Food stamps come with a bunch of restrictions. The most obvious is that they can only be spent on food. They are also restricted to food items that are not "hot foods". In some places, food stamps cannot be used to buy high sugar foods, like soda. Some would like to further restrict them to "non-luxury" foods, or, more accurately stated, low class foods, as if poor people were criminals who deserve some kind of beans and bread prison diet. On the surface, perhaps this seems like a good idea, but in reality, it is terrible.
The first problem with restricting what food stamps can be spent on is cost. Regulations are never free. Enforcing food stamp restrictions is expensive. In fact, there is some evidence that all of the restrictions we place on welfare in general cost almost as much as the welfare money that is actually distributed to poor people. Enforcing food stamp restrictions is just the tip of the iceberg though. The government has to spend a lot of money on audits and such, to make sure sellers honor the restrictions. The sellers themselves also have to pay though. It takes a lot of work sorting what can and cannot be bought with food stamps, so that point of sale systems can apply charges correctly. If an item is incorrectly marked as food in the system, that could result in a big fine or losing the ability to accept food stamps at all. Even worse, if an eligible food item is not marked correctly (and sadly, this actually happens all the time in stores that sell both hot and cold food products), it causes major inconvenience to customers, and it requires extra labor of employees to compensate for the error every time someone tries to buy the product on food stamps until it is fixed in the system. Restrictions on food stamps are costly to both the government enforcing them and to the businesses that have to do extra work to deal with them.
The second problem with food stamps is need. Food pantries, soup kitchens, and other sources of healthy food are readily available to poor people in most places. Individuals that want to provide charity directly are more likely to be willing to provide food than anything else. The primary benefit of food stamps is dignity. Accepting charity directly can be humiliating, and few people who need charity deserve that kind of humiliation. Food stamps allow poor people to shop at stores, just like everyone else. Of course, the dignity that food stamps provide ends at the cash register, when the poor person has to pull out the card for everyone to see. As a need, food is not exactly difficult to come by. There are plenty of sources of free food for those in need. There are not plenty of sources of free shelter, free utilities, free transportation, free clothing, free toiletries, and so on. Food stamps provide access to something that poor people generally already have sufficient access to, and they neglect the real needs, like rent.
The third problem with food stamps is human dignity and privacy. Paying with cash, check, debit, or credit reveals very little about your financial situation to others. Paying with food stamps is like shouting, "Hey, I am poor!" to everyone who is watching. While it may be reasonable to deprive dangerous criminals of human dignity, poor people have already lost enough dignity. We don't need to take any more.
The justifications for having and restricting food stamps in the first place may seem reasonable to anyone who has not had to use them. Poor people need food, so give them a resource that can be used to buy food. We can add restrictions to guarantee they don't abuse it and use it to buy anything except food. This will guarantee that poor people will have enough to eat. Unfortunately, this assumes that food is the only thing poor people need. The justification attempts to cover this by suggesting that when poor people have their food covered, they can use the money they would have spent on food on other things. This is honestly a really bad math error. Consider, if a poor person has an income of $100 a month, and you give them $200 a month in food stamps, that does not suddenly free up $200 a month for the person, because there is not $200 a month in the first place! Additionally, even if there was $200 a month to begin with, $400 a month is still not enough to live on, and perhaps that person was wise enough with money to only be spending $100 a month on food to begin with, which still only frees up $100 a month. And like I said before, food is the easiest necessity for poor people to get for cheap or free. The fact is, it just does not add up.
It gets worse though. The primary justification for restricting food stamps is the assumption that people will spend the money on things other than food otherwise. Is there something wrong with that? First, consider, if a person is starving, what is the highest priority, food, or something else? If people need food and have enough money to buy it, they will! If people are spending food stamp money on things other than food, it means that those things are more important than food. In other words the primary justification for restricting food stamps to food is that poor people are too stupid to feed themselves when they need it. News flash: People who don't eat die. If poor people were too stupid to eat, they would already be dead. Honestly, this justification suggests that our government officials who setup this system are actually stupider than the people they think they are helping with it.
The same applies to the hot food restriction. The justification here is that if hot foods are allowed, people will use food stamps to buy expensive fast food, instead of cheaper unprepared food (like grocery store sushi, that is allowed...). This does not seem to be a well known fact, but most poor people do not spend all of their time being lazy. Research has found that most poor people have less free time than anyone else. Being poor is a lot of work. Attempting to force poor people to buy cheaper foods that have to be prepared at home is actually a liability (and it does not work, as there is plenty of cold prepared food available...). Even soup kitchens do better than this. If poor people want to spend their food stamps on fast food, let them. Some of them need the time it saves, and those who don't will learn from their mistakes if buying more expensive fast food results in starving for the last few days of the month. Again, there are plenty of sources of food. Preventing poor people from buying fast food (or expensive luxury foods) is not going to make sure they don't starve. It just makes sure they never learn to budget their money.
I want to describe my personal experience now. I am not ashamed to say that my family is on food stamps. I won't say how much, but with two parents and six children, we get a lot of food stamp money. Being Mormon, we believe in having a reasonable amount of food storage. We don't have room for the recommended year worth, but we have several bags of rice and some paint buckets full of various other long shelf life foods, as well as as a chest freezer with a decent selection of meat and other perishables (including frozen vegetables, lest you think we don't eat healthy foods). We were able to build up this food storage because we get far more food stamps than we strictly need. While it is not technically allowed, we have been known to give some of our food to people who are literally starving but don't qualify for food stamps (on several occasions, pregnant women who cannot afford protein). I am thankful that we get more food stamps than we need, but it would be even better if it were just given as cash. I am dramatically underpaid for some fairly important work, but if we can pay off our mobile home, then our rent drops to around $300 a month. Even on my low income, we can survive with only $300 a month lot rent. At the rate it is going though, it will be 3 years before it is paid off, so we have to rely on food stamps and delay important things like car repairs. If food stamps were distributed as cash, with no strings attached, we could still eat perfectly fine, and we could afford car repairs, and we could pay off our house a year or two earlier, making us financially stable in half the time. Yes, if we did this, we would not be able to help others as much, at least, not until the house was paid off, but we could put ourselves into a situation where we could ultimately help others more and provide our six children with a better environment and a better education. We would also be more financially secure, which would give me more time and money to work on starting my own business. It is true that many poor people don't have the same aspirations I do, but I can tell you, I know a lot of poor people, and a majority of them are trying to get themselves into better situations, and the main factor preventing them is lack of time and money. Converting food stamps to a cash payout would help all of us immensely.
The takeaway here is, we could save money, help poor people more effectively, and treat them better, if we just gave them cash. We could easily give up food stamps in exchange for freedom, just by giving poor people the cash up front, instead of making them jump through hoops just to get food that they could easily get somewhere else. Welfare should be about freedom, not about forcing people to live the way we think they deserve.
No comments:
Post a Comment