While I fully agree with this portion of your post, that was part of the reasoning behind the EBT card. Food stamps were far more obvious than the card and the stigma was so great that many who would have benefited just made do without the help. The EBT card, on the other hand, is treated like any other credit/debit card and is inserted into the card reader and removed once approved. I have never looked at the credit card being used by the person in front of me at the grocery store in order to judge them (or for any other reason either), but then I’m not a judgmental shit-stain on the fabric of society.
“Supervising” people’s choices violates the sacred principle of minding one’s own fucking business. Now, if the government or whoever found a way to persuade the public to quit eating crap, not exercising, smoking, and drinking, that would be a real breakthrough.
Look directly above your post!
Also, why shouldn’t we also shit on farmers that buy “nice stuff” when they receive gov funding? Aren’t they also “welfare queens”? I know they drive really nice 3/4 ton pickups, but still they are suckling off my tax money! Fuck them. Their pickups are very similar to caviar but cost a LOT more!
Can we rename this to “the ethics of buying stuff off the farm bill”
HHS Secretary RFK Junior is going to do this.
You can, legally, designate a person to act in your stead and purchase for you with your card. No, not handing it out to random people but having someone fetch you groceries when you’re incapacitated is legit. It’s not uncommon with the frail elderly.
The store I work for already, of their own accord, offers a discount to anyone using SNAP for all fresh fruits and vegetables. That applies even to items on sale or deep-discounted for same-day sale. Which is not to say my employer is font of goodness and generosity, just that it’s possible to encourage better habits without being draconian.
As a cashier I have actually seen people purchase lobster tail with SNAP. It was one of those bits where we had to sell the seafood by the end of th that day or toss it, so the tails were discounted 80% making them cheaper than the fresh ground beef at the time. Seems to me that was actually a pretty good strategy.
Sure, someone could pay full price for lobster tails, or caviar, with SNAP - but do that more than once in a great while you burn through your money. Folks generally only do that once, maybe twice, and then learn their lesson.
I have also seen people on SNAP pay for their groceries, then pay for something like a birthday cake separately, with cash. Which they don’t have to do, you can buy the birthday cake with SNAP, but they feel for whatever reason they shouldn’t do that.
We have regulars who use SNAP, we get to know them. Some of them eat really, really healthy 90% of the time and anyone begrudging them the occasional candy bar or nice cut of meat or fish is, IMO, a heartless jerk. Others eat out of cardboard boxes of frozen food that probably tastes a lot like the outer container. Why? I don’t know. Can’t cook? Don’t have access to cooking supplies? (My former downstairs neighbor, after the second time she set her kitchen on fire, did not have the ruined appliances replaced - if she cooked at all after that it was probably in a microwave. Or maybe she just resorted to drinking all her calories in the form of alcohol instead of just a substantial portion of them).
Anyhow - I see a wide range of choices among the SNAP customers. Really, aside from a lack of income they’re just like everyone else. Which probably really annoys some people.
^ There is this.
Many states are moving to a one-card-for-all-benefits system. After the person swipes the card they have to choose which benefits they’re attempting to access. People with TANF can use their TANF funds for non-food items of various sorts. There’s probably a bunch of things I’m not aware of, not having been on those programs and really only concerned with whether or not my register will allow the transaction, whatever it is.
The leftover rotisserie chickens are put in the freezer at work and the next day, as cold food, can be purchased with SNAP.
The vast majority of people earning too much to be on food stamps COULD but such a luxury item… but it would require changing habits or priorities they can’t be bothered to modify, so they say they “can’t” afford it, when really it’s a matter of they don’t want it badly enough to economize elsewhere in their lives.
Two things:
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The meme that poor people are all generational poor or lazy or otherwise permanently poor.
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It scares them so badly to think that people like them (that is, non-poor) might have a string of bad luck that puts them on SNAP on a temporary basis that they’d rather not believe such a fate is possible.
I paid into the system for decades before I used SNAP, and after I pulled myself out of the hole I was in (took about 3 years) I no longer qualified and I’m back to paying taxes. Which is how it happens for many, if not most, people who have been on the program.
According to a previous poster one thing prohibited is:
Live animals (except shellfish, fish removed from water, and animals slaughtered prior to pick-up from the store).
Lobster and crab are shellfish so they were OK.
That’s another one of the really questionable things that, AIUI, the SNAP rules do.
You can’t ‘bank’ some of the SNAP benefits for a future purchase that’s not in the monthly food budget. If you try that you’ll get the letter that says ‘If you do not spend your X benefits within X days X benefits will expire.’ Back when they were actual ‘food stamps’ you could do that.
Of course, we wouldn’t want to actually allow the poors to save and defer current wants and needs for future wants and needs despite saying that that is one of the things the poors need to learn.
Thank you, that life mystery is now solved.
Do you have a cite for that? As I said, it was my understanding that the card could only be used by the applicant or somebody that they had named on the application . As I also said, this is not something that anybody really cares about.
Was it the program that subsidizes farmers for taking environmentally fragile cropland out of production and instead putting it into erosion-resistant permanent ground cover, planting trees as windbreaks, or letting it go back to a natural floodplain?
Not everything is as simple as it seems. The same goes for nutritional programs.
Yes, CRP/CSP comes out of the Farm Bill funding. But that is a smaller percentage than the other forms of welfare the farmer queens benefit from. And I guarantee they are buying caviar in the shape of Ford F250s all the time with their welfare. I see them paying with their EBT cards at the local dealership all the time.
But, better to look at the truly poor and how they are misspending MY money.
Seriously? You can’t buy toilet paper or dish soap??
Can you imagine the poors buying buttwipe with SNAP? How horrible would that be.
/s
It is odd since we have pulp tree farms that would fit in with the Farm Bill.
Most places don’t check ID so it effectively doesn’t matter. There could certainly be a rule.
The one time in my life that I have used a SNAP card, I had a friend (RIP Becky) who, along with her housemates, was on disability, and they needed groceries and she asked me if I could do it. She gave me a list and told me which store had a current sale on what they wanted, along with the PIN for the card, and I bought the items and delivered them to the house.
I was probably qualified for food stamps when I was in college, in the early 1990s, but I never looked into it because I never needed them. My brother found himself in a situation where he did, and applied and was accepted. At the time, he got $99 a month. I’m not violating any kind of confidence because he tells everyone about it.
A decade before that, a woman in my office said that when her husband had been laid off a few years earlier (this would have been ca. 1980) they applied for them out of (her words) absolute need. They also had two young children, and they would go to a grocery store in a part of town where they didn’t know anybody, and buy the cheapest no-brand products because they were so ashamed. When her husband got a “You’re hired” phone call, they took a newly-arrived packet of stamps out in the backyard, worth about $200 in 1980 dollars, and burned them. I told her that someone like her is exactly who should NOT have been embarrassed about them.
The thing that bugs me is the OPs friend who was bragging about it.
So you need food help. Not one thing to be ashamed of.
So you buy some treats with your card or however they send it. Not a problem.
But, if you’re collecting them and you’re thumbing your nose at American taxpayers, who have their own families to feed, you’re wrong.
If you and many others
do it enough these safeguards for families and children will eventually not be able to help anyone.
That money tree ain’t gonna stay alive and producing forever.
Yeah, campaigns of the ilk ‘Let’s all try to eat more fibre’ or ‘why not walk instead of driving short distances, if you can?’, are OK in my book, for the intent of improving the health of the general populace. It becomes more of a problem the more targeted and individually-tailored is the (ostensibly well-meaning) interference.
No. It was the PIK program, which was intended to reduce production. I’m not opposed to farm programs. My point is that there are many federal programs that pay benefits, yet there’s no hue and cry over how recipients spend that money. (And that farmer and his wife were very kind to us.)
He wasn’t.
And according to that this has nothing to do with “food stamps”.