Missouri About to Make Some BIG Changes to Food Stamps… Welf

[Drakeshead]

Missouri About to Make Some BIG Changes to Food Stamps… Welfare Leeches Don’t Like It One Bit


There’s big news coming out of a state that has traditionally been surprisingly behind the times concerning welfare reform, especially given the fact that it has always been a heavily red state.

Missouri House Rep. Rick Brattin recently announced that he’s sick and tired of seeing welfare leeches in the grocery checkout line with carts stuffed full of junk food snacks, soda and even porterhouse steaks and crab legs.

Something about that just doesn’t seem right in his eyes, so he did what he was hired to do — he began a push for state legislation that would prohibit welfare abusers from buying foods that most hard-working Americans can’t always afford.

He said the final straw that motivated him to take action is when he heard a professional welfare abuser utter the words, “This is the way I want to live and I don’t really see anything changing.”

“The intention of the bill is to get the food stamp program back to its original intent, which is nutrition assistance,” Brattin said.

He’s exactly right. After all, the program is called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, not the “buy junk food and fresh Maine lobster program.”

SNAP is purely to help needy families who can’t quite make ends meet on a temporary basis until they get back on their feet. But it’s turned into a monster that has allowed non-contributing members of society to spend taxpayer money on food items that contribute to obesity or mimic the menu of a tycoon’s private chef.

“I have seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs with their EBT cards. When I can’t afford it on my pay, I don’t want people on the taxpayer’s dime to afford those kinds of foods either,” Brattin admitted (H/T Mad World News).

While progressives will no doubt demonize Brattin and accuse him of starving the poor, common-sense thinkers know that this is exactly the right kind of legislation to get behind.

Welfare abuse has to be reined in quickly, as it’s already an incredible strain on a difficult economy. We support Brattin’s bold initiative and hope he gets the support he needs to make his new law a reality.

Missouri Republicans are trying to ban food stamp recipients from buying steak and seafood

In 2013, Fox News proudly broadcast an interview with a young food stamp recipient who claimed to be using the government benefit to purchase lobster and sushi.

"This is the way I want to live and I don’t really see anything changing," Jason Greenslate explained to Fox. “It’s free food; it’s awesome."

That story fit a longtime conservative suspicion that poor people use food stamps to purchase luxury items. Now, a Republican state lawmaker in Missouri is pushing for legislation that would stop people like Greenslate and severely limit what food stamp recipients can buy. The bill being proposed would ban the purchase with food stamps of "cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak."

"The intention of the bill is to get the food stamp program back to its original intent, which is nutrition assistance," said Rick Brattin, the representative who is sponsoring the proposed legislation.

Curbing food stamp purchases of cookies, chips, energy drinks, and soft drinks at least falls in line with the food stamp program's mission to provide nutrition. Nutrition experts are already discussing whether to remove unhealthy items from the list of foods participants can buy.

But seafood and steak? Seafood has been shown, time and again, to be a healthy part of any diet. And steak is such a broad category that it's essentially banning people from buying any flat cuts of beef, from porterhouse to flank.

"It just seems really repressive," said Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University and author of the book Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America. "I don't see how it makes any sense to ban some of these foods. Fish is something that should really be in your diet. And steak, what does that mean in this context?"

Brattin admits that the language might need some tweaking. "My intention wasn't to get rid of canned tuna and fish sticks," he said. But he also insists that people are abusing the system by purchasing luxury foods, and believes that that must be stopped, even if it ends up requiring the inclusion of other less luxurious items.

"I have seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs with their EBT cards," he said. "When I can't afford it on my pay, I don't want people on the taxpayer's dime to afford those kinds of foods either."

Currently, a household of one can qualify for up to $194 dollars a month, or fewer than $7 dollars day, as part of SNAP, according to the Department of Agriculture. For a household of two, it's roughly twice that. For a household of three, it's about three times the amount.

It doesn't take too much math to figure out that foods like lobster aren't exactly within a recipient's budget. And it's also hard to draw conclusions based on a single purchase. What if that family that was purchasing a more expensive cut of meat had subsisted on cheaper canned goods for the past month in order to afford it?

Brattin's proposal is part of what Rank laments is a long history of stigmatizing food stamps and welfare programs in America. Ronald Reagan famously told the story of one "welfare queen" as though she were representative of the system at large. Rank says that today, the myth is perpetuated using similar anecdotes, like the Fox example, which he argued should be viewed as distortions of reality.

"There are some isolated cases of abuse, sure," said Rank. "But they are hardly representative of what the people struggling to get by on SNAP are actually buying... These people are spending their money extremely frugally."

Brattin says his bill is about making the food stamp program revolve around nutrition, but it also touches on more than that: whether poor people should be allowed to purchase foods that are deemed fancy. And Rank argues that this crosses a line.

"More than anything else, I think this is about controlling people," said Rank. "We should be treating people who are in poverty the same way we treat everyone else."

[regishay]

Sounds like they need to stop worry what people are buying, and just limit the funds to a smaller amount.

[Smoke68]

[Rice]

Heard a democrat say who are we to tell people how to live their life and what they can buy...well when it's essentially MY money I should have a say so. I think the only answer is to have snap approved stamp on food that's ok to get and or have a snap grocery store.

[Wildfowler]

I always thought that food stamps needed to be used only for foods that needed to be prepared or fresh produce or meat.

Not cokes and junk food.

If this were the case it would probably have a direct effect of promoting a traditional family structure which would probably lead to fewer people being dependent on the system.

It really chaps me off to see expensive junkfood being purchased with EBT cards by gangbangers and ho's who have the munchies.

[teul2]

[tombstone]

koolaid pickles, pizza sticks, hot Cheetos, and jungle juice are the obvious favorites at double quick in the morning when the 13-16 year olds swarm the store at 7:40 to get the days lunch and snacks. ALWAYS ALWAYS paid for with the little yellow card.

[Drakeshead]

This is how stupid I am; I did not know until recently that EBT cards could be used to get cashback.

I disagree with EBT/SNAP individuals being able to purchase ANY seafood or meat product. If we can track a bar code down to the calf, or down to the fish pond, then why can't certain barcodes be exceptions and not used for EBT/SNAP purchases?

[sondance]

Here's an idea, Kroger can track what you buy with those cards you swipe to get reduced price gas. That's why you guys who buy a lot of pork skins and such get coupons on the back of your receipts for heartburn medicine. How about using a similar system when foods are scored on a nutritional basis. You buy food with high scores you get to spend the whole allotment. If you buy low scored food you are penalized. That way people have a choice and if they chose poorly they just get less of it.

[Wildfowler]

[Smoke68]

[teul2]

[hntrpat1]

Set it up like WIC in Mississippi, you go to the WIC center to get the staples needed they give it to you its not hey lets go to the store and pick what we want.

[jacksbuddy]

The article stated that recipients got $194.00/person/month. Spending that amount on luxury items WILL force recipients to run out of food before they run out of month. Heck, they'll run out of food before they run out of week for that matter! Here's an even better idea. Limit it to fruits and vegetables, dairy, and whole grains ONLY. This will do a few very important things:

1 - It will force businesses in extremely rural areas to stock more healthy food choices for their customers.
2 - It will make the funds go farther, and hopefully keep the needy from going hungry at the end of the month.
3 - It will lower the obesity rates among lower income groups, thus making them healthier and less costly to the state's health resources (Wow, I sound like a mid-ranking government official on that last one, don't I?), and
4 - If the system cheats still want to get the fancy stuff, then they'll have to go out and earn it.

Unfortunately, nobody asks my opinion on matters such as this, so.....

[duramax]

This is a broken system. You can't start limiting what foods you can, and can't buy effectively, because where do you draw the line. No junk food? Does sugary cereal count? What cereal is "sugary". What is "steak"? Does stew meat count as steak?

You can't limit $ because for the people who ACTUALLY need it, need it. Anything less $ wise would be a major strain on them.

If there was a solution, it would somehow make it difficult and have more oversight to folks that actually get food stamps. Probably 10% of those on food stamps are actually the ones who need the program.