The typical American on food stamps struggles to pay rent. The amount of food stamps varies widely, depending on a large number of factors. Some families get enough food stamp benefits to pay for 100% of their food. Some get so little they would starve without help from others. The fact, however, is that food is readily available to a vast majority of poor people in the U.S., even without food stamps. Many churches have charitable food programs. Boy Scouts and many many other organizations hold food drives annually if not more often. Many cities in the U.S. have soup kitchens where poor people can go to get a free meal. People feel more comfortable giving beggars and homeless people food than anything else. Family members are more likely to provide food to poor relatives than anything else. The fact is, poor people can get food if they need it. Food stamps do accomplish one valuable thing: They save some dignity. It can be humiliating going to food drive or asking family for food. Food stamps shift that embarrassment to the checkout stand, where the cashier and anyone standing behind you who is paying attention can see that SNAP card. The card is more discrete than the old fashioned coupons (WIC's checks are still just as bad as those coupons though), but it is still an affront to dignity. Food stamps are not just humiliating though. They are actually downright harmful.
The right likes to say food stamps contribute to inflation, and that might be true. If you vote against welfare though, the blood is on your hands. If fairness contributes to inflation, then so be it. Letting people starve to death is not the right answer. Food stamps contributing to inflation, assuming the claims are actually true, does not make them harmful.
This is what makes food stamps harmful: By taking away their choice, poor people become worse at managing their finances. Food stamp money is not real money, because real money can pay the bills. Lawmakers sometimes argue that it is just as good though, because it frees up real money that would have been spent on food. This is an oversimplification. People act differently when they are spending money that is not their own, and money that cannot be spent on whatever they want is not their own money. This is a common phenomenon, even among the rich. People are more likely to buy extravagant things with money that does not fully belong to them than they are with money that does belong to them. In other words, food stamp money is more likely to be spent frivolously than cash. Consider this: Recently, I started working on a project where the goal is to produce meals as cheaply as possible. I learned that the average American family spends $250 per person on food each month. We spent closer to $150 per person. I produced a recipe that is healthier than what the typical American eats that costs less than $50 per person per month. When a family gets $100 or $150 per person each month in food stamps, they spend $100 or $150 per person on food each month, because they cannot spend it on anything else. When they get that money in cash though, they are far more likely to look for ways to conserve it, because if they spend less than that, they can spend the leftovers on other things. That might be something frivolous. But who cares! The goal is for them to eat healthy right? Eating healthy does not have to be incredibly expensive. As long as they are not eating significantly less healthy food, what does it matter if they spend $100 a month per person on food and spend the extra $50 per person on something else? Keep in mind that in most cases, that "something else" won't be luxury goods. It will be rent, electricity, car repairs, appliance repairs, or even education. Again though, as long as they are eating healthy who cares! They are going to get and spend the money one way or another. If they are forced to use it on food, food is all they will get out of it. If they are just given cash, they are given the opportunity to exercise their free will to decide if they want to blow it all on food or if they want to be frugal with food and spend it on something else. This gives them the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. It allows them to learn how to manage their finances. Yeah, some will spend the excess on drugs or alcohol, and that is truly tragic, but is it right to deny the majority the opportunity to improve, just because a few people will make stupid choices if we do? No! By that reasoning, we should just toss everyone in jail, because a few are going to harm others if we don't, and we cannot know who they are beforehand.
Food stamps should be replaced with a cash handout. This would significantly decrease the cost of the program, because the enforcement systems that make sure stores are only selling food for food stamp money could be eliminated. A default direct deposit system would eliminate the costs associated with SNAP cards for a majority of recipients, and the remainder could be given cheap pre-paid Visa cards that are credited each month. Money on lost cards might be hard to retrieve, but replacing them would be cheap. (Actually, I just checked. If the food stamp administration keeps a copy of the card number and other card information, which they would need to do to credit the card each month, retrieving the money from a lost card would be trivial.) The money saved could be used for a number of things. It could make the food stamp program significantly cheaper for the government. It could allow larger payouts each month for participants. It could allow larger payouts for participants that are currently getting too little. It could support more participants, increasing the maximum income limit for participation. Making food stamps a cash handout would make the program much cheaper, but that is not all.
As a cash handout, food stamps would help recipients the most. Currently, in many places, it is common for some food stamp recipients to buy food and then resell it at a fraction of the price for cash. This is stupid, because now people who don't need food stamps are essentially fleecing some of the benefits, as a sort of currency exchange. If food stamp recipients were given cash instead, this could not happen, because no exchange would be necessary! (Yes, this exchange is illegal. You think it would be happening if we could stop it? "Illegal" does not matter, when the government does not have the power to enforce.) Making food stamps a cash handout would reduce any inflation effect, because less of the money would be spent on food. It would allow poor people to pay their rent or electricity with the money, if conditions made those things more important than getting enough food. It would reward them for spending money on food wisely. It would even encourage poor people to find food from other charitable sources, to free up their food money for more important things that they cannot get at nearly any church, food bank, or family member's house.
There is something especially nefarious about failed bills in various states intended to further limit what food stamp recipients can buy. Poor people have been observed buying lobster, filet mignon, and other expensive delicacies on food stamps. (In fact, I am not ashamed to admit that I bought lobster on food stamps a few months ago. I have since been using small amounts in various meals, at an average total cost of less than $1 for each meal. Note that $1 a meal comes out to less than $100 a meal, which is well under half what the average American spends on food.) Some lawmakers seem to think the solution is to essentially make expensive foods generally associated with luxury illegal to buy on food stamps. Otherwise stated, they endorse the system in Soviet Russia, where only the elite were allowed to purchase certain luxury items. This is stupid though. I mentioned above that if you give people $150 or $100 a month that can only be spent on food, they will spend that much on food. The solution is not to further limit what poor people can spend food stamps on. The solution is to allow them to spend excess on things other than food! Would they be buying lobster with food stamps, if they could instead spend the money on fuel for the car, on rent, on utilities, or even on other luxury goods? They are not buying lobster because they are incompetent with their finances. They are buying lobster because they have managed their food stamp money in a way that makes it so they can afford it! Why the heck does anyone think the appropriate response to this is to punish them? If poor people are able to manage their money so well that they can afford to buy lobster on food stamps, that is evidence that the program is not completely broken. When people are buying lobster on food stamps, that is evidence that they are managing the money well enough that they should be allowed more freedom with it! That means that maybe we have underestimated them. Maybe they can handle cash payouts, without any strings attached. And the fact is, the research supports this conclusion. If we don't want poor people spending food stamp money on lobster, let them spend it on other things.
Our current welfare system is pretty terrible in a lot of ways. The worst is assuming that recipients are stupid. It is controlling their finances for them. If they are not given the freedom to chose, they will never learn. It is clear that some have overcome this and learned anyway, but they are still stuck in the box. And for that, some think we should punish them. I think it is time to take away the box. It is time to treat them like they are smart enough to manage their own finances. If they fail, yeah, that is terrible. Most won't though. Most will make better choices than the government ever could make for them. Making food stamps a cash handout would help the poor, perhaps more than any other welfare plan that has ever been developed. And perhaps more importantly, it would stop hurting them. If the Republicans really want to deregulate something, let them deregulate the use of food stamp money.
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