It’s me, I’m out there converting EBT to drug money at an exchange rate of 6%.
Shouldnt it be a honeless mans right to do with his water bottles and money as he pleases?
I have seen far too many people on Reddit argue that beggars and benefits recipients are literally richer than the average person because of the huuuuge income.
The “welfare cliff” I’ve seen discussed academically is actually focused on single mothers who lose much of their benefits when seeking employment, and must now pay for childcare, making the prospect a net loss for mother to enter the workforce after getting onto welfare benefits.
Unfortunately they’ll never realize the actual solution to this alleged abuse is to just give everyone like $300/month in food stamps.
If everyone is food secure, selling the food at a discount for cash becomes very difficult.
That would allow people to buy food from where ever, instead of using agricultural subsidies to allow American agriculture to have unearned advantages in the global food market and suppress the development of food independence worldwide.
honestly, that used to be the deal pre-nixon i want to say. to placate two constiuencies (farmers and low income families) the government purchased “commodities” (as defined by USDA title… raw/minimally processed agricultural goods flourmeal, cornmeal, milk, butter, eggs, probably some vegetables even) to institute a “price floor” and guarantee a certain income to the farming households even if markets/futures were volatile. those commodities were available through literal food stamps, similar to the ration cards found in other countries like cuba today. no cash. just stamps for commodities and stamps were made available depending on the size of the family.
it was one of those no-brainer elegant public policies that was dismantled to become a massive giveaway to food processors, who get to purchase the raw commodities at below market prices (because now the big agricultural subsidy program is for direct payments based on acres planted), which they add some salt + sugar to and turn into a shelf-stable quickly prepared vehicle for diabetes and heart disease.
I heard a lady ranting about these same fake anecdotes a few years ago and finally interrupted to tell her, look, I’m on food stamps, and it’s not nearly enough, and the restrictions are so arbitrary and punitive that you can’t even get hot food, and if you wanted to trade SNAP benefits for drugs you wouldn’t get very many drugs at all. She said, “Oh, I wasn’t talking about you, because you’re educated.” Even when they think they’re dialing it back they manage to go in weirder, even more offensive directions. Needless to say, she had no idea how much education I may or may not have had.
Its so frustrating that I can get a hot meal with food stamps. Right now I have a surplus of like 2k because I’m a single adult and I didnt change my spending habits when the covid bonus came in. Its probably mostly because I dont cook for myself most of the time so Im mostly buying like… pasta and cereal lol.
And apparently they’re planning to just… take people’s surpluses back soon according to one of my disability staff. If I could spend that money on a fucking pizza or something that’d be fucking fantastic, but no. I guess Ill just spend my surplus on a bunch of nonperishables to donate to a food pantry or something? Because just having the gov take it back is not happening lol fuck em.
A rice cooker could be a game changer. We’ve experimentally cooked Aldi’s bagged risotto in ours to good result, so I’d bet any rice-a-roni or other boxed and flavored rice dish would be an easy fire and forget meal. Just add water, turn it on, and come back in 30 minutes.
Also, Instant Pots make really easy rice and lentils dishes (lentils and white rice cook together perfectly) that can be saved and eaten on for days, or probably even frozen like a DIY tv dinner.
“I have seen homeless who buy bottled water on SNAP only to dump and resell the bottles so they could get cash for their addictions”
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You didn’t see that, you saw a viral video of a black person dumping out water in a parkinglot and everyone told you it was an EBT scam. Just because you see it shared on the internet does not mean it’s common.
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Maybe the solution is to help their addictions rather than just throw them cash they can only use to buy ramen and bottled water. You don’t nuke or means test a helpful program just because you fail to address another issue.
Some people really cannot separate the video they’re watching from the text that someone overlaid on the video. If I record someone moving a box from a room, I can put the text “this is a box of unscanned ballots ->” and “the employee is taking them out towards the parking lot” and some people will just unabashedly say they saw the thing happening that they read in my anonymous text.
