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I'm not sure the value of this as a top level comment, but I'll write it because it struck me as odd. I live in California. I stopped by Grocery Outlet today after work to pick an ingredient up for dinner and some bleach for cleaning. I walk up to the checkout line with my $10 worth of groceries, and in front of me are two groups. The first group currently checking out are a couple, both guant, face sores, interesting clothing/jewelry/tattoo choices, and are buying food and water. I presume they are either living on the street or out of their vehicle and do drugs pretty consistently. They have a whole load of groceries and what caught my attention was the lady who requested the cashier to separate the mushroom mind focus and energy https://lairdsuperfood.com/products/focus-and-memory-mushrooms bags of snacks she was purchasing because if they weren't EBT eligible she would pay for them on her own. Luckily as I was to find out, they were, and she went on to make a separate purchase of those with her handy card.
Next up in the grocery line, we have a black lady, also buying significant amounts of groceries, and frankly she was a good 300 pounds #healthyatanysize. Luckily she had her handy card too.
Now I make decent money, but I sure feel like a shmuck when I'm the only one paying for my food in the grocery store line. Not sure what to add to this, I see the proposals to shrink EBT just to the essentials, only for people to be shocked as that would require people to make their food like me! Maybe this is what I get for living in California, but frankly, I think EBT and systems like it are just as prevalent elsewhere. It just strikes me as odd that I'm a professional, in a good industry, and I would question spending $50 for a couple of tiny packets of specialty mushroom superfood, but two methheads get to have it as they wish. Maybe I'm out of touch with the plights of the poor, but idk, doesn't seem half bad, I've car camped in the past before.
To be fair with the lady with the kid behind me, I did not stick around long enough to see if she too had her handy card with her, but I feel somewhat saddened that I am missing out on this club.
It reminds me in college, I had some hippy friends, they showed me the beauty of the college food kitchen. Just walk in, grab food, no worries. Oh yeah and btw since you're in a full college courseload, and your income is below the poverty threshold, despite being a dependent, you can apply to EBT, unemployment benefits, free health insurance, etc. Idk, I didn't partake, despite having years of less than stellar income and a strict budget. Maybe I should have? Is that just like any other tax loophole? What's the difference between saving money via that, and wash selling bitcoin shares to offset other investment income or other such schemes which I don't necessarily disagree with morally.
The other thing I think of when I roll this over in my head, is the stratification of grocery stores as a class separator. The last few years my closest store has been Ralphs. For those of you who don't know, Ralphs is slightly more high-end than Grocery Outlet which is more bottom of the barrel. Shoppers of Ralphs are probably not going to encounter EBT users at the same rates in areas with many grocery stores. Think Target vs. Walmart. The effect I feel like this has is for those contributing more to the tax pool, they encounter the absurdity of the purchasers less, and therefore the blob of money dedicated to it is further from the mind.
Every government program expands until it all is essentially 70% fraud by most people’s understanding of what the program was suppose to fix.
Wait until you hear about military disability payments. Those have essentially become a pension scheme for military personal who are perfectly healthy. Programs like that are virtually impossible to get rid of because which politician wants to fight the motte of taking care of disabled veterans. They have expanded to basically anyone who was in the military even if it was a desks job or a chef and if you don’t sign up for disability you’re basically turning down part of your compensation. If we want higher military pay we should vote for it.
I think things like this expand because the most morality lacking person figures out how to hack the system and then it slowly spreads to people less evil until even the good people hack the system because 70% are doing it so it’s just normalized.
I’ve met 25 year old girls with EBT cards. EBT was never meant for them. Or the drug users or probably 75% of current recipients. It’s meant for the person who can’t find a job because the largest employer in town shutdown, the single mom whose husband became an alcoholic and left her, the person with a health issue etc.
Technophiles like to talk about guaranteed minimum income when the robots inevitably take all our jobs. I wonder if the process won't be more gradual. Disability and unemployment schemes expanding until they encompass basically everyone. The more people who lie in order to access the schemes, the less taboo there is for everyone else.
The only thing that seems to be stopping it is the status hit that people take from being unemployed. As much as I criticise building an identity around work, at least those people tend not to cheat the welfare system.
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I like to eat pretty healthy and between that and not liking to spend much time on food, I tend to spend more money on food than I would like to.
I wonder if there is a really low-risk way for someone like me, who has a middle class income and no disabilities, to get government money for food.
I don't have much guilt about the idea of grifting the government, on the principle of "if they don't spend the money on me it's more likely than not that they will waste the money". Besides, government policy is probably partly responsible for the general low quality of American food and the fact that quality food tends to be niche and pricy.
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Given that with mass automation due to A(G)I, many more of us (possibly all of us) may be living off of a form of welfare before long, it’s time to have what has long been a taboo discussion, namely that government should enforce standards of behavior on welfare recipients.
To me it’s not really a question of generosity. If recipients didn’t use hard drugs, dressed well, behaved decently, were polite and generally didn’t disturb anyone else, I would even be in favor of more generous welfare in certain cases. But welfare for slobs, addicts, the obese, antisocial people, and groups with a track record of poor interaction with mainstream society should be curtailed to the point of making life very difficult.
In general, the greatest failure of liberal universalism is that it does not adequately distinguish between categories of citizen by social contribution. It did originally (eg almost every 19th century democracy initially limited the vote to landowners or taxpayers) but these restrictions fell - long before even female suffrage in most cases. Welfare initially was often led designed to promote prosocial behavior in the underclass, but again, much of this fell by the wayside.
Idea: Tiered welfare, including food stamps. Very low, third-world-beans-and-rice level baseline. Take a drug test every x period and come back clean, get 25% more money. Have kids? If they all attend school 97% of school days and are on time 90% of the time, get 25% more money. Kid scores in the top 20% of his grade on a standardized test? 50% more money. Kid is arrested? 30% reduction in money (or down to baseline, whichever is higher) for 2 years, rolling reset every time a child is arrested. Your ‘welfare tier’ also determines your tier of social housing, more recently renovated apartment in a better location etc. Every year of full time tax paying employment prior to going on welfare also increases your welfare. Local beat cops can also allocate a pool of welfare to ‘trusted’ informants, making snitching higher status.
The issue with tiered welfare is that controls are expensive. You are essentially taking money that could have been spent on food, and using it to pay for lab tests and full-time bureaucrats whose job it is to verify test scores and family size. This would have to result in some pretty significant savings for it to be justifiable in my mind. If you end up spending the same amount of money overall, but now poor people get less of it while more goes to the bureaucracy, at the same time making the process harder for those in need (as they now have to spend time dealing with said bureaucrats), I don't think you have really solved anything.
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In practice, how long would it be before those standards of behavior included things like "don't say things which are deemed to be racist"
Probably I am at least as disgusted as anyone else here by the image of the 300 pound illiterate welfare queen spending her food stamps on junk food. But I think we need a rule that you get your government benefits even if you are a disgusting person. Because I am acutely aware of the fact that to a large percentage of the voting population, I (a conservative white man) am far more offensive and disgusting than this hypothetical obese welfare queen with 4 kids from 4 different baby-daddies.
In fact, here's an idea: Food stamps for everyone, even if you are a millionaire.
Make it like public education, which everyone pays for and everyone gets for free.
I think that assuming AGI doesn't destroy us, there's really no alternative to some form of UBI. And arguably the most expedient way to get there is to broaden eligibility rules for food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability, and so on.
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And how many social credit points do you think you should lose for criticising the gove- uhh, I mean “subversive activities”?
Because this is the universal failure mode of any attempt at conduct-prorated welfare: it would inevitably descend into political patronage.
The mistake is in assuming this won’t happen anyway. The system already ruins your life, shuts you out of flying, having a bank account, shames every would-be employer for hiring you etc if you have a disapproved-of opinion, and in most of the West you can even go to proson for it, where you are likely to be the victim of ethnic or religiously motivated gangs if you’ve said anything or done anything to offend or hurt them before your incarceration. During Covid there was even plenty of chatter about prioritizing “higher risk” Black and Brown patients over white people.
You have - by the way - stumbled across a more general reality of the welfare system or entire modern state (discussed elsewhere in this thread): the system already exists to extract money and dignity from you and give it to others; you cannot destroy it, only redirect some of that extraction and humiliation toward others and some of the loot towards yourself.
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It's funny you should mention social contribution because to my knowledge both of California's biggest welfare programs (Calfresh and Medical) are going to be restricted unless the person has a job, is disabled, in education, or performs a certain amount of community service. They say they're going into effect this year for Calfresh and next year for Medical but I'll believe it when I see it because they were already postponed by years at this point but in any case they already did pass laws that at least in some way tried to restrict eligibility aiming toward some kind of prosocial behavior.
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I think it's fair that we want a society where people don't starve to death, and that means giving out free food. But I'd certainly rather see it implemented more like a government grain dole than a handy card you can use to buy anything that's edible and caloric. You might say that a grain dole is actually costs more to implement than a handy card, and is also degrading to the recipients, but that's exactly the point. People on the dole should be degraded.
I heard stories that the government used to hand out bricks of cheese and other foodstuffs in plain boxes labelled only with the name of the item. We should bring this back.
This is part of the brand identity of a certain major Canadian supermarket chain, fittingly called 'No Name', with bright yellow packaging.
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This was definitely a thing when I was a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese
It wasn't just a welfare program, but also a dairy price stabilization program??
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I can report from my state and city the situation is similar. With the addition of seeing multiple obvious retail thieves typically proceeding past the self checkout per month.
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Only about 13% of Californians receive EBT. You're probably seeing a lot of them because Grocery Outlet is, uh, a downscale retailer.
"Only"
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Wow I just learned how many Americans are on food stamps. Food is not that expensive...? How is this happening.
The income limits are fairly low - for a family of 3, the income limit is $53k per year. The benefits are a sliding scale but are capped at about $800 a month for a family of three.
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In China, a lot of the insurance system covers Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is pretty much just bullshit. Here in the US, I know people who have gotten chiropractic coverage under their own insurance. Acupuncture is also something apparently covered by many private insurance companies, despite also being highly suspect. Some apparently are even covering Reiki now.
Point here being that interest groups who believe they're effective push hard for their inclusion and treatment as "real medicine" and there's not really a strong lobby against it. It's not like you'll gonna be able to convince the TCM/Chiropractic/Acupuncture/Reiki/etc believers otherwise that easily after all, they're passionate and committed in a way that opposition isn't. If you have a bunch of people who really think that crystals or halo therapy or whatever are better than normal mainstream medicine, then you have a lobby pushing for their inclusion.
So in the same way, there's a whole load of highly motivated people who basically consider this sort of thing as the only real and healthy food there is. Heck even the head of the HHS now isn't that far gone, but he's a lot closer to that viewpoint than I ever will be. Even from the perspective of an EBT user, spending on those mushrooms instead of something else makes no sense unless you truly believe that they have some sort of meaningful benefits to them. They're at the store because people buy them and people buy them despite the cost because they believe it does something worth it.
Because there's a bunch of very very passionate people in support, I don't expect coverage of such products to end anytime soon in the same way that coverage of (what I consider to be bullshit) "traditional medicine" and other beliefs is being actively expanded by insurances. It's just part of living in society, sometimes you have to accommodate what you personally think is bullshit because large numbers of people believe it.
You might think "well just ban things that are stupid and bad" but the monkey paw curls and Whole Foods non GMO gluten free food and other stuff like that are the only things allowed to take EBT anymore. Whoops, turns out other people have different views on what is stupid and bad.
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Once you've accepted that political and social realities require adopting a progressive taxation system and social safety net, the existence of some form of absurdity like this is assured. The question then becomes how to administer the absurdity, and I think EBT does a pretty good job of it. The purpose isn't to prevent people from wasting their benefits on mushroom superfoods, it's to prevent people from buying things that are actively harmful (drugs).
You can have progressive taxation and a social safety net and not have the absurdities. America was once like this and my gut says their are a lot of people who would be in real need to do who feel a like of shame taking EBT.
Something something high trust society where the government can offer goodies and make it easy for those in need to get help but people don’t abuse the system even if they could hack it to their benefit.
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Modus ponens, modus tollens.
But only one of them leads to rains of fire and pillars of salt. (Ezekiel 16:49)
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