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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.
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.
Problem with that, though, is that if you do have growing kids, they need good food and nutrition. Restricting it to "beans and rice third world baseline" to start off means that parents will feed the kids processed/junk food because that's cheap calories. Not the greatest.
I agree about not buying snack foods and rubbish, but if you're going to buy decent meat and real vegetables, and more importantly cook proper meals, that will necessitate a better food budget than "on this tier we can only buy the frozen own-brand mystery meat nuggets".
I wonder if those meal boxes that are growing so common are an option. Upper-middle class people like them, so they're not punishing the poor.
Envisioning a system that everyone who applies to it can choose online between a selection of 15 or so meals, rotated out by a team of chefs and nutritionists. Most are pretty basic - spaghetti with canned sauce, some kind of chicken and sauce on rice, etc. Maybe 1 or 2 meals a week with some nicer cuts of meat.
Every meal comes with directions on how to cook it. When you are selecting your meal, you can sort by how long it takes to cook it, which is calculated by the median of self-reports from the users (no bs chefs claiming onions take 2 minutes to cut and sautee.) Most meals target cooking in 30 minutes or less.
Additionally, every week comes with powdered milk, choice of oatmeal or cold cereal, instant coffee, sliced bread, deli cheese, deli meat, salt, pepper, butter.
People pick up their kits from participating grocery stores nearest them. When you first enroll, a free pot and pan is thrown in with your bundle.
I don't think this will cut EBT costs but it might improve medicaid costs over time. At least it might remove some of the resentment.
Forcing the unrepentantly incompetent poors to have all their food and medical options be restricted to Hello Fresh and Better Help? Sounds like a pretty decent way to soak up the VC slop.
Well, I'm imagining something more socialist, run out of the USDA or something. Not just giving money to Hello Fresh and having them do it.
Nooooo! At least Hello Fresh is building something aimed at passing the profit/loss test. Why rebuild it asa government agency?
Why would Hello Fresh need to worry about profit/loss once they have infinite government money?
Does it become like Medicare where prices are fixed by a centralized government agency?
Or does it become like colleges where prices to everyone balloons until everyone needs a subsidy to attend?
We are already messing enough with the free market to ensure that the poor do not starve, which is what the market would demand without government or charitable intervention.
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