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Republican War on the Poor

The idea that delivering food to millions of Americans would be cheaper and more efficient than just giving them money is utterly ridiculous. The goal of such a plan is to siphon money from feeding Americans to third party vendors. This is the core of Republican economy policy. All money has to flow through the richest people before it gets to the rest of us.
 
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Donald Trump’s Nasty Budget

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During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump told the “forgotten men and women of our country” that he would champion them. As evidence that he was a different kind of Republican, he promised not to cut Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that benefit poor and middle-class families.

On Monday, President Trump proposed a budget that would slash spending on Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, transportation and other essential government services, all while increasing the federal deficit.

Mr. Trump’s 2019 budget, combined with the tax cuts Republicans passed last year, would amount to one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich in generations. It would also charge trillions of dollars in new debt to the account of future Americans. It’s a plan that could please only far-right ideologues who want to dissolve nearly every part of the federal government, save the military.

The proposal would raise military spending by 14.1 percent while cutting funding for the State Department — the agency that has a mandate to resolve problems without going to war — by 26.9 percent. It would cut the Department of Health and Human Services by 20.3 percent and the Department of Education by 10.5 percent. It calls for (yet again) the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and proposes cutting food stamps by $213 billion, or around 30 percent, over 10 years. Medicare and Medicaid, which benefit one-third of Americans, are targeted for cuts of hundreds of billions of dollars.

If Congress adopted Mr. Trump’s proposal, millions of people would stand to lose health insurance, subsidized food, low-cost housing and other benefits. The result would be to greatly increase poverty and hunger in America.

This is surely not what most of Mr. Trump’s working-class supporters imagined during the primary and general election campaigns. In May 2015, Candidate Trump tweeted, “I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid.” And in an April 2016 ad that ran in Pennsylvania he promised to “save Social Security and Medicare without cuts.”

But wait, there’s more. Another of Mr. Trump’s promises was to build the “gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways and waterways all across our land,” a promise that he referred to as recently as his State of the Union address in January. Yet his budget recommends slashing funding for Amtrak and grant programs that help local and state governments pay for highway and transit projects. Over all, the administration wants to reduce the Department of Transportation’s budget by nearly a fifth. The budget would also effectively cut the Highway Trust Fund by $122 billion over a decade.

No doubt Mr. Trump will claim he is still serious about infrastructure by pointing to a separate infrastructure proposal he announced on Monday. In that document, the administration says it will bolster investment by $1.5 trillion over 10 years. But the math simply doesn’t add up. The White House suggests that the federal government would put up only $200 billion, which would be enough to get state and local governments and the private sector to supply the rest of the money. But where would most cities and states find those funds? Already strapped, many will struggle to raise new tax revenue, because the Republican tax law limited the deductibility of state and local taxes. The private sector might be interested, but only in projects like toll roads that produce a steady and rich source of income.

It will be tempting for some to dismiss Mr. Trump’s budget as a marketing stunt by his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, who was earlier a Tea Party zealot in Congress. After all, Congress last week passed, and Mr. Trump signed, a two-year bipartisan budget that authorizes a significant increase in domestic, as well as military, spending.

But presidential budgets are statements of principles. They tend to reveal how administrations will try to change policy and funding levels when Congress comes up with detailed appropriations bills for individual departments. With this budget, the Trump administration is giving notice that it will do everything it can to torpedo the bipartisan budget deal, regardless of the needs of millions of Americans.
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Maybe I’m naive, but the food box method of feeding people could be healthier and more cost effective if done right.

Do I trust the Trump administration to do it right? Not so much.
 
Maybe I’m naive, but the food box method of feeding people could be healthier and more cost effective if done right.

Do I trust the Trump administration to do it right? Not so much.
It would only be more "cost effective" if you planned to give people less value in food then the amount of benefits they were previously receiving, and then you also have to factor in the cost of delivering boxes of food to millions of people every month.
 
Food delivery would not be cheap. This seems to me to be about two things. Giving money directly to preferred vendors and the conservative idea that poor folks can’t be trusted to make the right choices with public assistance dollars.
 
It would only be more "cost effective" if you planned to give people less value in food then the amount of benefits they were previously receiving, and then you also have to factor in the cost of delivering boxes of food to millions of people every month.

"Prove it."

I think it's possible to make work. When someone buys an item at a store, there's multiple layers of production costs built in. Perhaps you could work with local distributors and farms (when possible) to provide much higher quality food with a lower cost.

I think it's disingenuous to act like it not possible to find another way that better than the current method.
 
This is a great idea to stop the poor from spending their entitlement money on non-essential items. There is a good reason the majority of the poor remain poor.

Food doesn't have to be fresh to be nutritious. Canned veggies and frozen chicken breasts are better than McDonald's or Lunchables any day of the week.
 
Trump Administration Wants To Decide What Food SNAP Recipients Will Get

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...This and other changes in the SNAP program, according to the Trump administration, will reduce the SNAP budget by $213 billion over those years — cutting the program by almost 30 percent.

Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, a hunger advocacy group that also helps clients access food-assistance services, said the administration's plan left him baffled. "They have managed to propose nearly the impossible, taking over $200 billion worth of food from low-income Americans while increasing bureaucracy and reducing choices," Berg says.

He says SNAP is efficient because it is a "free market model" that lets recipients shop at stores for their benefits. The Trump administration's proposal, he said, "is a far more intrusive, Big Government answer. They think a bureaucrat in D.C. is better at picking out what your family needs than you are?"

Douglas Greenaway, president of the National WIC Association, echoed that sentiment. "Removing choice from SNAP flies in the face of encouraging personal responsibility," he said. He says "the budget seems to assume that participating in SNAP is a character flaw."

It isn't clear how billions of dollars' worth of food each year would be distributed to millions of SNAP recipients who live all over the country, including dense urban areas and sparsely populated rural regions. The budget says states will have "substantial flexibility in designing the food box delivery system through existing infrastructure, partnerships or commercial/retail delivery services."

Critics of the proposal said distributing that much food presents a logistical nightmare. "Among the problems, it's going to be costly and take money out of the [SNAP] program from the administrative side. It's going to stigmatize people when they have to go to certain places to pick up benefits," says Jim Weill, president of the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center.

Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, called the proposal "radical and risky." The idea that the government could save money by distributing food itself, she said, is "ill-informed at best."...
 
Food delivery would not be cheap. This seems to me to be about two things. Giving money directly to preferred vendors and the conservative idea that poor folks can’t be trusted to make the right choices with public assistance dollars.

This is a great idea to stop the poor from spending their entitlement money on non-essential items. There is a good reason the majority of the poor remain poor.

Food doesn't have to be fresh to be nutritious. Canned veggies and frozen chicken breasts are better than McDonald's or Lunchables any day of the week.

Exhibit A
 
what if we just drive trucks into the cities and throw the bread directly to the population?
 
There is nothing that drives old white men crazier than the thought of a single black mother using food stamps to buy a steak. Nearly makes them froth at the mouth.
 
"Prove it."

I think it's possible to make work. When someone buys an item at a store, there's multiple layers of production costs built in. Perhaps you could work with local distributors and farms (when possible) to provide much higher quality food with a lower cost.

I think it's disingenuous to act like it not possible to find another way that better than the current method.
I'm not against the notion of giving millions of people food every month. What i'm against is removing the tiny bit of agency and dignity that poor people have in the simple act of picking out their own food, and i'm also strongly against the logic that this can be done as a cost saving measure. The logistics of delivering meat, eggs, dairy, and perishable fruits and veggies to millions of people is staggering. Food distribution is one of the only economies in this country where retail middle-men (grocery stores) actually improve the process and benefit the consumer. Intending to cut them out is the equivalent of reinventing the wheel.
 
https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-find...s-be-arrested-and-jailed-bidding-private-debt
ACLU FINDS COURTS NATIONWIDE ORDERING CONSUMERS TO BE ARRESTED AND JAILED AT THE BIDDING OF PRIVATE DEBT COLLECTION COMPANIES

FEBRUARY 21, 2018

NEW YORK — In the first-ever report on the extent and impact of cooperation between courts and the private debt collection industry nationwide, the American Civil Liberties Union found courts in 26 states and Puerto Rico in which judges issued arrest warrants for alleged debtors at the request of private debt collectors.

This practice violates the many state and federal laws as well as international human rights standards that prohibit the jailing of debtors. It worsens their financial struggles by subjecting them to court appearances, arrest warrants that appear on background checks, and jail time that interfere with their wages, their jobs, their ability to find housing, and more.

“The private debt collection industry uses prosecutors and judges as weapons against millions of Americans who can’t afford to pay their bills,” said Jennifer Turner, author of “A Pound of Flesh: The Criminalization of Private Debt,” and principal human rights researcher at the ACLU. “Consumers have little chance of justice when our courts take the debt collector’s side in almost every case — even to the point of ordering people jailed until they pay up.”

An estimated one in three adults in the United States has a debt that has been turned over to a private collection company, according to the Urban Institute. More than 6,000 of these companies operate in the U.S. At the bidding of the private debt collection industry, courts issue tens of thousands of arrest warrants every year when people don’t appear in court to deal with unpaid civil debt judgments.
 
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