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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.
The poor wouldn't starve even if foodstamps was abolished; they might eat shitty diets, but even the literal homeless do not starve, and you kinda need a kitchen to make use of foodstamps.
The homeless have charitable interventions keeping them alive.
Why can't the poor?
They could as well, we chose not to do it that way. People think they deserve faceless government gibs, they don't like realizing that they are relying on the beneficence of others.
I guess there are people in the margins who even the most charitable charity would rather not serve. Charities cluster in cities, poor people cluster in rural areas. When the most awful drunkard wifebeater comes up for his bowl of daily soup, would some charities turn him away? Maybe. Progressives are scornful of the idea that there should be individual human judgement in such things.
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