Comment by ecshafer
2 days ago
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.
In California you can also use food stamps at farmer’s markets with a 50% discount.
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.
Mountain Dew and Twinkies are bad for your health regardless of your income level. We should tackle unhealthy eating by going after the supply, not by going after a class-segmented group of consumers.
Like many Americans, I grew up in a town where unhealthy eating was a major part of the social rhythms of life: a bag of buttery popcorn at the movie theater, an ice cream at the zoo, things like that. Not having the means to participate in these simple pleasures is a kind of social deprivation. I view redistributive programs as a tool to lessen the gap between families. Food regulators can handle the junk food problem.
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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.
> We're just choosing between fraudster shop owners getting a cut, or the addict being able to buy twice as much malt liquor.
I don't agree with these zero friction in a vacuum takes. Difficulty in access does shape choices, a lot in fact.
If you make it easier for people to use handouts to gamble or do drugs or whatever then more people will do it and ones doing it will do more of it. This isn't even a take its the null hypothesis.
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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.
Very informative post, and for background, I am not an us citizen. I have no issue with the idea of small luxury because it's socialized, but I do have the impression that obesity is a huge issue in the US and these kind of consumption patterns cause reinforcement and lead to worse outcomes. I have nothing against cheap food and cheap calories(actually I think they are super useful) but I do think healthier people are an aim we, as a species, should target.
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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.
> If they so choose to dissolve their teeth and decimate their guy bacteria, who am I to intervene?
In this case, I'm the American taxpayer who is paying for all of this food, and, perhaps more importantly, paying for all of the medical treatment they receive because of the consequences of these choices.
When your consumption is being paid for by other people, it's perfectly reasonable for those people to put limits on your choices, especially when they're footing the bill for the consequences of any bad choices you make too. We're a wealthy country and shouldn't let people starve, but you don't need ice cream or Coke or Pringles not to starve.
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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.
Oh good, you have demonstrated how money is somewhat fungible and therefore any moralizing about what welfare is spent on is a little odd
>SNAP's stated purpose is nutrition
SNAPS purpose is dual, and it was always also about ensuring american farmers had more demand, including for corn syrup. Horrifically, EBT being spent on soda is intentional.
If that bothers you, we can reduce corn subsidies without taking candy from literal children, or keeping poor parents from buying chips.
Who cares? It's $5.00 to buy a box of cake mix and a can of frosting. Let poor people have fun sometimes instead of trying to use the welfare as a leash to harry them constantly about their choices.
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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.
I don't really see the point, as a practical matter. Money being the fungible thing that it is, the only way this policy actually restricts anything is if the only money SNAP recipients ever spend on food is their SNAP benefit.
It feels much more like spite politics: We can tell these people whose morals are so bad that they need our money to survive that they cannot spend it on what we think of as junk food. That is a luxury only us hard working folk are permitted. When you are poor, you cannot suffer alone, you need to know that we are making sure you feel extra pain. Please be motivated to be better.
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Easily sidestepped, however, there is a thriving economy in poor neighborhoods around converting EBT to cash.
Soda, I agree.
Chips ... I think you should probably allow parents to spend EBT to buy a bag of chips for a hungry/picky kid in a pinch.
Why shouldn't EBT money be allowed to purchase sugar free soda?
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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.
You have all of that freedom in countries with single-payer but somehow they're able to make it work.
I don't see why this would be the case - it's not like the private system in the US today has different premiums based on how much junk food you eat (the closest to that I've seen is higher premiums for tobacco users).
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?
> giving people lifelong obesity and metabolic disorders
Is that a given? People can drink soda without getting fat. And plenty of people get quite large without ever drinking soda. This seems more personal, like intentionally causing suffering as a moral imperative.
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