So, food stamps are an agricultural subsidy. The reason they can buy junk food in the first place is because this is a hand out to corn syrup producers.
Good fucking luck taking on big ag with this idea, RFK Jr.
My understanding is that this move can only be appropriately considered through the lens of the aesthetics of maintaining an effective culture war.
Like the racially charged tirades against “welfare queens” of the past, this pretends to deal with income inequality on a level that blames the victim only, while doing nothing for the systemic factors that create and maintain junk food dependency.
It’s like a school or church entity attempting to deal with widespread sexual abuse by making and enforcing dress codes on potential victims.
I was always told the democrats were going to ban junk food and raise my taxes. I voted for them anyways but here the republicans are going and doing it.
yeah but he's doing it for poor people so it's ok because fuck poor people
You say that but I keep fucking poor people and nobody ever gives me any governmental power… maybe I should try not being poor
Hitler was a bit of a health nut too, lots of anti smoking laws.
It’s funny cause the US school lunch program is garbage food
Careful, they'll ban that next
This will do literally fucking nothing because food stamps don't cover grocery bills for anybody. You always have to subsidize it.
They also don't buy diapers, as per Marshall Mathers (2002).
Least bad news from America in a week. Though if the junk food isn’t replaced with equal calories from healthy veggies, for the same amount of stamps, or however that works, it would be evil
if the junk food isn’t replaced with equal calories from healthy veggies, for the same amount of stamps
It won't be. This just ignores the fact that one of the reasons junk food is popular is because it's cheaper than ready-to-eat healthy food.
The actual problem: Many parts of America are food deserts where people do not have access to affordable nutritious food. This problem is exacerbated for those below the poverty line who may not have access to a vehicle.
But solving that problem is hard so it's just way easier to make sure that poor people aren't allowed to buy the food that is accessible to them. Making desperate people even more desperate... I'm sure that wont have any unintended consequences.
And much more readily available. Decent food can be hard to come by in some places.
Well, I have dozens of healthy food programs ideas but I guess shortage of ideas isn’t the problem.
From my experiences with junk food diet, you feel extremely bad on it and when you are in hard situation you probably need to be in prime brain fitness without junk food brain fog. Prolonged junk food feels like intoxication almost.
So I think providing such vitamins and micro-elements for cheap/free should be very important to overall strategy of pulling people out of poverty.
If such were provided then discontinuing junk food support would be a next logical step.
But of course many much smarter people figured it all out ages ago already. What ‘
left’ solid folks fail at is they don’t immediately understand that empathy and good plan isn’t enough but you need marketing.In their honesty they often fail to see the appeal of the shallow and the allure of the superficial. All the skills alt right excels at.
They do not easily see or aren’t willing to, that you often need to trick or even lie or manipulate people to be in the position to do good things and/or to do them effectively on a big scale.
The alt right rise is nothing else but a failure to sell a solution to the future obstacles. People aren’t fundamentally racist, stuck up or bigoted. They just buy the only thing that is left on the barren political market. The one that gives them hope. Even if it is only a cheap trick of some ‘patriotic’ demagogue.
There was once a time, very brief, when Elon Musk wasn’t a complete jackass. A brief time when people were watching rocket starts with awe that instilled hope in them. Hope in the vision of the better future. If we could rally people around this idea, that the future of humanity is bright, tolerant and abundant, that we can become something noble and beautiful, then that I believe would be a uniting force we need. Challenges, sure but worth solving because of what we can become if we succeed.
Climate scientists do not understand the reaction of average person when they tell them “We must lower our CO2 footprint”. The response is Why? It isn’t a question about what will happen but the question of motivation. People ask “What is the reward of solving it, what will I have from it?”. Of course scientists are pissed at such questions and throw a snarky answer.
What will an average person have from fighting climate change? You will have future of thriving great nature and an abundance of basic goods provided by it. You will experience unity that was achieved by solving great problems together. You will have plethora of technological wonders that come from focused collaboration of human beings. You will have a victory, not merely containment of defeat.
We won’t make America great again. We will make America greater than it ever was before.
If you are doing even a tiny bit of meal prep, junk food becomes quite expensive on a calorie per dollar basis. Your fundamentals like potatoes, beans, pastas, and rice include of shitload a calories and none require a bunch of prep work. Those fundamentals are also significantly better for you than jellied sugar.
If your family needs food, buy potatoes, beans, pasta, and rice...not candy.
How is he going to define this? Food is so processed that almost anything can be junk food.
As it applies only to food stamps, I guess that's the goal.
They'll fight those "welfare queens" (blegh) in court in order to not have to guarantee a minimum of survival.
Pasteurization is considered processing.
How is he going to define this?
Bahahha, they don't care about logical consistency. They are going to ban anything they think is "bad" and allow everything else. Trying to nail them down is like trying to staple jello -- there's no logical approach. Trump and Co. take flying by the seat of your pants to a new art form.
You can't get them on "gotchas" like this because they simply DO NOT CARE.
"And the poor shall not be allowed even the pleasure of sugary treats. Yea, they shall have their food stamps slashed for the sin of poverty."
Book of Jebus, chapter 6, verses 3 and 4.
Seriously, though, it seems like everything these people do is just to inflict more suffering.
Yeah. That's their whole aim. Make sure more people are a poor as possible and as beaten down as possible. These are the same politicians that don't want Walmart to pay their workers enough money to get off food stamps.
I’m sure this is the push they need to get that six figure job that they have avoided to do because they are lazy
The problem is it's probably a good idea to get people in deprivation to eat healthier. It's also a reasonable claim that antidepressants are over prescribed.
However, if the alternative is unaffordable, the solution is just a punishment.
This is just a pretext to reduce food stamp payments. Conservatives have used this rhetoric since the 90s to attack food stamp payments. “Welfare queens are buying STEAK with your tax dollars!”
And the overwhelming majority of antidepressants are prescribed on a voluntary basis, eg the people taking them are choosing to do so because they feel there is not a more viable option for them. There is a whole essay on why this is the case but just some key points: therapy is really expensive (often a therapist costs almost as much as a psychiatrist except it’s a weekly visit instead of monthly), effective therapy requires a lot of active buy in and effort that people often don’t have the bandwidth required to contribute due to external factors like oppressive work or family life, therapy requires a time investment, stigma, etc. essentially overprescribing is a side effect of massive systemic issues
So do you address any of these systemic issues? Do you address any of the issues related to the western diet being loaded with sugar and other carbs, that we have huge swaths of residential areas with no proper grocery stores around throughout a great deal of the US, or that our environments are so structured around cars that we walk like 50 feet a week, etc?
Nah, just create more financial stress for poor people who eat like all of us (eg, like shit). Punitive approach 100% of the time!
How about increasing the amount of ebt funds for people who do not buy an excessive amount of empty calorie food and drink? Create a base amount of funds that everyone gets and increase the amount by 2.5% for every 25% of funds used that are dedicated to “healthy foods”. So if you buy only “healthy foods” you get an extra 10% of your ebt allotment, and if you buy nothing but junk then you aren’t penalized (unless of course you count not getting the reward, I guess). But this isn’t punitive so americans hate it
Or maybe make regulations that any grocery store that opens more that 20 stores is required to maintain at least 1 store per 20 in an underserved area that will not be profitable. Adjust the regulation actively of course so that whole foods doesn’t just become 800 separate stores to circumvent the regulation or whatever. But this means that corporations have to do something to enrich communities at the expense of constant profits so americans hate it
Or any of the obvious shit people have gone on about for ages. Nationalized health care, shorter work weeks with improved wages, workers getting equitable shares of companies, robust pensions, unions, etc. but americans are brain washed to think this is commie bullshit
They are correct about one part. The welfare queens, like Walmart and McDonald's are absolutely buying steak and caviar with the money they save not paying their staff.
I wanted to float out there the argument that I've had some luck with, with Xtians.
"How many good people did Jesus want you to starve in order to make sure no one was having it "too good?" Because I feel like he just said to feed the poor, not to make sure they weren't eating too well."
everyone getting so serious over a worm joke i mean i appreciate it but worms 🪱 lol worms
True, but then you would have to increase the amount of money they are getting.
The reason why poor people eat less healthy is because that's the food they can afford.
The healthy food is much more expensive.
I mean, if they'd also improve the ability to get healthy food with those stamps it's not necessarily bad. But judging by who's saying it I somehow doubt that it's done with good intentions.
How do those food stamps work anyways? Can you use them like money? I'm not American so it's a foreign concept yo me.
How do those food stamps work anyways? Can you use them like money? I’m not American so it’s a foreign concept yo me.
You get an EBT debit card with an amount of money based on some calculations that can only be spent on certain things (in the case of SNAP aka food stamps, you can only spend that balance on food). WIC is another subsidized food program that sometimes gets included when talking about "food stamps" targeting people with small children, which has a more restrictive list on what you can buy with it.
Some of the guidelines have been painfully dumb, even if there was an intended logic to them - like "no hot food" where the goal was to disallow restaurant purchases and purchasing pre-cooked meals because they are generally a less efficient use of the funds, but led to dumb shit like Subway noting that they sell subs cold and so could hypothetically still sell, then just offer to toast the sub post-sale so that the division was meaningless.
Then you have the abuses of the program that really do need fixed, like stores that are well known to be willing to buy certain stock from just anyone, at a stupidly low price. The idea being that you go to Walmart or wherever and buy up a bunch of product that you can buy on SNAP, take it to the store and resell it at a massive loss to launder your SNAP funds into regular cash. In my area it was certain convenience stores that were known to buy certain brands of soda in cases of cans for much less than they could be bought through legitimate channels as a way of laundering SNAP funds.
Given how many Americans are in food deserts where it's close to impossible to get anything but junk food, it's definitely an absolutely moronic move.
First you have to make sure that fresh and healthy food is available for everyone then you make this kind of move.
Not the other way around...If you want to know the quality of US education before current cuts...
I learned about food deserts in 7th grade. The teacher called it food desserts and went into great detail about how it meant places where you can only find desserts to eat like ice cream shops. It's a real problem for these areas because they don't have real food to eat and everyone is obese from only eating desserts.
Yeah agreed. It's always insane to me to hear how all that works in the US. Here I've always had a supermarket at <10 min by bike, and those always have fresh fruit and vegetables. A society where unhealthy food is way easier and cheaper to get is a recipe for disaster
I'm somebody who has food stamps. It's like a debit card that the government will load with money monthly. You can only use it to purchase food items. If your total bill at the store is $40, $20 of food and $20 of other household goods, then paying with the food stamps card will pay for the $20 of food. You'll still have to pay the $20 of other goods with your own money.
Republicans don't improve anything except profits for the top 1%. Not only are they not going to make healthy food more available or affordable, Trump's hard on for mass deportation is actually driving up the cost of produce.
This isn't going to help anyone eat healthier, just make poor people more miserable.
In my area, a relative that receives SNAP gets a debit card. They split their payment since they get such a small amount.
I need a new type of vote for when the post makes me sad
parasites are mostly protien and reproductive organs. if you ever dissected a parasitic worms you will be able to see it has dozens of uteri or male gonads.
I can’t think of a quicker way to get rednecks to shoot in your general direction - take away their food stamp snackies.
???
Why isn't our low-protein gruel wearing down his resistance?
So are they okay with healthier foods like steak, lobster, and avocado toast now?
So no fruit juice?
There's a percentage juice and ingredient requirements to not be in the "junk" category.
Well, they definitely could get worms for all I care.
This is a great idea, it will make healthy food more abundant for everyone via economies of scale. Ban tartrazine and put a warning for high sugar content and trans fats.
Healthier foods tend to be more expensive, and I highly doubt food stamp restrictions will magically change that. Also, sometimes people just need the calories.
You do realize 8 billion usd are spent on soda via snap every year right? We have a sick twisted corporate oligarchy with its fingers in the food supply pushing cheap junk food on everyone. Everyone knows Whole Foods cost more than processed food, but an astronomical amount of SNAP is spent on food that should simply not be funded. Beans and rice and bread are far cheaper than any junk food you can find, and when people are being brainwashed by big food corporations there needs to be an external incentive (no SNAP funding) that pushed people away from junk food.
Honestly, I wish there’s was a 50% sin tax on all food above a certain calories/gram or processed or whatever criteria you want that would be reinvested into subsidies for healthy food on SNAP. But that would never happen because Wall Street makes too much money off of fat Americans.
Food desserts in farm country are real. Wanna ride elsewhere? Can't pay Uber with food stamps.
Was this comment written by RFK? Also trans fats have already been banned in the US since 2021, and had mandatory labeling since 2006.
warning for high sugar content and trans fats
These are the same folks that think the "diet" in diet cola makes it healthy. They aren't going to read anything or change their habits. Junk food is tasty and that's as far as the thought goes.
