SNAPpy
I don’t understand why SNAP (the fancy new name for the food stamps program) uses almost entirely open-ended debit cards, yet WIC generally sticks with vouchers geared toward specific types of food (milk, cereal, etc.).
The very acronym of SNAP, which begins with “Supplemental Nutrition,” seems to belie what should be the real intent of the program. I would prefer it to be called ASAP, Anti-Starvation Assistance Program. Why am I spending $80 billion a year to supplement the diets of millions? I would rather spend $40 billion, or preferably much less, a year to provide baseline nutrition for those in emergency need. They can do their own supplementing as it is possible.
If you establish the spirit of the program to provide bread, milk, beans, rice, vegetables, fruit, and nutritional and inexpensive proteins, and bottled water when necessary, you can essentially set up SNAP to be the same thing as WIC, but for everyone in need. In fact, just merge the two and have infants be an additional rider on an existing assistance contract.
I don’t see how SNAP needs to be so broad, if WIC is supposed to be good enough to keep infants, young children, and mothers alive. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as dear Mittens would say.
If FLOTUS can dictate to me what I should eat, I don’t see why SNAP can’t be a pretty strict plan. Maybe in earlier eras it seemed okay to be prescriptive only about what infants and children should be eating, but in the Bloombergian era of banning soft drink sizes for all, why can’t we go ahead and get a little bossier about what adults should be getting on the dole? If the free market is getting limited by government, why can’t the public sector food racket get the same, or preferably much stricter, treatment?
Sliding toward the absurdity of Freakonomics and such, what if we cut people’s SNAP benefits if they and their families are found to be gaining weight? The way it is now, SNAP is just another injection of cash to construct a “true” “living wage” for those who are working, and to subsidize higher market wages by keeping a large set of people out of the workforce and on the dole. It’s not overly concerned with exactly how close somebody is to being truly in need. And it’s certainly not watching out for what people are doing with the money, beyond the most basic of controls.
These are luxury expenditures on a societal level, just like baking contraceptives into health plans legislatively. We can certainly afford luxury in our society, even on a grand scale, but with the debt outlook we have, it’s going to get necessary to ask if we’re accomplishing the actual goals of these programs. Which luxuries do we want to fund?
Political rhertoric as it is, you hear “Paul Ryan wants to shut X down, cut Y totally, etc.” This is not good. We don’t want people starving on the streets, but we need to be able to talk over how we avoid this without accusations of total malice immediately flying. The means are a valid discussion, and maybe the same - or similar - ends can be met in different ways.