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.
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).
It’s easy to talk about how people on food stamps should just cook healthy meals… when you have a house, with a kitchen, and a fridge, and aren’t working 3 jobs, and don’t have kids that are bombarded with ads for sugar coated sugar ………………………
It’s just another way to punish the poor.
No one can possibly have food sensitivities or allergies to common and cheap ingredients. Everyone is able to cook everything from scratch. Disability is just mind over matter. You just have to MAKE time and prioritize. You need to work more than one job? MAKE the time. Just sleep less. Not feeling well because of that? Well, I struggled too (in college, where I didn’t have many responsibilities and there was also an end date) so you can do it!
You just have to want it.
Signed, someone that was given all the speeches when I asked for help because I was broke and occasionally homeless. Makes you not want to ask for help any more.
Besides, a person of food stamps could be eating a healthy diet, but still simply want a treat once in a while without destroying their finances, because, it turns out, the poors sometimes want to enjoy things.
This is exactly it. People are outraged imagining that other people on food stamps are out eating lobster dinners every night and they cheer on the idea of adding all sorts of restrictions on what people are allowed to buy. It’s dehumanizing and it doesn’t actually solve any problems, it just creates new ones. Now people are at the store trying to figure out what they can afford because spaghetti is covered but spaghetti sauce is not and no one has time to make a fresh spaghetti sauce from scratch after working two jobs but some fuck thought it was funny to stick it to the poors and pass a bunch of complicated restrictions that make it a pain in the ass for everyone.
“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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Is that you, Republican Jesus?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
This isn’t going to help anyone eat healthier, just make poor people more miserable.
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.
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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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.
People aren’t fundamentally racist, stuck up or bigoted.
Yes, at least some of them are. Don’t be this naive. You could make the argument even that most of MAGA are EcOnOmiCalLy AnXIoUs but (trigger warning: Godwin’s Law) so were most nazis. SOME people really are like that.
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.
That was called marketing and it sold a lot of Teslas. No one who will do a nazi salute is capable of delivering the utopia future you describe. Anyone who would do a nazi salute is definitively always a jackass.
Otherwise I agree and really do appreciate this kind of hopefulness. I really think what you’re saying is correct and important. It’s just, well, those two SLIGHT bits of contention… Sorry.
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.
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?
This is a great idea, it will make healthy food more abundant for everyone via economies of scale. Ban tartrazine and put a warning for high sugar content and trans fats.
This would only make sense if food stamps were the main driving factor in junk food sales (they’re not, everyone wants to eat garbage sometimes).
I don’t think he government needs to subsidize eating garbage, though.
Neither do I, but beef subsidies aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
so tax junk food higher and subsidize healthy food directly? or do we only want poor people to eat healthy food?
Why not both?
Gonna tax people to pay for the corn subsidies then tax people for eating the corn syrup
Food desserts in farm country are real. Wanna ride elsewhere? Can’t pay Uber with food stamps.
Healthier foods tend to be more expensive, and I highly doubt food stamp restrictions will magically change that. Also, sometimes people just need the calories.
Economies of scale are kinda like magic.
I’d rather not wager millions of people’s food security on that bet though. That magic must come FIRST, before we rely on it.
You do realize 8 billion usd are spent on soda via snap every year right? We have a sick twisted corporate oligarchy with its fingers in the food supply pushing cheap junk food on everyone. Everyone knows Whole Foods cost more than processed food, but an astronomical amount of SNAP is spent on food that should simply not be funded. Beans and rice and bread are far cheaper than any junk food you can find, and when people are being brainwashed by big food corporations there needs to be an external incentive (no SNAP funding) that pushed people away from junk food.
Honestly, I wish there’s was a 50% sin tax on all food above a certain calories/gram or processed or whatever criteria you want that would be reinvested into subsidies for healthy food on SNAP. But that would never happen because Wall Street makes too much money off of fat Americans.
A good discussion is here on the “8 billion usd for soda” figure.
TL;DR: it uses data from 2011 from one store, and the media got the number wrong after extrapolating it to all food stamps expenditure.
Honestly, I wish there’s was a 50% sin tax on all food above a certain calories/gram or processed or whatever criteria you want that would be reinvested into subsidies for healthy food on SNAP. But that would never happen because Wall Street makes too much money off of fat Americans.
Good intentions here, but the LAST thing we need is an increase on consumer basics like this. Cheap candy bars and sodas are one of the few pleasures that are still affordable for people, despite their unhealthy effects. I’d prefer subsidies to healthy food vs. yet another cost increase.
If we could snap our fingers and make healthy food cheaper, this plan might be fine. But if you don’t do that, this idea just ends up making calories more expensive for poor people. Perhaps it could work okay if people also got more money’s-worth of food stamps, but even then there are food deserts where people just don’t have groceries within a reasonable distance.
I don’t see a future where politicians are willing to spend more money helping people, so if that’s the case then letting people continue to use SNAP on junk food is necessary.
I can’t tell if this is a serious comment or not; I’m going to just assume that it isn’t, given where we’re at.
I’d say we will save money by forcing them to be healthy. The outrage is about this not being a social safety net but something closer to a minimum income.
I for one fully support a minimum income. Maybe, rather than taking choices away from disadvantaged adults and treating them like children, we should be examining why they’re disadvantaged in the first place, and fixing the systems that allow that to happen.
Alternately, outlaw unhealthy food entirely, regardless of income. See how well that polls. If you’re really concerned about public health, that’s the logical step.
Was this comment written by RFK? Also trans fats have already been banned in the US since 2021, and had mandatory labeling since 2006.
warning for high sugar content and trans fats
These are the same folks that think the “diet” in diet cola makes it healthy. They aren’t going to read anything or change their habits. Junk food is tasty and that’s as far as the thought goes.
So are they okay with healthier foods like steak, lobster, and avocado toast now?
So no fruit juice?
Well, they definitely could get worms for all I care.
