In the current debate about SNAP (food stamps), my position is as follows:
This is reasonable and would make the program more sustainable.
When we emigrated to Canada, we were told that in the first 10 years of residence, we weren’t entitled to any benefits. We found that good and reasonable. Of course, we saw many fellow immigrants cheat the system. But for us, it was a point of honor never to ask for welfare. We wanted to prove our value to the new country. It felt good not to be a leach.
Welfare should be for people whose ancestors contributed, in my opinion. But limiting it to citizens would already be a good step in the the right direction.
–Also would (if I had the magic wand) simply revert to the old Commodity Foods program, which distributed food, purchased wholesale by the govt. Saves money by cutting out corporate middlemen, and ensures that the food distributed provides basics needed to prevent frank nutritional deficiencies. Plus free cooking classes for how to get the most out of your box of ingredients.
That sounds brilliant. I didn’t know it existed, to be honest.
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My parents used the program, back when they were young, broke, and dealing with dad’s prolonged recovery from serious head injury. It was a good program. You’d pick up a box every week (month?), with powdered milk, powdered eggs, dry beans, dry grains, bread, peanut butter, canned meats, canned vegetables, molasses, flour, cornmeal, cheese, some other things. Mostly shelf stable. People would swap in the parking lot: parents were vegetarians, so they’d trade canned meats for molasses, which some people didn’t know how to use or didn’t like, but which is very nutrient dense. This was common.
On the buying side, the USDA would purchase this stuff in huge quantities directly from farmers. This is why SNAP is under the USDA instead of HHS. It was a farm insurance program. How that worked was, the USDA would guarantee farmers a certain price for certain commodity foods. The price wasn’t great, and farmers could make more on the open market, in a year when crops were not great and supply was tight. But it protected them from good crop years and similar market fluctuations: it takes them all season to grow a crop of wheat. If there’s an oversupply and the price of wheat collapses, farmers go broke. So the program had the dual purpose of stabilizing farm incomes, and providing food for the poor.
It was replaced by SNAP (thanks to lobbying from grocery chains and food corporations, who wanted a cut), and farm subsidies, both of which have much bigger downsides and are more prone to abuse than the original program. There was a certain amount of blackmarket reselling of government cheese in the commodity foods program, but doesn’t seem to have been remotely comparable to the current EBT-for-cash scams.
-ethyl
It’s impossible to explain in words how much I hate the food industry. It shouldn’t be propped by the government in any shape or form. It’s poisonous garbage. And now I’m discovering that this great program was destroyed to feed the greedy food industry.
I’m very pro welfare state but not in the current form. For example, there should be child benefits. But for married, working citizens.
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It’s the food industry on both sides, too. Farm subsidies (unlike the price guarantees for the Commodity program), encourage overproduction of corn and soy, and make all the subsidized crops absurdly cheap at taxpayer expense. This is why corn syrup and soybean oil are in *everything* now. Because of farm subsidies. So the destruction of the commodity foods program lets the processed food industry buy corn/soy/etc under the cost of producing it, and then also rake in retail profits selling the factory-made foodlike end products to the poor.
It’s evil, and it’s a huge contributor to why Americans are so fat and unhealthy.
Didn’t really sink in until we lived in PE. It wasn’t just that the food was amazingly better, fresher, more variety… it’s that the more processing that went into it, the more expensive it was– and the difference was really noticeable. Chocolate, cookies, canned tuna, and peanut butter were expensive. Fresh produce, turkey, fish, eggs, and beef were astonishingly cheap by comparison. Which makes sense because more labor, materials, machinery, supply chains etc. go into the processed food. But I had never really seen before how hugely the subsidies distort the market. I think it’s a knock-on effect, like, it starts out with processed food being artificially cheap, then you throw in ‘food scientists’ optimizing the level of crunch and MSG in that engineered corn product, and you end up with… there’s just not enough of a market for good, fresh, high-quality meat and produce to bother stocking it in most stores, so you get this bizarre situation where the sort of fresh food that’s available in every mercado and smalltown chợ outside the US, to ordinary workmen, is unimaginable luxury to ordinary people here. If you can convince enough people to buy Doritos instead, then it’s not worth sourcing five kinds of bananas or having an in-house bakery or selling corazón de res, because only three people will buy them and the rest will go bad.
-ethyl
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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