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I mean, if they'd also improve the ability to get healthy food with those stamps it's not necessarily bad. But judging by who's saying it I somehow doubt that it's done with good intentions.
How do those food stamps work anyways? Can you use them like money? I'm not American so it's a foreign concept yo me.
Given how many Americans are in food deserts where it's close to impossible to get anything but junk food, it's definitely an absolutely moronic move.
First you have to make sure that fresh and healthy food is available for everyone then you make this kind of move.
Not the other way around...If you want to know the quality of US education before current cuts...
I learned about food deserts in 7th grade. The teacher called it food desserts and went into great detail about how it meant places where you can only find desserts to eat like ice cream shops. It's a real problem for these areas because they don't have real food to eat and everyone is obese from only eating desserts.
Let them eat cake.
People really just don't understand how fucked the U.S education system is. The idiots all had kids, and some of those kids became teachers, who continue to pass down their culture of ignorance. Meanwhile, teaching is such a dogshit job that nobody in the U.S. wants to do it, so hiring standards have gotten lower and lower.
It's like a perfect storm taking us to a situation where people at a 7th grade reading level are teaching U.S. History to 10th graders.
/fellating_pikachu_meme
Good lord. How in the hell does that thinking even survive a first pass at thinking about how a fru-fru place like an ice cream shop could survive while the people living there wouldn't be able to get to a place with 'real food' on offer?
The implication was more we were supposed to be judging them for being fat and only wanting to eat desserts, ruining the options for everyone else. Free market giving them what they want.
This kind of thing is how millions of people can think they are well informed and the blame is on some other demographic. While not knowing anything about the subject.
Yeah agreed. It's always insane to me to hear how all that works in the US. Here I've always had a supermarket at <10 min by bike, and those always have fresh fruit and vegetables. A society where unhealthy food is way easier and cheaper to get is a recipe for disaster
How do those food stamps work anyways? Can you use them like money? I’m not American so it’s a foreign concept yo me.
You get an EBT debit card with an amount of money based on some calculations that can only be spent on certain things (in the case of SNAP aka food stamps, you can only spend that balance on food). WIC is another subsidized food program that sometimes gets included when talking about "food stamps" targeting people with small children, which has a more restrictive list on what you can buy with it.
Some of the guidelines have been painfully dumb, even if there was an intended logic to them - like "no hot food" where the goal was to disallow restaurant purchases and purchasing pre-cooked meals because they are generally a less efficient use of the funds, but led to dumb shit like Subway noting that they sell subs cold and so could hypothetically still sell, then just offer to toast the sub post-sale so that the division was meaningless.
Then you have the abuses of the program that really do need fixed, like stores that are well known to be willing to buy certain stock from just anyone, at a stupidly low price. The idea being that you go to Walmart or wherever and buy up a bunch of product that you can buy on SNAP, take it to the store and resell it at a massive loss to launder your SNAP funds into regular cash. In my area it was certain convenience stores that were known to buy certain brands of soda in cases of cans for much less than they could be bought through legitimate channels as a way of laundering SNAP funds.
I'm somebody who has food stamps. It's like a debit card that the government will load with money monthly. You can only use it to purchase food items. If your total bill at the store is $40, $20 of food and $20 of other household goods, then paying with the food stamps card will pay for the $20 of food. You'll still have to pay the $20 of other goods with your own money.
Richest country in the world!
But on a serious note, that sounds like a decent idea, though I suppose you might as well just give people the money. Idk why they would only allow it to be soent on food.
Because they think poors will use cash money on drugs and booze.
No, seriously. That's the reasoning of those that limit aid. They think anyone in poverty is there because of drug addiction.
Coincidentally, they also believe that drug addicts don't deserve help. It's all awfully convenient (for those who don't want to help others.)
Well, they also believe that the poor are all idiot layabouts, and if anyone is poor in the most amazing awesome doublemost mcbestest country on earth, it must be their own fault. So, a lot of aid is engineered to be uncomfortable to get and uncomfortable to be on, like financial homeless spikes.
One of the worst aspects of this for me is how brutal the means testing is for many assistance programs. They often turn eligibility into a sheer cliff face where the second you make even a dollar more than the cutoff you lose the whole benefit. But even if they don't and there's a more gradual reduction you're often on multiple assistance programs if you're poor and the reduction to all of them often puts you in a worse place than you stated in.
My partner is fully disabled, she's got neurological issues where she'll be pretty much fine one minute but with maybe like an hour at most of warning she could be fully incapacitated from a migraine brought on by pseudotumor. Not even because of the pain, she starts having trouble walking, standing up straight, remembering what she was doing. Sometimes she temporarily loses access to years of her life like the Cosmic Dungeon Master said "Roll 2d20, that's how old you think you are for the next 2d4 hours"
So obviously that makes having me work right now basically impossible. Very few jobs are cool with your availability being subject to that kind of rapid change. So I stay home to take care of her and our kids. But back when her symptoms weren't so severe and I could work I had to be very careful what kind of jobs I found because depending on how much I made we actually ended up losing more in assistance than what I made that caused us to go over.
Fantastic example, our oldest just got approved for SSI because they relaxed some of the asset/income restrictions and now my wife's disability benefit isn't too much money for him to qualify. We get Section 8 so our portion of rent is based on our income so our rent went up when he got SSI. Our SNAP amount also went down because our income went up. He got approved for like 200 something in SSI and between the rent going up and SNAP going down at the end of the day we get like $10 dollars more a month than we did prior to him getting it. This shit happens everywhere with these kinds of programs and is one of the many reasons people get trapped in poverty.
Do you think you should be able to buy drugs and booze with food stamps though?
I think a unified UBI is a lot more efficient than segmenting aid between housing assistance, bill assistance, and food stamps, and I think if somebody really wants to waste their small monthly UBI stipend on drugs and booze, they should be allowed to. It'll be a pretty small fraction of a percentage of the program participants that would do such a thing, and in a morbid sense it's a problem that sorts itself out.
Keep in mind business vendors ring up non-food and alcoholic beverages under food stamps all the time. There's always a gas station or food mart ringing up beer as gatorade and such anyway.
Our lawmakers just tend to refuse to regulate or punish business overall and displace everything onto consumers as means testing for resources.
Restricting it to food is probably what allowed it to get passed in the first place in this country. And likewise, it is way easier to get food stamps than any kind of “cash assistance” welfare.
Like in my case, I have a good job and my previous good job got eliminated during the first year of COVID. When temporarily having no income, we could easily sign up for food stamps to help while looking for the next job. It’s nice to help stretch any money you might still have in the bank, or be able to feed your family day to day if you don’t really have anything in the bank. Like others said it’s a debit card that works at the grocery store.
But if you want medical coverage or cash assistance to bridge the gap? Not until you have lost everything substantial that you own except for a place to live and a vehicle if it’s necessary to get to work.
Have a family with two parents and a couple of kids, in a typical US neighborhood where leaving your house to go any real distance away is via car and nothing else? I hope your cars weren’t made in the past 15 years or else you’ll probably have to lose one of them.
And if you’ve been trying to save for a purchase or just be financially responsible? Nah we’re going to need you broke and penniless first. You don’t have to be literally at $0, but in my state I think the asset limit is $2000 and that includes any cash, your second vehicle, your first vehicle if it’s not “necessary” to get to work, and I think even retirement accounts.
Gonna get downvoted~
A lot of people who are really poor have shit spending habits and/or abuse substances. Not even majority, but a lot. These programs should aim to helo you up, not allow you to spiral lower on welfare money.
This type seems great for me honestly. Where I live, from what I've seen, poor simply receive care package. There at least you get choice, while still being somewhat denied ability to screw up.
I get the sentiment, but this comes across as patronizing and unscientific. A move to universal basic income would require cutting practically all of these programs in favor of just giving people the autonomy to decide for themselves. That works well when you couple it with universal healthcare and harm reduction programs like safe needle exchange sites.
People that want to abuse the system will do so no matter the red tape you put around it, and what good does that do for the overwhelming majority that rely on it in good faith? Unless you have data to suggest abuse is rampant, which afaik is not the case. You made the initial claim, so please provide sources.
Universal basic income would probably solve it, I agree. But the amount of money sent for food is not UBI, nowhere close. I solely commented on letting food welfare loose.
I do not have data on hand and after a quick search I am growing dubious whether may country even publishes that, so all I can lean on is experience. A lot of homeless consciously choosing alcohol over shelter, stories of people trading care packages for alcohol (seen this once myself, didn't believe before), housed people I know who are poor just rabidly splurging every time they got slightly more money and thus spiraling back down.
It's all my experiences, not propped up by any other data (will check later if I can find more with deeper search), but in this case the patronizing method of welfare seem actually better. At least if UBI isn't an option.
Research on UBI is available with a quick search, with data on what participants are selected and what they prioritize. We can make some speculations from there. Try again.
I've heard that some places allow cash withdrawal via ATM.
For TANF, not for SNAP. Nobody's going to federal prison for a few hundred dollars of transaction fees. TANF is cash so it's right to allow cash withdrawals from that. Both are EBT cards.
My relative receives SNAP and their debit card allows ATM withdrawals. Don't know why or how but it does.
They might receive TANF on the same card. SNAP shouldn't allow cash withdrawals per federal law.
Republicans don't improve anything except profits for the top 1%. Not only are they not going to make healthy food more available or affordable, Trump's hard on for mass deportation is actually driving up the cost of produce.
This isn't going to help anyone eat healthier, just make poor people more miserable.
In my area, a relative that receives SNAP gets a debit card. They split their payment since they get such a small amount.