There's a new bill preventing food stamps from buying ""soft drinks, candy, ice cream, prepared desserts such as cakes, pies, cookies, or similar products."
It's expensive complex bureaucracy that doesn't add anything of value. Additionally "unhealthy" or "junk" have no standard definition while no properly ran grocery sells "bad food".
All that is being accomplished is greater stigmatizing abd punishment of food stamps recipients while making it harder to get food.
You can't clearly define "unhealthy food" so the government has to keep paying Coca Cola to kill our poorest citizens.
Ok. How many people should we deny for legitimate use to make sure that we stop all those bad folks from buying food you don't like? What even is the percentage of people buying shit like that over food they need to live?
It seems like more unnecessary over sight that will cost more time and effort for the grocers than money it saves.
For reference, 9% of food stamps are spent on soda alone.
Most of the discussion in that thread is reasonable, let's check out r/politics:
People don't like sin taxes when democrats are pushing them but big government is fine when it's coming from Republicans.
Not giving people free money to buy junk food = tax
when a Democratic administration wanted to reduce the amount of sugary drinks available in New York the Republicans shit themselves over libertarian concerns. This may surprise some people, but they're being hypocritical.
Because if something is legal, it should be given to everyone for free.
Maybe pass a law that makes sure healthy food is affordable?
Grocery prices too high?
that's probably why they're doing this. they want the poor to starve. they don't care about health lol they just fired people at the fda
Poor people will starve without soda and snack cakes!
Are these the same people who went ballistic when Michelle Obama suggested they eat healthier food and excercise more?
Yep. 💯
If you're unhealthy you want to pay for everybody to be unhealthy.
Highest rates of diabetes are in the South/red states…. You gonna tax their sweet tea too, Trump? Do it! Get them angry.
Redditors see this as a tax because they think food stamps are earned income.
Party of small government wants to dictate which foods people can buy. Cool.
Redditors, like Chris Chan, see food stamps as an everyday fact of life.
Just drove through Mississippi and one of the things we do is to count how many family/dollar trees we see before a seeing a real grocery store.
You can still buy cheese and pasta and milk and canned soup at those stores.
Why not just make healthier foods more affordable?
People would stop buying soda if only they could afford broccoli!
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There was a big discussion during last years dietetics conference circuit as a paper presented flaws in NOVA. You can have crazy unhealthy whole food diets and healthy UPF diets. High sugar drinks include no sugar added juices, 1 cup of OJ contains nearly as much sugar as 1 cup of coke
BIPOCs will get scurvy if they ban SNAP from getting juice.
Economically the administrative overhead is rarely worth the savings made when they try and do shit like this too.
The most effective way to deal with the issue is added sugar tax. Mexico did one recently that reduced soda consumption by 12%.
Cheese & pasta are part of the fatty and heath problem. Low quality carbs and excessive SFAs.
Poors need to eat more fricking vegetables.
Whole foods are not more expensive. That's a shared delusion Americans have because they associate canned and frozen foods with unhealthy.
They also have the r-slurred notion that organic is more healthy.
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There's already shit that's not allowed on SNAP and WIC. It's almost trivial blocking this stuff. First off, stop letting people use EBT at 7-11/other convenience stores and then tell Walmart/Kroger/Albertsons/Publix to disallow the items.
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Prepared food and alcohol are not allowed on SNAP, they are easy to codify.
How do you codify "unhealthy food"?
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Proving it's good to buy candy and soda for poor people.
[Hate slur]s don't buy juice, they buy drink. These are great quibbles to have but we can tweak the details after passing a bill that's 95% on the money. And it's virtually impossible to not hit your Vitamin C requirement in America.
If you define "shit like this" to include shit entirely unlike this. SNAP cost $95 billion in 2024 and 9% of that was soda. If it costs 8.5 billion dollars to change the eligibility of something in the food stamp system the program should be eliminated. People are trying to compare overwrought means testing schemes to a simple reclassification that we do all the time and for every new food product.
The issue isn't "Americans are fat," the issue is "taxpayers are paying for unnecessary things."
They are better than soda and candy and this isn't a health food plan, it's about not letting poors piss away our money.
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Maybe it should be
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Ozempic lets anyone with money be thin, it's fitting the cattle are hideous but we shouldn't pay to make them that way.
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I just hope in like 20 years it turns out to give everyone super ebola or something like that
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Give every American a one-time coupon for a free Crockpot and publish PDFs on how to make easy roasts. A $12 chuck roast can feed a family of four twice with some potatoes. I'm making french dip sandwiches in mine tonight
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Reddit pot
I prefer sneed roasts anyways
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