Comment by shuntress

"Linked" to cancer at outrageous consumption levels. No artificial sweetener on the market is remotely as dangerous as sugar. Risk should never be examined in isolation, but only in comparison with the alternatives.

And where is the evidence of widespread fraud? The MAGA crowd keep pretending everything government is full of fraud, but they keep faring abysmally at finding said fraud. The problem is not fraud, but wasted effort. Most things government involve a lot of duplication of effort because everyone wants a piece of the pie. And all too often they spend a dollar to save a dime. A pair of examples illustrates the problem:

1) My wife tried to buy what turned out to be a 31 pound watermelon. Oops, has to be weighed on a properly certified scale to be allowed to sell it--and every such scale they have only goes to 30 pounds. Once the problem was identified the manager proposed a simple solution: sell it to us for the price of 30 pounds of watermelon. Not even a minute.

2) DMV. They made a field too short, two people used different abbreviations to fit into the field, the registrations didn't match and the unused portion of the old registration that should have transferred over didn't. By the time it was fixed IIRC 4 people had been involved, something like an hour passed. Over what turned out to be $6. (Not that I knew the number when I squawked.) The vast majority of that time was spent trying to document to the system that it was proper. Nobody with the authority to simply say moving this money is proper, do it.

And the related problem of politicians always wanting to visibly do something. Lots of duplicated effort because of this. Locally, several professional type fields require a separate business entity for every licensee even if they are part of something else that is licensed. A few hundred dollars a year per person for absolutely no benefit to society.

There is not a huge amount of fraud with SNAP and obviously what fraud does exist should be investigated, resolved, and prevented.

You are proposing eliminating fraud by eliminating the system. "You can't have failing tests if you have no tests"

You're going to get very bored just drinking water all day every day. Why can I buy coffee to make my water more interesting? Why can I buy Kool-Aid and pour 12 tablespoons into a glass, but I can't buy a Coke? What about a diabetic who is out and needs a quick sugar fix?

Might as well tell people they also just need to eat plain rice for every meal too.

I get there is some fraud on SNAP. I know people on SNAP. Most of them use every single cent on decent food. I've seen fraud, though. In Chicago I would place a bet that most non-chain convenience stores will sell you cigarettes on SNAP. Some of them absolutely sell weed on SNAP.