As noted in my quote, food deserts are still an issue. However—on a rare positive note in this thread, lol—since the notion pierced the veil of public consciousness a few years back, there’s actually been a notable effort by communities to create these. So while there’s not a lot in those areas, there are more than there used to be.
I know what I saw in the line. Perhaps the WiC program is different (as that was the debit card she utilized). You’re assuming that this is the ONLY money they are using to buy food. Based on your comment, I would wager that she was in fact blowing multiple months of food stamps at once… why? Because they weren’t typically using them, hence the grocery shopping spree.
You’re right. I don’t. So you’re saying that I just completely fabricated my observation to screw with everyone here? Hardly. I’m all for supporting families that are in need… TOTALLY. What I’m not on board with is supporting people abusing the system.
Playing devil’s advocate here — I’m looking at people who, work jobs under the table or are in a living situation where not everyone at the actual address is register as living at that particular address. So the household is bringing home comfortable pay but being “outside of the family.” So the single mom with 3 kids will jump through all the hoops to get assistance (and she may need it to some extent), yet there are significant others bringing in perfectly respectable amounts of money in to the house. I don’t think getting assistance is easy, or something that someone can just walk to their local town hall and fill out a 1 page form and sign it at the bottom, but people clearly are abusing it. And like all shitty things in this administration they aren’t analyzing the situation and forming a controlled plan. They are just blurting shit out that makes no sense at all.
Again - I’m all for supporting those in need - to assist them. But those abusing the system… I just dunno what you do with those people.
Like with every other business/government program/etc you do whatever you can that is reasonable to stop fraud and then just accept that a small amount of fraud will still occur.
Everyone who has ever run a restaurant or retail store knows that some of your employees will steal from you. It’s just a fact, but the wrong thing to do would be to shut down all restaurants or retail stores because of it, or to treat all employees like thieves. You just build the loss (called “shrinkage”) into the cost of running the business.
This is a useful post, because it illustrates one of the many ways the current systems are poorly implemented. That’s what needs to be fixed, not some awful replacement program involving sending out premade boxes of processed food and Trump logos.
There are far more people getting pitiful SNAP benefits or getting rejected outright than there are people getting $400 a month from SNAP along with a regular income. It’s just that the right-wing anecdotes and even the real-world stories (I work at a grocery store, and I see quite a bit of the “customer comes in and buys $50 of potato chips and soda with their Link card” scenario, which I think is far worse than people buying luxury meats and seafood) only reflect the bad actors. Some of this stuff can also differ from state to state or even from case to case, and sometimes the program legitimately does just screw up in one way or the other.
I have two anecdotes here: one, my girlfriend’s awful mom has been incarcerated for something like eight months now, but her SNAP benefits (which were about $350 a month) were still active until this month. Two, I just used my state’s SNAP calculator, and based on a fudged version of my personal income and our apartment’s rent (I work a lot more than the 20 hours a week typically used in part-time wage calculations, and I don’t pay the full rent myself), making less than a thousand dollars a month before taxes and paying $550 between rent and utilities, I’d be eligible for…$77 a month from SNAP if I lived here alone. I plugged in the same numbers but added a dependent, and it jumped to $327 a month.
My ideal rework of the program would be to improve the eligibility process at all levels (particularly for adult individuals - something’s very wrong with the program if an income well below the poverty line is barely able to get you enough in benefits to have a cheese sandwich for every meal, unless you’re also a single parent), figure out a way to limit “junk” purchases (by which I mean purely unhealthy and low-cost items like potato chips and soda, not “this is the most calories for my dollar” items like the cake mix example, or luxury meat and seafood that should theoretically be limited by price and by the amount of money already being spent on necessities), and figure out a good way to fix the “prepared meals” rules that let you get a take-and-bake pizza at Papa Murphy’s with SNAP benefits, but not a hot rotisserie chicken from the grocery store’s deli. It absolutely doesn’t involve replacing the program with the government cheese version of BlueApron, though such a program in addition to SNAP benefits could be useful (and instead of the high expense and waste of food boxes constantly being shipped out, maybe it could be something like the pre-printed WIC vouchers I work with daily).
You have to prove your residence to get SNAP, either with your own name on a lease or with a utility bill in your name. And then they will follow up at some point to verify the number of people at that address. Again, if you apply for SNAP, everyone within your sphere of relations is going to know about it. It is an invasive process, and one that certainly surprised the hell out of me for how thorough it is.
According to this article:
Fraud was at about 1.5% of the entirety of the system in 2015.
But yes, please keep throwing your anecdotes at us.
What his says to me is that it’s not worth the money to address. Just keep it at 1.5% and find another way to improve the program.
But that 1.5% of fraud is going to poor people! If we implement Trump’s plan, we can boost fraud to 10-15% or more, and all of that will go to job creators!
You are the only one having that conversation. Nobody else is. Only you, all alone. You are truly all alone, all by yourself. Nobody there beside you.
The food box thing would cost way more than people are thinking or it will actually hurt people.
Why? Because everyone has different dietary needs. There are people who have received transplants that have very restrictive diets. Can’t have things you’d never consider like lunch meats, certain breads, bagged greens, and tons of other things. Many people have allergies to certain fruits and vegetables. People with diabetes have different dietary needs, people with cancer have different dietary requirements, and the list goes on and on and on. So are they going to design a food box for every single person? If they were to do this to not hurt anyone it would cost way WAYYYY more than the current system.
The food box thing is stupid, and shows no thought whatsoever went into it. trump wants to use it as a way to lower cost and get people on welfare the worst quality food possible. This is what he does. He hates the poor.
I bet you Amazon could create a pretty nifty system for customizing and delivering these boxes. But it would be way, way, way more expensive than letting people go to the store on their own.
Why would we worry about the dietary or religious needs of the poor? Just fill each box with the same Anglo-American food, and if a participant claims they can’t eat this or that, tell them they should change their needs to something more compatible with poverty.
That’s how Guap’s statements were coming out. He’s a really good guy, but sometimes his vision is a little cloudy. Pride sometimes makes it hard to see through when one becomes vested in one side of an argument.
Peanut allergy? Tough luck.
Heh. No need to stop there.
Diabetic? Tough. Kidney, liver, or gall bladder condition? Sucks to be you.
Oh, and hope you’re not living in an efficiency that just has a microwave and toaster oven. Or in a weekly-rent motel/hotel.
Honestly, I think the dietary needs issue is a bit of a red herring, because many of the people who this would apply to are likely already eating the cheapest $ / calorie foods (e.g. fast food), and just absorbing the health impact into their bodies as it is (untreated diabetes, etc.)
I say a bit, because there are obviously people who would be impacted, and some other things, like allergies, halal/kosher requirements would be observed by current recipients.
Regardless, I think the sheer logistical impracticality is reason enough to discount it.
To nitpick the DoA report is about retailer fraud, which was a significant problem in the past that has been fixed, but not total fraud. It doesn’t include people with off-the-books income who receive SNAP. I’m happy to believe triggercuts’ assessment that other kinds of applicant fraud (where you lie about people in the household or similar) are very difficult.
Ultimately I can’t imagine that even the largest conceivable amount of that kind of fraud outweighs the good done by a program providing the most basic of subsistence to people.
I concur with many posters who see the irony in the GOP suggesting a totally separate government administered food purchasing and distribution network, rather than simply giving people the ability to use money-equivalent to take advantage of the fantastic network provided by the free market.
It is expensive to be poor, and it is difficult to not be poor if you are poor, and it sucks to be poor, and poor folks by necessity have to maximize their resourcefulness to have a chance at survival, and it is a good and decent thing for our national government to try and improve the quality of life of its poorest citizens (sure, and religious and private organizations, and personal philanthropy, too!) and it is a really shitty thing to do to hinder those small attempts to ameliorate miseries, especially warding off malnutrition or starvation.
I’ve never experienced poverty, thank goodness, though there was a period of my life where I was coasting on savings and the kindness of friends and family. My thoughts on poverty in America as listed above were mostly formed from these sources, in increasing order of length:
Senator Paul Wellstone’s slogan: “it’s hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you don’t have any boots.”
A small clip from a fantasy novel. I know, I know, but it struck a sympathetic cord, and followed the theme of boots relating to want:
A blog post, now over a dozen years old, by an author who grew up in poverty and is very, very glad to be seeing it in his rear view mirror:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/amp/
(He wrote a followup article ten years later:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/09/03/being-poor-ten-years-on/amp/ )
A 2000-ish bestselling non-fiction book where the writer took a number of minimum wage jobs around the country and described her experiences and those of her coworkers. It wasn’t all steak and champagne.
https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0312626681
Never apologize for quoting Terry Pratchett. Never.