A key component of President Trump's big budget proposal on Monday included this: Trump wants to replace food stamps with actual food. Makes sense, doesn't it?
It should come as no surprise that liberals are irate about this. Why would that greedy president take away their food stamps and give them food!?
HuffPost had this hot take:
"Facing a trillion-dollar deficit because of his just-passed tax cuts, President Donald Trump has an idea for how to get some of that money back: making poor people eat beans and rice."
Food stamps, also known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program (SNAP) are provided for around 42 million people. About 80% of these people get a voucher worth around $90 per person. These are redeemed at stores for food, but this program is abused so much.
Per Daily Wire:
For example, an Oregon minimart owner was recently sentenced to nearly two years behind bars after being convicted for food stamp fraud totalling $189,000. In that case, prosecutors said the minimart owner allowed his customers to exchange cash for benefits. He charged high prices for food to food stamp recipients’ benefit cards, and then gave them back half the cash.
In January, a Baltimore man was found guilty of fraud involving $1.5 million worth of food stamps. The list goes on and on.
The new proposal would give food stamp recipients a USDA Foods package which would account for about half of their benefits. It would include' shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit and vegetables.' There would not be any fresh fruits or vegetables in these boxes.
This program would be known as "America's Harvest Box." Sonny Perdue, the Argiculture Secretary labeled it “a bold, innovative approach to providing nutritious food to people who need assistance feeding themselves and their families ― and all of it is home-grown by American farmers and producers.”
Per NPR:
The USDA believes that state governments will be able to deliver this food at much less cost than SNAP recipients currently pay for food at retail stores — thus reducing the overall cost of the SNAP program by $129 billion over the next 10 years. This and other changes in the SNAP program, according to the Trump administration, will reduce the SNAP budget by $213 billion over those years — cutting the program by almost 30 percent.
Seems like they are on board, right? Wrong.
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.
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?"
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."
According to liberals, it would be embarrassing for someone receiving food stamps to instead receive free food.
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.
There is another option: get a job and buy whatever food you want.
Check out the responses on Twitter:
Food stamps are in dire need of reform, social programs have become similar to a hammock instead of a safety net
We should judge success by how many people leave government assistance, not how many enroll onto government programs!
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 13, 2018
Trump wants to cut out food stamps & replace them with boxes of non-perishable foods.
This is awesome!
No more abusing the program on steak & lobster. If you don’t like the free food you are receiving, then bust your ass like the rest of us & get a job.
— Educating Liberals (@Education4Libs) February 13, 2018
Trump’s Harvest Box proposal is a pure fuck-you to poor people. Ignoring the reality of food deserts, it perpetuates a myth that those who need nutrition assistance spend it on junk. That may be the entire point, since it’s utterly impractical to execute. https://t.co/eiQGfNXxvx
— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) February 13, 2018
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