Trumps Food stamp proposal

I understand there is a woman in Atlanta who is really good at getting packaged food to people who need it in a timely fashion, and she has had government contracts before.

Given many companies have failed and even Amazon is struggling to get home food delivery to be more cost effective than retail I am not sure any Trump organized effort is going to do better…

This is just playing to his base who think every poor person has an iPhone X and gets every dollar of their grocery bill paid for by the government because they saw that one woman one time covered with bling buying steaks.

The chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams.

This is the one of the things that drives me nuts. I have a few friends that trot out the “they used welfare for WHAT??” and a columnist for the Herald uses that one a lot when they use their EBT cards to buy smokes or something.

I always figure if it helps 80-90% of the people, and and maybe 2% of the people manage to min max the thing to their advantage, so what? There is always some level of risk and fraud in anything. Ask a credit card company what their acceptable fraud rate is and you’ll get an idea.

EBT has two different accounts on the same card, last I heard. One is the food part but the other is just straight up money. There are restrictions on one, the food, and the other is basically like a bank account.

I had some Republican friends I played board games with for years, but I recently cut off the relationship because Trump. But one thing they always said to me was they hated liberals because “they always want government to tell you what to do”. More or less, that liberals are for fewer freedoms.

I wonder what they would say about this. My guess is they would do backflips to basically say that people on welfare already made bad choices etc and so they don’t get a choice. I knew these guys really well, and I’m not exaggerating.

To be fair this is not unique to folks in the United States. In the UK lots of voters are obsessed with people (usually foreigners) somehow getting things for free or gaming the system.

It is pretty silly. Its part of why I think basic income is such a good idea. It does away with a lot of irrelevant detail. “Here is enough money to live on as is your right as a citizen, your call how you spend it.”

The thing I don’t get is the jealousy. I would not exchange my life and lifestyle, that I have today, to live a life where the highlight of my week is a store bought steak, where the people around me judge me, and probably the cashier too. Are there some that game the system, sure, but they’re a fraction of a fraction of the people on that system, and if it were cheap and efficient to do fresh food delivery systems, ,we’d be seeing it in the private sector. What we see are Blue Apron, Gobble and Chefd options that are competing against going out to eat, not groceries because that delivery system is not cheap at all.

It’s also possible to receive support and service and not have a kitchen, so requiring people to cook just shows another example of how little some people understand about how other people have to live.

I don’t understand it either. I have family members who are obsessed with it though. I never get a straight answer to my question of “why do you care?”

Although I do draw the line when my English family starts complaining about “immigrants coming here and getting opportunities we don’t”, my sharp response of “you mean like I did in America?” is met with the straight faced response of “well thats different”. I still no idea how its different but the subject gets changed quickly. Its VERY odd.

I’m just gonna straight up call bullshit on this. The average food stamp recipient averages about $252 per month for a family of 2 . The numbers vary a bit for households of 1 to 8 people but the average is about $125 per month per person. So unless that horrible steak-eating poor person was blowing 2 months worth of food stamp all at once, then your anecdote is BS. And in theory, a household of 8 could have about $850 per month to spend so maybe they could afford $200 for meat, but that would be feeding 8 people.

There’s also this: the total federal food stamp program is about $70 billion per year, a bit under 2% of the federal budget and Trump is right now proposing a budget with $700 billion for the military.

Even if you add in all the other federal “welfare” programs like housing and childcare subsidies for the poor, it’s less than 4% of the federal budget. The biggest program we have based on poverty is actually Medicaid at about 8% of the budget, but taking health care away from poor and sick people doesn’t play as well as slamming the horrible steak-eating poors.

Bottom line is: we actually spend a tiny amount of money relative to our huge economy on federal programs for poor people. And yet we still have to shame them. Fuck Trump.

I have heard that some people sell their EBT cards for cash for other items. Someone buying said card way under value might spend it on high priced meats.

But I don’t think this is reason to end the program, maybe just to require an ID to match the card.

That’s true. You do need to take reasonable enforcement/verification measures. Requiring an ID is reasonable IMO.

Then they’ll just have the person buy in store, then step outside and trade for cash at 50% of face value.

If people want to turn it into cash instead of food, they’re going to.

Well, it just makes it one step tougher and I am fine with that. There is no way to eliminate all fraud.

This. Besides, an EBT card is allowed to be used by anyone in the household (in addition to one designated “trusted” person) and there’s a requirement that such customers are treated no differently than others. Asking for such an ID would certainly set them apart, and frankly the poor catch enough grief as it stands.

This report shows a very low incidence of fraud (right around the average retail shrinkage rate, interestingly), but to be fair it does certainly occur:
https://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/27901-0002-13.pdf

Fun fact: Its not food stamps but one level up: Most military bases have a WIC office right on base. Enlisted people are paid so poorly many qualify for WIC.
http://militaryoneclick.com/military-family-survives-wic/

Wow, this is the first interesting thing I’ve heard out of this administration and people poo poo it by default. If it doesn’t cost more money I don’t see the problem. How can delivering food to the poor be controversial? (If it costs more, which it has to, right? then it’s a bad idea)

I guess people will nitpick anything, this feeds right into the “pick your side” political mentality we are trying to step back from.