study shows how 42M recipients spend their food stamps
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Anonymous
So your proposal is that in America, the supposed greatest country on earth, where we have enough resources to feed and house everyone if we had the political will, should allow children to go hungry because they happen to be number 3 or 4 in the birth order? And if you had any idea of the hoops and means testing that goes into qualifying for benefits. There is no huge percentage of people collecting benefits that don't need it. Quite the opposite. The systems are so poorly constructed and so complex, a lot of people aren't getting benefits they absolutely should qualify for. I truly hope you never find yourself in poverty. You're so dumb and misinformed, I doubt you could survive it. |
Anonymous
We all know WHY people are filling their carts with sodas and other junk: Because they can. Because we are paying for it and it’s quick and easy. But as others have pointed out, we then are forced to pay for their insulin and leg amputations and everything else when they are obese with diabetes because we are allowing it. We should be making it easier for them to make better decisions by simply not buying this damaging food FOR THEM. If they want to spend their own money on it, go ahead. But we shouldn’t be buying it FOR THEM. I honestly cannot understand what is remotely controversial about that. |
Anonymous
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There are other National food programs like WIC where pregnant and lactating women and children up to 5 get healthy food. There are certain categories like juice, milk, bread, peanut butter/beans, fruits/vegetables that participants can buy so much of each category. You can’t use WIC to buy soda, candy, cookies or processed food.
Then there is free school lunch and in many communities free school breakfast and for kids who stay after school even free school dinner. To get an accurate picture of the diet of people using snap you have to add all the nutritional programs together. And if you live in cities like Flint, Michigan you are going to be too afraid to have your family drink tap water. There are way too many places in the US where the tap water is not safe to drink. |
Anonymous
WTAF? You are an idiot. |
Anonymous
pp here. I recall heating up canned soup or a tv dinner for breakfast, when I was in ES, by myself. We didn't have a working oven (no microwave at the time), so I cooked it on the stove top. Not as bad as soda or chips as a meal, but yes, I ate overly processed foods for meals. Or, I skipped meals. I was a latchkey kid starting at the age of 7 or 8. When I got home, I was starving, so I ate .. chips. My mother woke up at 5am to prep dinner. But, at least my dad drove her to the grocery store (she never learned to drive), and she didn't have to take public transport lugging all the groceries. All she did was cook, clean and go to work. I can't imagine how much harder her life would have been had she not had access to a car or was a single parent. Immigrant kids I knew ate overly processed food all the time. She had a really hard life and now has alzheimers. I'm convinced it's from all the stress she went through. |
Anonymous
I'm not disagreeing with you that soda and junk is not what we want people to be eating. Where I disagree with you is HOW to address the issue. Your solution is focused on the individual and only serves to make their lives more difficult and miserable. I'm instead suggesting that we look to addressing the SYSTEMIC issues that make junk food so cheap and accessible, that make it such that people with full time jobs need food stamps, that housing has gotten so expensive people are living in squalor without the basic kitchen equipment needed to even have a chance to store and prepare healthy food, that Americans are so miserable and despairing that we turn to food to fill the void of comfort and joy in our lives. I don't think you fix these problems by being punitive or more control on poor people because I do not genuinely believe they choose this life. It's thrust upon them by a broken system, and the choices they make, while not ideal, make perfect sense given the full picture of the challenges they face and the privileges they lack that you and I take for granted. |
Anonymous
Did the rest of the family help? Did her children do their duty and assist with chores like cleaning and looking after younger siblings or even help her cook, go to the store for her? My mom also never learned to drive, with 3 kids we knew we needed to find a job as teenagers, we didn’t think about asking for parents to pay for extra curriculars or hobbies. Money from odd jobs was for our living expenses like bus tickets and school supplies, clothing and occasional snacks. We didn’t think about our parents as providers and none of us even got a car and had to finance our own driving school |
Anonymous
Someone people are not willing to help themselves and they don’t deserve help. If don’t have a full time job and they aren’t disabled they should not get assistance at all. I used to be like you and sympathize with people, but after volunteering at places to help these people, I realized many of them just make bad decisions. |
Anonymous
I hate to break it to you but most of these poor people as you call them will no doubt take less from the system as you term it… because they will die statistically early deaths and no doctors will offer heroic and expensive end of life care to extend their lives… nor will they receive expensive treatments along the way that might actually delay or prevent the onset of serious illness. You most likely will however have $100s of thousands of medicare dollars spent on life extending treatments that will maybe net you an extra 3-6 months, or a year or 2 at most. Or you will drag your pops in for open heart surgery at 72, $100+k easily, make him suffer, and then he kicks off anyway in a year or two but not before he too racks of $300k in end of life care. This will repeat over and over until your final farewell where you too will really sock it to the taxpayers to the tune of about $300K… for a few weeks of care because your kids who deem your life so valuable won’t want to let you go. To the tax paying youth, who are supplementing the last 10-20 years of your life, via medicare and SS, you are a non productive suck of resources, entirely non productive in anyway that helps them. After all old women bare no fruit! At least those poor people are raising future revenue generators to pay for your future of expensive healthcare that will produce diminishing returns. Oh and aren’t you sucking up insurance benefits that in one way or another we all pay for? You just don’t see it that way. Because after all your life is more valuable. Knee and hip replacements because you refused to believe that running will ruin your hips and knees, or therapy because navel gazing happens when you have time to waste, or that expensive treatment that your kid needs because they inherited a genetic disorder or were a preemie, or you couldn’t conceive naturally but you really wanted a mini me, so you did IVF, and now nature being nature your kids are developmentally delayed and they suck up an inordinate amount of school resources that we all pay for. Do you think that money goes to poor kids whose parents don’t have the resources to work the system. So those poor people of whom you speak of with such derision aren’t nearly the collective drain that you think they are, and you aren’t at all the individual gift to society that you think you are. You’re a cog in the machine and a whiny, entitled, dull and not very useful cog at all really. And no arguments about how you paid into the system so you are entitled! That’s b.s., as explained above, you’ll suck out way more than you ever put in. So since you will be and are sucking up my money shouldn’t I have a say in how you use it? It’s a free for all so let’s all jump on the most vulnerable. That may include you and yours at some point. So DNA tests for all. If you have any issues that may cause the taxpayers burden then sterilize or euthanize. So do us all a favor when you turn 68 throw yourself off of a cliff into the sea, make sure your family knows no taxpayer money is to be spent on recovery efforts. That would definitely save all of the remaining productive and useful taxpayers a ton of money. And be good for the environment too. |
Anonymous
My kids don’t have a have a genetic disorder because I screened for this during IVF. The premature birth issue for IVF is mostly attributable to multiple embryo transfers, when you control for number of embryos transfers the risk difference is minimal. I pay a lot more taxes than people on welfare do and the social security payment formula only replaces 15% of lifetime earnings above a certain cutoff. I am contributing much more in taxes than I collect in benefits. |
Anonymous
I'm talking about the children you want to punish because you don't like the choices their parents made. And you opinion means nothing in the face of mountains of research and studies that have proven that poverty is caused by systemic issues NOT individual choices. |
Anonymous
Of course the “research” proves that nothing is ever poor peoples fault. Because god forbid people actually make responsible decisions and take care of themselves. I don’t buy this argument at all. The people conducting this research are usually in academic fields with very subjective research and a low bar for entry. Sociology professors and social workers don’t conduct rigorous empirical research. |
Anonymous
So you, random internet yahoo, think you know better than the people who have dedicated their careers to studying these issues? You sound as dumb as the anti mask and anti vaccine crowd. We pay to educate these people, and we pay them to conduct this research and advise on policy. Listen to them! |
Anonymous
Comprehension fail on your part… but it is rather amusing that I pegged you so aptly, right down to your believing that you will ultimately pay in more than you receive. It’s not a benefit, that others are subsidizing one way or another, for you it’s all entitlement. Like I said keep up the good works and throw yourself off of a cliff at 68. |
Anonymous
People from all SES backgrounds make bad decisions. Poverty limits options and produces more severe consequences than your cushy MC life. In no scenario should kids be going undernourished in the US. |