Look at it like this, a world with no food assistance, snap, food stamps, whatever.
Who eats better? (Or more expensively)
Food assistance is a way to feed food insecure families and children. Not to party.
He can get a treat. How about a tub of ice cream?
Like I said, his business. Still stupid.
BTW, caviar isn’t THAT expensive, provided that you aren’t that picky about type. Lumpfish caviar can go for around $7 per ounce, and an ounce goes a pretty long way. I’ve bought it a few times before, and I can’t say I noticed much of a difference from Russian sturgeon caviar I’ve had.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Romanoff-Black-Lumpfish-Caviar-2-oz-Box/10321130
In addition to the article that Darren_Garrison posted, here’s the USDA’s official page on what SNAP may and may not be used to purchase:
Briefly – Yea:
Nay:
In the grocery business we usually just call it EBT, for “electronic balance transfer”.
Rabbi Lionel Blue once told a story (or parable) on thought for the day, which I can’t find transcribed, so I will try to recount from memory:
A man passes a beggar on the street and, feeling sorry for him, gives him some money; quite a generous amount. As he walks away, he turns back to see the beggar walking into an expensive sandwich shop that is right nearby. Curious, he hangs back to see what the man will buy.
The beggar walks out of the shop, unwrapping and biting into a salt beef sandwich, the speciality of the deli, and one of their most expensive items; it probably cost nearly the whole amount that the man had given the beggar.
Angry about this, the man chastises the beggar and demands to know why he bought such an expensive sandwich, when he could have spent the same amount more wisely and perhaps eaten for several days.
The beggar replies: “Every day I see people buying these sandwiches and enjoying them, and I longed to taste them, but I could never buy one for myself, because I had no money. And now you’re telling me that when I DO have money, I STILL can’t have this sandwich?”
A dozen chicken eggs are cheaper than $7 per pound.
And make far more meals.
We really should get together one day and write the definitive treatise on How to Properly be Poor.
/s
I find that spaghetti sauce, noodles, peanut butter, and bread can make meals as cheap as $2 a meal.
You learn to budget.
From the recent viral hit song Rich Men North of Richmond by Oliver Anthony:
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfareGod, if you’re 5 foot 3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Should fudge rounds also be on the list of proscribed purchases?
(Question aimed at OP, not you.)
If the OP’s antagonist was complaining about their benefits not being enough, you might actually have a point.
Abbreviation started on an extremely popular Reddit group. Specific questions from there are often reposted on other sites that aggregate and duscuss various things.
In my mind they are two related, but ultimately distinct, concerns:
For #1 it’s a hard yes for me (food stamps aren’t a huge cost to society anyway; yes, let’s feed people who need it). I was on food stamps for a while too, but I held that position both before & after that.
That’s not really the controversy though.
The #2 argument is much more interesting: Should people receiving that assistance be able to decide for themselves how to spend it?
For something like a Section 8 housing voucher, it goes directly into the housing payment. You can’t spend it on, say, cookies or caviar. But even then you still have some choice as to where to live (as in which low-income housing unit to apply for, in which cities or states). Your costs of living can be very different depending on geography. Should we bus all poor people to the cheapest, most undesirable land in the country? I’d say no.
Food stamps / SNAP already have some restrictions. Not only can you not buy alcohol with it, you also can’t buy hot prepared meals – which is crazy to me, because some people on SNAP don’t have proper kitchen facilities or even a microwave/portable stove to be able to heat up food. Some states are experimenting with a “SNAP for restaurants” that can be spent in restaurants, which seems a lot more humane than “I guess it’s cold canned beans for you for the seventh month in a row”.
Now, is caviar, oreos, or an extravagant steak that uses the whole month’s payments really the best way to spend a limited SNAP budget? No, probably not. But then neither is, say, buying a ton of organic lettuce from the farmer’s market (which you can also do with SNAP in some locales).
As a blanket statement, Americans don’t eat all that healthily to begin with. Our government guidelines on the matter are rarely followed by anyone, and even when they are, they’re corrupted by lobbyists and such to begin with such that they don’t necessarily result in either optimal nutrition or maximum value per dollar.
That being the case, why would we suddenly expect our poorest to be any different and to be able to choose their food more wisely? There’s not many of us who lead truly “optimal” lives, in nutrition or otherwise. What if they bought some ice cream instead of caviar? What if they bought anything at all aside from rice and beans?
I don’t think you’re an “asshole” for judging them, but realistically, we all make some short-term sub-optimal choices… because we’re creatures of wants, not just needs. I don’t think poorer people are magically exempt from desire. It might be the one nice treat that get that day/week/month.
That alone shouldn’t make the case for government intervention (force-feeding them MREs or whatever). If anything, I think it just shows that, as a society, we should be better about teaching our citizens how to best shop for and prepare food. These days you either learn from your parents (who may or may not have good habits themselves) or mostly you just become a victim of infinite food marketing that teaches you mostly to eat bad, expensive things. That’s not really SNAP’s fault, that’s just how we approach food as a society.
Caviar may be a bit extreme, but I don’t know that it’s that much worse than any other poor decision you might make on a limited budget. The tradeoff of a society valuing freedom is that sometimes people will make bad decisions. That’s just the way it goes, no?
And, at the end of the day… if some miniscule portion of my tax dollars happens to buy a stranger a few minutes of happiness with a fancy treat… then gosh, I can only hope they find a nice tree/river to sit by and really milk that moment for all it’s worth. I wish every tax dollar were used that effectively.
I witnessed an awkward “Karen” moment. Karen started berating a food stamp shopper. I was the third in line.
Basically the food items being purchased were same as every other American. But Karen took issue with the purchases.
So in that regard I think the OP is the a*
Yet as a somewhat frugal person myself I would sometimes roll my eyes at some financial decisions some lower income people make. (Or higher income too I guess).
You probably could get more bang for your food stamp buck making different choices. Maybe that’s part of the society we live in where basic financial education doesn’t take place.
But the key point would be it’s not appropriate for me to impose my personal frugality onto anyone.
Just as I wouldn’t stand outside a pay day loan store yelling and calling people stupid for using such an overpriced service. It’s none of my business.
Who brought up that he was buying caviar, and that he was doing it with food stamps?
One point is, surely, that money is fungible – money saved one place (e.g. food, or housing) can be spent on something else. For anyone who receives direct government financial assistance of any kind, no-one can ever know whether the receiver’s other money is or is not being effectively* spent. And in almost all cases, some of that money surely isn’t. That is part of the deal.
For example, a person who gets food assistance is not allowed to buy beer with it. But their other money, freed from the necessity of buying food, can go towards beer. If this is a problem for you, this means that you are not in favor of food assistance.
*I use “effectively” to mean something like most bang for the buck, which is what complainers usually seem to want to see.
He did.
Then that makes him the ass because he was trying to start something with you.
There’s enough food wasted in this country to feed the poor in the US and probably another country.
Someone spending their food assistance on junk or fancy foods is way down on my list of worrying about the waste in this country.
It’s a crime and an outrage, what we throw out.
I feed anywhere from 8-12 people everyday. My grocery tab ain’t for the weak hearted. We do NOT eat out much(well, don’t tell, but I get Tacobell or Sonic on dialysis days…I promise I eat cheap).
Food waste is high on my shit list.
It wasn’t what he bought so much as it was the fact that he bragged about it to someone who he knew had a different opinion on the subject-he tried to start something.
I’m amazed that such things ever existed. For the curious, this is an example:
