Comment by bruceb
3 days ago
Pure partisan spite. The gov't not spending money on candy and sugary drinks is good. Just like when Michelle Obama pushed for better school lunches.
3 days ago
Pure partisan spite. The gov't not spending money on candy and sugary drinks is good. Just like when Michelle Obama pushed for better school lunches.
When Michelle Obama pushed for better school lunches she was excoriated for trying to get healthier foods into the hands of children. Glenn Beck's response was "Get your damn hands off my fries, lady. If I want to be a fat, fat, fatty and shovel French fries all day long, that is my choice!". Seems partisan spite cuts both ways.
I'm glad to see this announcement and despite the leadership in Washington right now I don't think these adjustment will be seen as too controversial by the American public. The recommendations are based on a lot of good nutritional science that's been out there for years, but the buck seems to stop at the conversation around fat.
They went to great lengths to remove the debate around good fat vs bad fat from this discussion. Even reading the report, emphasis is put on the discussion of why we use so many pressed oils in the food chain, but not why we phased lard and shortening out of the American diet.
"Eat real butter" is ostensibly a recommendation presented at the bottom of the webpage, but butter is not a healthy fat. Same with some people's obsession with frying in beef tallow, but the report doesn't want to dig into this distinction for obvious self interested reasons. They even recommend:
> When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil. Other options can include butter or beef tallow.
Which is a good recommendation. But no, you don't want to replace olive oil with butter or beef tallow. There's a lot of good nutrition science to back this up, but the report would prefer to not go there. Maybe "eat some butter" is appropriate, but unless the FDA wants to have an honest conversation around HDL and LDL cholesterol and saturated fats, I don't see this inverted pyramid doing too much good for overall population health (besides raising awareness)
Partisan spite does cut both ways and should be seen as such and ignored on either side.
Regarding fat I think "eat real whole unprocessed food" is a simple way to cover it. These guideliness recommend using less added fat including avoiding deep frying, and if one must use fat to use a minimally processed (i.e. pressed or rendered) form like olive oil or coconut oil or butter or animal fat. Though they failed to mention the distinction between refined and unrefined olive oil - today much of it is refined i.e. highly processed.
One of the best litmus tests for Democrat or Republican I have found is "Should people on food stamps be able to buy mountain dew / candy / etc with them?", very low false positive rate in either direction.
But regardless I have it on very good authority that with the BBB some within the Republican party wanted to limit EBT to only be able to purchase healthy food. No soda, no candy, no chips, etc. A couple calls from Coke, Pepsi, etc lobbyists shot that down.
People should be able to get cash transfers to buy goods on the general market. There shouldn't be food stamps.
The success of SNAP comes despite its inherent inefficiency, friction, and the indignity of its limitations. We structure the program the way we do in order to mollify voters who twitch at the idea of the poor ever enjoying anything.
Inequality isn't just about healthcare costs, biological metrics, etc. It is also deeply corrosive socially and psychologically, and this side of things is systemically underappreciated in policy circles.
To be sure, our food and diets are bad. Americans broadly should eat healthier. But are society's interests really better served by insisting that a poor child not be allowed to have a cake and blow out the candles on his birthday, the way all of his friends do?
In California you can use food stamps for fast food.
I haven't been there in a while so it might be different now.
Let's think about it.
Your homeless or in an unstable living situation. You don't have access to a kitchen, where are you going to make a home cooked meal.
How are you going to prepare raw chicken without a stove. Some homeless encampments do have people trying to cook, which sounds neat until a fire starts.
Let someone down on there luck buy a sandwich with SNAP. Maybe a shake too. Keeps the fastfood franchise in business, keeps people employed there.
The money is going to flow right into the local economy. I'd rather my tax dollars stay here than funding military bases all over planet earth.
I agree with you though. Just give people money. I feel like a UBI is the way to go. A single Flat tax rate for everyone. Everyone gets 1000$ a month( just off the top of my head, could be higher or lower).
The bizzaro welfare cliff... If you and your partner have kids it can be smart to not get married and have the kids live with whoever makes less.
They get free healthcare with the less affluent parent and you just hope you don't get sick.
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It seems unnecessarily reductive to insist that we must choose between endlessly subsidizing Mountain Dew and Twinkies or that poor children should never be allowed to have cake.
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Honestly when it comes to SNAP there's no good answer that achieves all of the reasonable policy goals ('make sure the kids have something to eat', and 'avoid wasting benefit money on crap')
You can replace it with cash aid, and there's a good chance a good chunk of recipients will spend most of it on drugs, lottery tickets, or alcohol while the kids go hungry.
On the other hand, you can have the way it is now, where the same kind of person who would do the above, sells $200 worth of SNAP benefits to whatever corrupt bodega owner in exchange for $100 to spend on drugs, lottery tickets, or alcohol while the kids go hungry.
In both situations the government is spending $200 to buy the poor harmful vices. We're just choosing between fraudster shop owners getting a cut, or the addict being able to buy twice as much malt liquor.
And in case it isn't clear, I don't think the majority of SNAP recipients sell their benefits or don't feed their kids. But the responsible group, well, it makes little difference to them whether they have EBT or cash aid as they're going to buy food anyway.
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> A couple calls from Coke, Pepsi, etc lobbyists shot that down.
Fucking hell, if this is true, I don't know how those people sleep at night. Really, It's a failure if my imagination, but I don't imagine how people like this function. I'm sure I've done my share of indirect harm in this world, one way or the other, but being so on the nose about it would make me absolutely nauseous.
Half of the purpose of SNAP is to be yet more subsidy to American megafarms. That was literally how it was done by FDR, and why it is administered by the department of Agriculture. It intentionally drives food production that wouldn't necessarily be profitable on its own because most first world countries, including the US, found that letting Capitalism run free on your food supply would result in booms, busts, and cyclic famine.
Soaking up grain and corn syrup supplies is intentional. Ethanol in our gas has a similar purpose.
However, the primary reason you should not care about SNAP recipients spending money on soda or chips or junk is because it's usually a good price/calorie ratio, so for the half a percent of Americans that literally don't get enough to eat, it can be sustaining, if not healthy, but for the rest, the idea that people shouldn't be able to have a small luxury because it's socialized is just too much.
Taking candy from children is probably just not worth the squeeze. The entire federal SNAP program is ~$80 billion.
Lookup WIC. It is a very restricted program of food assistance, and spends immense effort and money of "only healthy" or "no junk" and parental education and supporting nutrition, and it really pays off, but it does that by relying on ENORMOUS free labor from parents and stores. A WIC checkout takes significantly longer than average, is more error prone, and is miserable for all involved, for like $30 of bread and cheese.
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It is indeed true.
The truth is that lobbyists have a ton of cards to play, including that if such a ban were to go through, there would be a lot less demand for High Fructose Corn Syrup, which might sound wonderful, except that HFCS is a byproduct of corn, which is a major export of some very competitive swing states.
You fuck with that, your party gets trounced in the next election.
I agree, but: "individual freedom"
It's a great umbrella.
If they so choose to dissolve their teeth and decimate their guy bacteria, who am I to intervene?
It's gross, but it works for gross people, and there's a high enough percentage of gross people for this to make sense.
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Why should they not, what is with this parental-ism? Should Social Security recipients be able to buy candy? Should my employer get to choose what food I can purchase?
Food stamps are an inherently paternalistic program. The whole point is to ensure people get enough to eat, even when they can't or won't provide for themselves. Same with other voucher or in-kind welfare programs in housing, healthcare, education, etc.
A poor kid on food stamps should be able to get a birthday cake on their birthday. Anyone that believes otherwise definitely should never have kids or work with kids.
For exceptional items, can't the parent pay for them from non-SNAP money? For instance from the child tax credits they also get? SNAP's stated purpose is nutrition, not making birthdays fun.
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I would say that a short answer that implicitly accepts the framing of the question is a flag for someone without well-considered political views.
I'll bite. I think there is a difference between "should they" and "should they be able to."
Most liberals I know think they shouldn't but that its stupid to police this aspect of people's behavior if they are on EBT. Most liberals might even feel more comfortable regulating everyone's behavior by taxing unhealthy foods than they would just bothering poor people with it.
EBT is already money with strings attached - you can only spend it on food. I don't see narrowing the definition of "food" here to exclude soda to be a huge problem.
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If we want healthy food we have to regulate the food-makers. Everything else is skirting the edges of the problem. Taxes, EBT restrictions, none of that will make a dent.
Taxes like that seem all but required if you want to have a chance at a functioning single payer system. 0 chance single-payer will works with so much freedom to destroy yourself then make everyone pay for it.
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In my experience the reason Republicans are so interested in what people can buy with food stamps is that they want very much to punish people who are on food stamps. If they truly cared about the health of needy Americans there are a lot of other things they could do, or even a lot of things they could stop doing like making it more difficult to access health care, quackifying vaccine recommendations, holding press conferences in which they say nobody should take Tylenol under any circumstances, making dubious assertions about AIDS; the list goes on and on.
What if we just don't want to subsidize giving people lifelong obesity and metabolic disorders? Why does that necessarily imply we have to agree with you on other issues? Do we need to make it tribal and ascribe ulterior motives?
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I go on HN to read thoughtful non-partisan commentary but the general mood seems to be "everything is bad" in certain threads even if that contradicts a previous popular HN consensus.
Lol I forgot about that. What was it? Pizza is a vegetable?
Pizza as a vegetable (because of tomato sauce) was California under Reagan. Michelle Obama said to eat healthy and exercise more, though "eat healthy" still used the MyPlate guidelines.
Reagan said that catsup is a vegetable, not pizza.
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