So, food stamps are an agricultural subsidy. The reason they can buy junk food in the first place is because this is a hand out to corn syrup producers.
Good fucking luck taking on big ag with this idea, RFK Jr.
My understanding is that this move can only be appropriately considered through the lens of the aesthetics of maintaining an effective culture war.
Like the racially charged tirades against “welfare queens” of the past, this pretends to deal with income inequality on a level that blames the victim only, while doing nothing for the systemic factors that create and maintain junk food dependency.
It’s like a school or church entity attempting to deal with widespread sexual abuse by making and enforcing dress codes on potential victims.
I was always told the democrats were going to ban junk food and raise my taxes. I voted for them anyways but here the republicans are going and doing it.
yeah but he’s doing it for poor people so it’s ok because fuck poor people
You say that but I keep fucking poor people and nobody ever gives me any governmental power… maybe I should try not being poor
Hitler was a bit of a health nut too, lots of anti smoking laws.
True, the old school fascists loved physical ideals. Trump I could see going for anti alcohol laws as he’s a teetotaler whose brother died to the bottle, but he’s an obese man addicted to McDonald’s.
Wow he was opposed to people breathing toxic gases??!
He didn’t think of them as people, so it all checks out.
It’s funny cause the US school lunch program is garbage food
Careful, they’ll ban that next
This will do literally fucking nothing because food stamps don’t cover grocery bills for anybody. You always have to subsidize it.
They also don’t buy diapers, as per Marshall Mathers (2002).
Least bad news from America in a week. Though if the junk food isn’t replaced with equal calories from healthy veggies, for the same amount of stamps, or however that works, it would be evil
if the junk food isn’t replaced with equal calories from healthy veggies, for the same amount of stamps
It won’t be. This just ignores the fact that one of the reasons junk food is popular is because it’s cheaper than ready-to-eat healthy food.
The actual problem: Many parts of America are food deserts where people do not have access to affordable nutritious food. This problem is exacerbated for those below the poverty line who may not have access to a vehicle.
But solving that problem is hard so it’s just way easier to make sure that poor people aren’t allowed to buy the food that is accessible to them. Making desperate people even more desperate… I’m sure that wont have any unintended consequences.
And much more readily available. Decent food can be hard to come by in some places.
Well, I have dozens of healthy food programs ideas but I guess shortage of ideas isn’t the problem.
From my experiences with junk food diet, you feel extremely bad on it and when you are in hard situation you probably need to be in prime brain fitness without junk food brain fog. Prolonged junk food feels like intoxication almost.
So I think providing such vitamins and micro-elements for cheap/free should be very important to overall strategy of pulling people out of poverty.
If such were provided then discontinuing junk food support would be a next logical step.
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But of course many much smarter people figured it all out ages ago already. What ‘
left’ solid folks fail at is they don’t immediately understand that empathy and good plan isn’t enough but you need marketing.In their honesty they often fail to see the appeal of the shallow and the allure of the superficial. All the skills alt right excels at.
They do not easily see or aren’t willing to, that you often need to trick or even lie or manipulate people to be in the position to do good things and/or to do them effectively on a big scale.
Yeah I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the left is so aware of the fact that we’re correct we sometimes forget to actually sell it. We’re a plain bottle of salicylic acid on the shelf next to a full display of the latest and greatest 100% genuine snake oil
The alt right rise is nothing else but a failure to sell a solution to the future obstacles. People aren’t fundamentally racist, stuck up or bigoted. They just buy the only thing that is left on the barren political market. The one that gives them hope. Even if it is only a cheap trick of some ‘patriotic’ demagogue.
There was once a time, very brief, when Elon Musk wasn’t a complete jackass. A brief time when people were watching rocket starts with awe that instilled hope in them. Hope in the vision of the better future. If we could rally people around this idea, that the future of humanity is bright, tolerant and abundant, that we can become something noble and beautiful, then that I believe would be a uniting force we need. Challenges, sure but worth solving because of what we can become if we succeed.
Climate scientists do not understand the reaction of average person when they tell them “We must lower our CO2 footprint”. The response is Why? It isn’t a question about what will happen but the question of motivation. People ask “What is the reward of solving it, what will I have from it?”. Of course scientists are pissed at such questions and throw a snarky answer.
What will an average person have from fighting climate change? You will have future of thriving great nature and an abundance of basic goods provided by it. You will experience unity that was achieved by solving great problems together. You will have plethora of technological wonders that come from focused collaboration of human beings. You will have a victory, not merely containment of defeat.
We won’t make America great again. We will make America greater than it ever was before.
Much as I hate Scott Adams now, there was a time when he wasn’t a complete jackass.
If you are doing even a tiny bit of meal prep, junk food becomes quite expensive on a calorie per dollar basis. Your fundamentals like potatoes, beans, pastas, and rice include of shitload a calories and none require a bunch of prep work. Those fundamentals are also significantly better for you than jellied sugar.
If your family needs food, buy potatoes, beans, pasta, and rice…not candy.
Next you’ll ban butter, cheese and salt because “fat makes you fat” and “salt gives you high blood pressure”
Because in 2025 we want our poor to eat unseasoned rice, beans, pasta and potatoes while they work our fields and factories so the ownership can get another, bigger super yacht this year.
How is he going to define this? Food is so processed that almost anything can be junk food.
It’s simple, just pay FDOGE(formerly the FDA) $100/mo and you can put a special blue checkmark on your food packaging to signify its not junk food.
Companies can buy checkmate subscriptions for $500,000 a month
Sorry, you’re right, I was way too low. But let’s be realistic it will be more like $420,690
As it applies only to food stamps, I guess that’s the goal.
They’ll fight those “welfare queens” (blegh) in court in order to not have to guarantee a minimum of survival.
Pasteurization is considered processing.
How is he going to define this?
Bahahha, they don’t care about logical consistency. They are going to ban anything they think is “bad” and allow everything else. Trying to nail them down is like trying to staple jello – there’s no logical approach. Trump and Co. take flying by the seat of your pants to a new art form.
You can’t get them on “gotchas” like this because they simply DO NOT CARE.
“And the poor shall not be allowed even the pleasure of sugary treats. Yea, they shall have their food stamps slashed for the sin of poverty.”
Book of Jebus, chapter 6, verses 3 and 4.
Seriously, though, it seems like everything these people do is just to inflict more suffering.
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Yeah. That’s their whole aim. Make sure more people are a poor as possible and as beaten down as possible. These are the same politicians that don’t want Walmart to pay their workers enough money to get off food stamps.
I’m sure this is the push they need to get that six figure job that they have avoided to do because they are lazy
The problem is it’s probably a good idea to get people in deprivation to eat healthier. It’s also a reasonable claim that antidepressants are over prescribed.
However, if the alternative is unaffordable, the solution is just a punishment.
This is just a pretext to reduce food stamp payments. Conservatives have used this rhetoric since the 90s to attack food stamp payments. “Welfare queens are buying STEAK with your tax dollars!”
And the overwhelming majority of antidepressants are prescribed on a voluntary basis, eg the people taking them are choosing to do so because they feel there is not a more viable option for them. There is a whole essay on why this is the case but just some key points: therapy is really expensive (often a therapist costs almost as much as a psychiatrist except it’s a weekly visit instead of monthly), effective therapy requires a lot of active buy in and effort that people often don’t have the bandwidth required to contribute due to external factors like oppressive work or family life, therapy requires a time investment, stigma, etc. essentially overprescribing is a side effect of massive systemic issues
So do you address any of these systemic issues? Do you address any of the issues related to the western diet being loaded with sugar and other carbs, that we have huge swaths of residential areas with no proper grocery stores around throughout a great deal of the US, or that our environments are so structured around cars that we walk like 50 feet a week, etc?
Nah, just create more financial stress for poor people who eat like all of us (eg, like shit). Punitive approach 100% of the time!
How about increasing the amount of ebt funds for people who do not buy an excessive amount of empty calorie food and drink? Create a base amount of funds that everyone gets and increase the amount by 2.5% for every 25% of funds used that are dedicated to “healthy foods”. So if you buy only “healthy foods” you get an extra 10% of your ebt allotment, and if you buy nothing but junk then you aren’t penalized (unless of course you count not getting the reward, I guess). But this isn’t punitive so americans hate it
Or maybe make regulations that any grocery store that opens more that 20 stores is required to maintain at least 1 store per 20 in an underserved area that will not be profitable. Adjust the regulation actively of course so that whole foods doesn’t just become 800 separate stores to circumvent the regulation or whatever. But this means that corporations have to do something to enrich communities at the expense of constant profits so americans hate it
Or any of the obvious shit people have gone on about for ages. Nationalized health care, shorter work weeks with improved wages, workers getting equitable shares of companies, robust pensions, unions, etc. but americans are brain washed to think this is commie bullshit
They are correct about one part. The welfare queens, like Walmart and McDonald’s are absolutely buying steak and caviar with the money they save not paying their staff.
I wanted to float out there the argument that I’ve had some luck with, with Xtians.
“How many good people did Jesus want you to starve in order to make sure no one was having it “too good?” Because I feel like he just said to feed the poor, not to make sure they weren’t eating too well.”
everyone getting so serious over a worm joke i mean i appreciate it but worms 🪱 lol worms
True, but then you would have to increase the amount of money they are getting.
The reason why poor people eat less healthy is because that’s the food they can afford.
The healthy food is much more expensive.
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.
I need a new type of vote for when the post makes me sad
I can’t think of a quicker way to get rednecks to shoot in your general direction - take away their food stamp snackies.
???
parasites are mostly protien and reproductive organs. if you ever dissected a parasitic worms you will be able to see it has dozens of uteri or male gonads.
Why isn’t our low-protein gruel wearing down his resistance?
So are they okay with healthier foods like steak, lobster, and avocado toast now?
So no fruit juice?
There’s a percentage juice and ingredient requirements to not be in the “junk” category.
