Evicted<\/a>, who sell food stamps to get cash to meet their daily needs and rely on food banks, school meals, etc., afterwards.)<\/p>\nDone right, this could have some benefits.\u00a0 After all, one reads periodically that the poor are increasingly growing up in homes where the ability to cook has been lost, so a \u201cBlue Apron\u201d-type box with not just staples but recipes on how to put together meals, from the staples alone, or with the addition of fresh foods, would be a plus.\u00a0 And buying staples in bulk, then adding in the fresh items in other shopping trips, is a fairly common way of shopping.<\/p>\n
But the largest failing of this proposal is that it imagines that all recipients would be able to pick up their boxes from some central location \u2014 there is no delivery envisioned.\u00a0 And given that one of the larger difficulties in grocery shopping that the carless poor face is getting back and forth from the store, I don\u2019t see this system working without some provision for delivery.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s the greater quandary:\u00a0 one of the reasons why food stamps is perceived to \u201cwork\u201d \u2014 that is, to provide food to people without disrupting the market or causing price-fixing issues \u2014 is that people are given benefits to spend in the open market. Yes, that has undesirable consequences, when people don\u2019t spend the money the way we\u2019d like them to, but there\u2019s no particularly good way to avoid that.<\/p>\n
On the (third?) hand, well, the system is a mess in some ways.\u00a0 The working poor get a partial food stamp allocation because it, in principle, is supposed to just supplement their own food purchases, but when their\u00a0other expenses outstrip their income, they try to make the food stamp benefit cover their whole food costs.\u00a0 The unemployed single mother, on the other hand, can end up with a \u201csellable\u201d surplus of food stamps because the amounts don\u2019t distinguish between kids (who besides having smaller appetites also get meals at school) and adults.\u00a0 In many ways, cash benefits would make more sense, but there\u2019s too much worry that parents would let their kids go hungry while they spend the money on booze, to implement this.<\/p>\n
So, as usual:\u00a0 readers, what do you think?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Image:\u00a0from https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/chrstphre\/5489717927<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As reported in various sources, including Politico, the Trump administration in its latest budget has proposed reducing food stamp allocations and replacing them with packages of actual food, shelf-stable items including \u201d shelf-stable milk, peanut butter, canned fruits and meats, and cereal.\u201d\u00a0 The plan would save money because the government could source these items at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[240],"class_list":["post-8315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-food-stamps"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n