Food Fight

Megan McArdle has written an interesting series of posts over the last couple of days advocating the elimination of food stamps (or at least opposing expanding food stamps as part of a stimulus package), to be replaced by an expanded EITC and/or unemployment benefits. It’s not an issue I’ve thought a lot about, but she seems to make a fairly persuasive case. Some excerpts: 

The poor don’t need more food. Obesity is a problem for the poor in America; except for people who are too screwed up to get food stamps (because they don’t have an address), food insufficiency is not.

Saying that the poor don’t need more food is not the same thing as saying that the poor aren’t poor, or that they live joyous lives of material satiety. Being poor is awful for a score of reasons that I don’t think I have to go into–and if you doubt it, I invite you to rent an apartment in Anacostia or East New York for a month, and attempt to live on the average welfare grant.

But to the extent that you think we have an obligation to help the poor with their problems, and that those problems can be fixed by giving them money to buy things, then we should give them money to buy things. Attaching strings to the money both blunts the fiscal stimulus, and degrades the dignity of adult citizens who are presumptively capable of deciding whether they would like to spend their money on a bag of apples or a pair of shoes

Food stamps continue not because they’re great for the poor, but because they’re terrific for the farm lobby. If you want to give stimulus money to the poor, increase the EITC, welfare grants, disability, or unemployment insurance. (I’m on the record as being in favor of the former, against the latter).

If people are genuinely so screwed up that when given enough money to buy what they need, they fail to purchase enough food to sustain life, then what they need is not food stamps, but 24 hour supervision. If people will buy alchohol or some other unnecessary instead of feeding their children, then they are probably neglecting their children in other ways requiring a stronger intervention than an EBT card. One could argue that right now, incomes are not high enough to purchase basic necessities (and indeed, I think the EITC should be increased, as I’ve said numerous times.) But that still doesn’t make the case for food stamps for me; if the poor take money out of their food budgets to buy something else, it is presumably because they think they need that something even more than they need their next meal. Who am I to second guess them?