Quote:
Originally Posted by Engine
Regardless of whatever they are doing with their lives, I feel that food stamp recipients should spend their food stamps on whatever types of foods they want to eat.
What's the alternative? They can only purchase shitty food with them? Who would get to decide what they eat? What a horrible, even more fucked up system it would be if the government provided food stamps that can only be spent on macaroni and cheese. Especially considering that Medicare (not Obamacare but Medicare as we've known it for decades) will pay out for life-saving heart surgeries, etc.
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The thing is, it's not some arbitrary source (the government) that's providing its own money to support welfare out of the goodness of its heart. It's the taxpayers. There has to be some sort of effort to ensure that the money that we put into that system is being utilized efficiently and to the benefit of the families involved. Multiple lobsters and steaks taking up about half of the entire highest monthly payout is obviously not efficiency, and would not benefit a family for 2 weeks. Not even a single individual.
140 dollars worth nutritious meal ingredients you can cook at home and stretch for 2 weeks is efficient. I don't think anyone who supplies their own sustenance on a budget would disagree (unless you live in some crazy high-priced place like NY).
And I don't think anyone is suggesting that food stamps should be restricted to cheap, processed box food. The suggestion implied that it should simply restrict high dollar items that don't stretch. Because why would you provide a service that intends to meet the basic needs of people when you don't have some oversight into making sure that your entire goal is actually being met?
Simply giving people 300 bucks a month to spend how they want is not achieving the goal of ensuring low-income households have what they need to survive. It's simply spending tax dollars on the assumption that most of them will be responsible enough to utilize government assistance responsibly. I'm sure most of them do, too. But I don't see the harm in ensuring that those who don't are unable to neglect the purpose of the funds to begin with.
It's living assistance, not splurging assistance...