Now this is a great idea that should be implemented immediately. Talk about slashing waste, fraud and abuse! Come to Appalachia if you don't believe me - this is the most abused program in the .gov.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tru...tamps-114015814.html

Trump Wants to Replace Food Stamps for Impoverished Americans With Food Boxes to Save Money

The Trump administration wants to scrap food stamps for low-income Americans and replace them with boxes of non-perishable food items selected by the government, Politico reported Monday.

The proposal was touted by White House budget director Mick Mulvaney and included in the White House fiscal budget, released Monday. According to the administration, it could save the federal government $129 billion over the next decade.

Mulvaney compared the measure to start-up meal delivery company Blue Apron.

President Donald Trump pauses while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., on February 9. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Under the plan, the amount of money low income families receive as part of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, would be slashed, and they would receive a product dubbed “America’s Harvest Box” by the Department of Agriculture.

That box would include staples like shelf-stable milk, peanut butter, canned fruits and meats, and cereal.

Don't miss: Julian Assange Still Faces Arrest if He Leaves the Ecuadorian Embassy After Bid for Warrant to Be Lifted Fails

Critics likened the plan to wartime rationing, and questioned how the boxes would be delivered to remote rural communities and would accommodate those with special dietary requirements, including allergies.

The Food Research and Action Center, a prominent non-profit group, told Politico the harvest box idea would be “costly, inefficient, stigmatizing, and prone to failure.”

MREs!

quote:

Originally posted by Jim Shugart:
MREs!

Cruel and kind of unusual there, Shugart!

I love it!

I totally agree with this idea...
Is it about feeding the poor, or transfer of wealth?

Why does replacing food stamps with food so anger liberals?

By Ed Straker

President Trump has proposed replacing some food stamp grants with actual food. This has curiously enraged liberals, who you would think would be delighted to see "hungry" people getting food.

The Trump administration is proposing a major shake-up in one of the country's most important "safety net" programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. Under the proposal, most SNAP recipients would lose much of their ability to choose the food they buy with their SNAP benefits.

But if you like your supermarket, you can keep your supermarket, right?

Under the proposal, which was announced Monday, low-income Americans who receive at least $90 a month – just over 80 percent of all SNAP recipients – would get about half of their benefits in the form of a "USDA Foods package." The package was described in the budget as consisting of "shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans[,] and canned fruit and vegetables."

Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, a hunger advocacy group that also helps clients access food-assistance services, said the administration's plan left him baffled. "They have managed to propose nearly the impossible, taking over $200 billion worth of food from low-income Americans while increasing bureaucracy and reducing choices," Berg says.

Do you think before today that this poverty pimp has ever been concerned about the bureaucracy of any government program?

He says SNAP is efficient because it is a "free market model" that lets recipients shop at stores for their benefits. The Trump administration's proposal, he said, "is a far more intrusive, Big Government answer. They think a bureaucrat in D.C. is better at picking out what your family needs than you are?"

Extolling the free market. Condemning big government. Criticizing D.C. bureaucrats. Hey, Trump finally accomplished something! He's gotten liberals to talk like conservatives!

Douglas Greenaway, president of the National WIC Association, echoed that sentiment. "Removing choice from SNAP flies in the face of encouraging personal responsibility," he said. He says "the budget seems to assume that participating in SNAP is a character flaw."

He's right: participating in SNAP is a character flaw. No one should be on SNAP for years. Get a job! As for removing choice discouraging personal responsibility, just the opposite. If you want a choice of what food to buy, get a job!

Critics of the proposal said distributing that much food presents a logistical nightmare. "Among the problems, it's going to be costly and take money out of the [SNAP] program from the administrative side. It's going to stigmatize people when they have to go to certain places to pick up benefits," says Jim Weill, president of the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center.

And people aren't stigmatized using EBT cards in supermarkets? They wave them around like Visa Platinum cards!

Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, called the proposal "radical and risky."

"Marriage" between two men or two women. Boys in girls' bathrooms. Gutting the military. Obamacare. Leaving our borders unprotected. None of these is "radical and risky." But giving food to poor people instead of money – that's "radical and risky."

It isn't clear whether the boxes will come with directions on how to cook the foods inside. "It could be something that [SNAP recipients] don't even know how to make," notes Miguelina Diaz, whose team at Hunger Free America works directly with families to help them access food aid.

I can see it now: police, responding to reports of a strange smell, enter a home to find an entire family starved to death, surrounded by dozens of boxes of unopened macaroni. If only the instructions had contained pictograms!

If people are too dumb to cook a box of noodles, why are they voting? Or is voting easier than cooking a box of noodles when the Democrats tell you what to do?

The startling thing about this entire discussion is that liberals are outraged that people on food stamps are being deprived of choice. Liberals didn't care about depriving people of choice when it came to Obamacare, or gun control, or raising taxes. They didn't care even when Michelle Obama, the cultural tsarina in charge of food tastes, tried to tell our kids what they should be eating in school.

Why such a different attitude when it comes to food stamps?

Occam's Razor states that the simplest answer is also most likely the correct one. The simplest answer is that liberals don't care about feeding the poor. SNAP and a hundred programs just like it are all about income redistribution, not feeding the hungry. Any limits on transferring cash from taxpayers to those on welfare interferes with liberals' social engineering schemes.

Exit question: If you were President Trump's adviser on food policy, what foods would you advise him to distribute to people on welfare?

http://www.americanthinker.com..._anger_liberals.html

I'm curious to know how such a program would save taxpayers' money.

Not allowing them to buy steak & lobster? Harder to sell government peanut butter than food stamps.

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
I'm curious to know how such a program would save taxpayers' money.

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
I'm curious to know how such a program would save taxpayers' money.

Do you think all the food stamp recipients actually need those stamps for food or do you think a percentage of them only get said stamps to use/trade for alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, hookers, etc?

How many recipients do you think will drop out of the program if they received food instead of [fake] money?

15 years ago I dated a girl who had 10 brothers and sisters. One of her brothers (and his wife) were drug addicts, with 2 kids. Every month they would sell their EBT card for $.50 on the dollar. I also saw people buying snacks at the 7-11 (Taquitos type things). The .gov should also be able to buy food at a volume discounted rate, rather than the people paying retail at a store.

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
I'm curious to know how such a program would save taxpayers' money.

About five years ago, I posted a thread about working in a convenience store and having to complete a sale to a skinny black guy with long dreads and dragon-lady fingernails using EBT to buy a 12 pack of Corona. They get cash benefits on the card that they can use for anything, just like a debit card. If you're all for using taxpayer money to buy beer for people, then I guess you have a point.

That was the most egregious example. We couldn't sell people hot food with SNAP, but we could sell them sodas, energy drinks, candy, cookies, chips and anything else with a Nutritional Information label on it. Didja wonder why all that crap suddenly started having that stamp on it a while back? That's why.

I'm all for this change. Send them food. If they don't like what they get, it might motivate them to get off their ass and achieve.

quote:

Originally posted by LS1 GTO:

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
I'm curious to know how such a program would save taxpayers' money.

Do you think all the food stamp recipients actually need those stamps for food or do you think a percentage of them only get said stamps to use/trade for alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, hookers, etc?

How many recipients do you think will drop out of the program if they received food instead of [fake] money?

Yes, I know in the past with stamps this was a problem, to some extent. No idea if the same is the case with SNAP. I know next to nothing about SNAP, but figure if it's a card, it is tied to an individual. I don't know if a form of ID must be presented when a SNAP card is presented, but that would be a potential way of combating use of the system as a form of currency.

From what I'm reading, SNAP is restricted pretty much to grocery-store type foods only. EBT is a different deal, and doesn't seem to be the target of a boxed-food program, from what I can tell.

One of the big questions I have is if boxed food could be done in cooperation with existing stores, or if they're proposing a whole system of warehouses and distribution centers. Gotta think Trump would want to use the private sector to do this, but getting them to buy in would be a challenge.

"C" Rations. Give them cases of "C" Rations. That'll be the incentive to get them back to a meaningful job.

If you know anything about the food stamp program, you'd understand why this will never happen. It will never get through Congress.

Food stamps are much more a handout to the agriculture and retail grocery industry than the actual benefit recipients. Those industries, which have significant lobbiest presence, would fight any change tooth and nail.

quote:

Originally posted by Jim Shugart:
MREs!

Damn, beat me to it!

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
I know next to nothing about SNAP, but figure if it's a card, it is tied to an individual. I don't know if a form of ID must be presented when a SNAP card is presented, but that would be a potential way of combating use of the system as a form of currency.

No ID required.

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
From what I'm reading, SNAP is restricted pretty much to grocery-store type foods only.

Nope, see my post above. If it has a Nutritional Information label on it, it can be purchased through the SNAP program. Pop Rocks, Little Debbies, and a dozen Monster energy drinks was one notable SNAP purchase I had to ring up.

The USDA published nutrition guidelines for adults and children. Participants and their dependants should receive a box once a week with enough food to meet these requirements for the week along with a book of recipes. No debit card, no check. If you want discretionary income to buy your choice of food then get a job.

Forget having the .gov administer it. Put the guidelines in place and put it out to bid, I bet Amazon could deliver better food than is being purchased by the individuals for half of what we currently spend on SNAP.

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
From what I'm reading, SNAP is restricted pretty much to grocery-store type foods only.

Nope, see my post above. If it has a Nutritional Information label on it, it can be purchased through the SNAP program. Pop Rocks, Little Debbies, and a dozen Monster energy drinks was one notable SNAP purchase I had to ring up.

Yeah, there's probably no way to ever cut off all/most of the junk food as long as the card user has control of food choice. It would be a never-ending battle to keep every single product correctly classified.

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:

One of the big questions I have is if boxed food could be done in cooperation with existing stores, or if they're proposing a whole system of warehouses and distribution centers. Gotta think Trump would want to use the private sector to do this, but getting them to buy in would be a challenge.

They'll create new distribution centers about the same sqft as a Wal-Mart. New centers official title will be "Zero SNAP", population will refer to them as "Oh Snap."

At first glance I like the concept, along with work requirements for the able bodied.
Unfortunately, I see another government agency started to administer and deliver that will soon become another but different part of the problem.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
At first glance I like the concept, along with work requirements for the able bodied.
Unfortunately, I see another government agency started to administer and deliver that will soon become another but different part of the problem.

Yes.

We already have an incredibly efficient system, refined by decades of free market activity, for getting fresh, bug-free food to convenient locations for shoppers.

Hopefully the plan isn't to build a system independent of that.

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:

quote:

Originally posted by rusbro:
From what I'm reading, SNAP is restricted pretty much to grocery-store type foods only.

Nope, see my post above. If it has a Nutritional Information label on it, it can be purchased through the SNAP program. Pop Rocks, Little Debbies, and a dozen Monster energy drinks was one notable SNAP purchase I had to ring up.

Yeah, there's probably no way to ever cut off all/most of the junk food as long as the card user has control of food choice. It would be a never-ending battle to keep every single product correctly classified.

Which is why I'm all in favor of taking away the choice.

This is Trump helping the left finish painting themselves into another corner. "You wanna feed the underprivileged or be poverty pimps buying votes?" kinda thing.