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Doesn't this already necessarily exist? You cant use snap to buy Budweiser or Cough Medicine from the grocery store.
The grocery store sells different kinds of rice, oatmeal, flour, bread, and pasta, which have different nutritional values. If you try to promulgate a simple definition, companies eager for government money will soon manufacture new products designed to fit within your simple definition while still being unhealthily delicious, forcing you to issue a more complicated definition.
For example: Chapter 19 of the US Harmonized Tariff Schedule lists 19 different types of bread. A government must pick which ones it wants to make eligible for government handouts, and it must define those types as well. (I don't see any definitions in this document, but I assume that they exist somewhere. You may be aware of tariff shenanigans like coating sneakers in a layer of felt so that they count as slippers, adding flimsy temporary seats to cargo vans so that they count as passenger vans, and calling X-Men action figures nonhuman so that they don't count as dolls.)
Couldn't that be stopped with some language such as "products are classified based on their primary use"? If most people remove the felt or the seats, they then wouldn't count.
I'm not a lawyer, but it is my impression that punishing the manufacturer for actions taken by the consumer is unconstitutional.
If you want to talk about the manufacturer's purpose in making certain manufacturing decisions, then you are on firmer ground. But, even then: Taking the seat case as an example, the manufacturer actually won on the first level of appeal, since the flimsy temporary seats were functional and standards-compliant despite being uncomfortable to actually use and removed (by the manufacturer, not by the consumer) immediately after importation, and it was only on the second level of appeal that the tariff was enforced. So closing these loopholes may be more difficult than it appears at first glance.
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So why don't they already do this with booze and the like? Market beers and vodka as kombucha or something?
Beer, vodka, and kombucha already have detailed dictionary definitions that need no further clarification in law or regulation. You possibly could argue the same for flour. But the terms "rice", "oatmeal", "bread", and "pasta" definitely encompass a wide variety of different products on grocery shelves.
So you are arguing people are going to market oatmeal cookies as oatmeal to get around said law?
No, I'm arguing that the term "oatmeal" includes flavored oatmeal, instant oatmeal, steel-cut oatmeal, and presumably other types of oatmeal with which I am not acquainted, rather than just ordinary oatmeal, and the law would need to differentiate between those types.
Write it how you do, tie goes to "no". Not angry problem here. If using snap, or state equivalents becomes a pain in the ass, that's a feature. Its a horrible program
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