah. It’s simply part of the nature of physical reality that, all other things being equal, it is going to be more efficient and less expensive to distribute to recipients a virtual form of money with which they can purchase food from local suppliers, rather than actually sending them physical boxes of food.
Saying, in a modern technologically advanced material-abundance society, “oh some people are going hungry so we should ship boxes of food to them” is ridiculously archaic 19th-century-foreign-missionary type thinking.
And nobody has yet made any kind of a convincing case that any of the “other things” would be unequal enough to justify the massive fundamental inefficiency of switching a geographically and demographically vast assistance distribution network over from lightspeed weightless no-wrapper nonperishable virtual money to heavy cumbersome processed packaged stored containers of physical food.
As you say, if some people are living in serious “food deserts” or confined to their houses or something, to the extent that their virtual money can’t actually be used to fulfill their nutritional needs, then sure, there’s a case for the old-fashioned missionary-box approach in those situations.
But for people who have reasonable access to supermarkets? Fuck, dude, just press a couple buttons to upload some food money to their assistance-recipient debit card, and let them do the work of purchasing and transporting their own food, just like the rest of us do. Can’t get faster or cheaper than that when it comes to distributing nutritional assistance.
Given that the goods in question are selected to not rot too fast, they could indeed be mailed by the USPS.
And stolen off of porches while people are at work.
Lets be serious here - a certain percentage of people would benefit from home delivery, as opposed to picking things up at walmart. A certain percentage of others would suffer badly under a scheme where the USPS just dumps a box on your doorstep and drives off.
This is just one of the many, many small ways this moronic scheme is inferior to the current one of “hand them some money and tell them to go to the store”. It’s a problem looking for a solution - and the only problems is solves are “how can we make things worse than they currently are?” How can we lower the quality of food? How can we lower the variety of food? How can we lower the availability of food? How can we increase the theft of food from its intended recipients? How can we increase errors, mismanagement, corruption, and fraud? How can we starve more people?
Under the proposed scheme (though let’s be honest - there’s nowhere near a coherent enough plan to justify call it a scheme) all the above outcomes are more probable. And if there is to be any chance of the scheme costing less than the SNAP benefits it intends to replace, then so many corners would have to be cut then all of the outcomes are nigh certain.
Which, to some, is a good thing.
There are such things as empty calories, like chips and soda. You can look it up if you’re interested.
Sure, but all that means is that such foods don’t contain much in the way of nutrients other than calories.
For those of us who don’t need a lot of calories and must budget our calorie intake to make sure that we get the necessary variety and amount of nutrients, “empty calories” are bad because they’re crowding out the nutrient-delivering calories from healthier foods that we need more.
But for people who need high-calorie diets because they’re expending a lot of calories, eating 2000 calories of healthy nutrient-rich foods plus 1000 calories of potato chips is healthier than eating just the 2000 calories of healthy nutrient-rich foods. You can be getting all your necessary vitamins and minerals but still gradually starving due to sheer calorie deficiency. “Empty calories” are at least better than not enough calories.
What percentage of SNAP recipients need high-calorie diets because they are expending a lot of calories?
Certainly not the 30% who don’t work.
Sorry, I guess I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean that people on nutritional assistance in general need high-calorie diets. I was just explaining one reason that getting “empty calories” from unhealthy foods can be better than not getting them.
For SNAP recipients, the same might be true for different reasons. For example, if they can’t afford to buy enough healthy foods to meet their calorie needs, they’re probably better off eating however much healthy food they can afford plus a calorie-dump of cheap junk food than spending all their food budget on calorie-insufficient healthy foods on which they gradually starve.
Amazon already uses the US Postal System.
We actually covered some of that in the thread on Gwenyth Paltrow’s Food Stamp Diet On an EBT budget it is entirely possible to purchase extremely healthy food that has too few calories to ensure long-term existence.