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For perspective, SNAP constitutes somewhere around 1.5% of the total Federal budget[0], and provides supplemental income for over 41M Americans[1]. So they're making everyone reapply because their disbursement headcount is off by less than 1% (180k vs 41M). It's hard not look at stuff like this and not see gross oppression. 0: https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-gover... 1: https://www.cbpp.org/res…
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The problem here is that healthier food tends to cost more, so you'd essentially be forcing people to buy less food unless you also simultaneously raised the disbursement. And then a certain wing of the media starts screaming about how the poor are eating organic salads on the backs of taxpayers. Sounds reasonable in theory but has little basis in our current political reality.
I hate this common trope about health food costing more. Beans, lentil, rice, potatos, carrots, onions, cabbage, garlic don't cost a lot, add some additional cheap proteins like chicken and eggs and you're good to go for like $50 or less per week per person. And if you can buy in bulk and freeze, then it can get even cheaper.
UBI would probably be a whole lot cheaper than micromanaging what people can and can't buy while not treating the most desperate people with unkind, perpetual suspicion.
The truth is this is yet another rug pull surprise to screw over poor people. Not just health insurance subsidy revocations or Medicaid cuts, because some people just aren't satisfied with trillions or all the power.
For context, state-administered food programs paid for by SNAP already treat recipients like criminals with extensive salary, income, assets, and life situation reporting and verification every 6 months to 12 months max. It comes across as just yet another way look down on poor people, waste their time, and spend more money on duplicated means testing already costing significantly more than whatever hunting down ever…
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A quibble… The 180k is just for the states that responded, if I understand correctly. They suspect that the rate of fraud could be much higher in other states. How much high? I have no idea. I don’t think anyone does. I think they want to reboot the program to try to remove the corruption.
I would also keep in mind that the 180k number is almost certainly inaccurate, if we go by this administration’s behavior during the DOGE efforts of manufacturing false claims of “fraud” out of benign circumstances as an excuse to tear down the social safety net systems.[1] > Bobba [DOGE engineer] had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in…
Right? Why is anyone taking this as a good faith number, let alone a fact, given who said it and where it was said?
It’s quite clearly made up nonsense.
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Reform is needed, yes, but this is a stupid comment. By your own argument 75% of SNAP is spent on normal food, mostly by people who need it
Cut the 25% and keep the 75% that is spent on normal food. By the other comments you can see that even that seems quite unpopular as it is seen as policing food for poor people?
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Less than one percent of 1.5% of $7 trillion, around $1 billion. Which is a significant sum, no doubt, but that's also less than $3/person in the US. Given the much larger wasted sums by DOD and other parts of the government, it's an amount I can live with. I'd rather see the real waste and abuse get addressed first, but it won't be. Address this, but address it in a way that doesn't cause undue harm to the 40.8 mill…
Agreed with everything you said, but people would say the exact same thing about some of the more wasteful programs that were shutdown. "It is only $50 million" etc got really old... It is not like you can expect to just find massive line items that can be easily removed
Ahem.