#3 Actually, food stamps are the one form of welfare that makes complete sense, at least in the Bizarro world of American agribusiness.
Since the start of the 20th Century, America has had too much food. By the time of the Great Depression, farmers could no longer afford to ship food, because prices were too low.
So every year, the government both pays farmers to not grow food, and still buys thousands of tons of food, to expensively warehouse until it rots.
Just doing things the way we do them today, every poor person willing to cook unprocessed food could eat for free, and the government would *save* money.
And it wouldn't hurt the retail market, either, because people who can afford to buy their food much prefer processed food to unprocessed.
So the end result would be people eating the food instead of it just spoiling and being thrown away.
Perhaps the solution would be to set up government food distribution sites, where the poor who were authorized would just be given free food, based on how many family they had, and how much at one time, the site had excess of particular foods.
Say Tuesday, 20 lbs of potatoes per person, because we have too many potatoes. Wednesday, lots of flour and oranges. Thursday, 1 gallon cans of peanut butter. |
Some think Newt Gingrich scored by calling Barack Obama the "food-stamp president," but isn't it really a compliment?