spurgeonryan said:
So poor people should be forced to know how to eat healthy, cook healthy, and buy healthy? Do you know how much that would cost?
Someone told me something about food stamps. But I forget. I will say that if we did what you say we would slam into a recession! Billions of dollars a month or close to that I can imagine go into food from food stamps each month. Just think of all the companies in America that would instantly lose all that money. Do you know how many jobs Food stamps create? Bill Clinton made huge changes to welfare. Money can only be recieved for 5 years of peoples life if I am not mistaken. Did that help? No. The government just found other things to spend the money on with in 4 years and we were bankrupted just about. Plus there is already a Bread, egg, milk, etc program. It is called W.I.C Women, infants, and children. It is tightly regulated. I will say that they could stop people from being able to go to restaurants with food stamps. That is uneccessary and would not hurt anyone much if it was stopped. Why make poor even more desperate? To be honest it is not hurting us taxpayers that much at all to allow a human being a little kindness in a hard life.
Also all of our defense spending can be cut in half. Soldiers do not need to train everyday. Too much money is given for supplies that just get wasted or sold. Does every soldier need 10 pocket knives? How about workable body armor instead? With all of our technology we still have struggled in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Go figure! |
Well see, I think you prove my point. There is an industry of junk food by the likes of Frito-Lay, Kraft, etc, that is heavily inflated by people who buy all that junk food using food stamps. It's almost a form of corporate welfare, when you think about it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if those companies lobbied heavily for the expansion of food stamps and other forms of welfare. It increases their sales. Those companies also are heavily-burdened with the continual rise in the minimum wage that bleeds out their bottom line and causes them to raise prices, lay people off, and reduce the amount of food in packaging. The government is literally driving them out of making a profit, however well-intentioned it may be.
I'm not arguing at all that people should be forced to know how to eat healthy, and it doesn't have to cost anything. I'm merely arguing that all food stamp purchases be only for basic food groups, and that it be a very narrow list. No education, no promotional costs, just a change at the Point-of-sale... all non-essential food either gets turned down for use with the food stamp card, or you pay for it with cash. Which brings me to another issue with this whole thing... now you can use food stamps at the ATM to withdraw cash! I mean it's just gotten so ridiculous. It would be laughable if it wasn't our money being taken from us to provide others with priviledge that many of them don't need.
Really, the only two ways to fix this is either A) Have a "Welfare cop" follow each recipient around all day making sure there's no waste, fraud and abuse... or B) Heavily, heavily cut the program back to the barest of essentials. Option A would likely cost more due to hiring even more Government bureaucrats, and it would also likely start riots and a race war. Option B would be the best way to handle it, even if there would be a lot of push-back and demogoguing from people who either aren't aware of how much abuse there is in the system, or simply don't care. Both are equally terrifying.
