Choice
By Mitch Berg
A friend of the blog emails:
Found very different headlines from NPR regarding food choices. Democrats love telling the poor what to eat when they see fit. Tax sugary drinks. They need to eat healthier, why, the tax helps fight obesity:
Even this article seems concerned that SNAP recipients may be using food stamps to buy the cheapest food, which “isn’t healthy for them,” and the article even has to question, once again, are SNAP recipients consuming too much sugary beverages?
But, now that Trump is proposing a change, a change in which the government does exert more control over what SNAP recipients might be given to eat, there is all of a sudden a different tone? Suddenly, Trump is some evil government official trying to tell people what to eat? Give me a break.
Moral, intellectual and logical inconsistency is less important to Big Left than adherence to narrative.
February 15th, 2018 at 8:51 am
I asume this is a hoax or a viral Trump trolling op. You notice the details are missing (where is the official text where this is called for?). Also the expense of assembling and mailing out 60 million or so packages every month would be prohibitive.
February 15th, 2018 at 10:02 am
I can see a certain benefit in distributing healthy food boxes to areas that are what the progs like to call “food deserts”. Especially if these boxes are loaded with fresh (and won’t that be a trick) greens. The devil is in the details, of course, and who gets to decide what “healthy” is. If it’s Michele Obama, prepare for people passing out in the streets.
It would end up as just another government overreach and bureaucratic morass, and people still won’t get any healthier.
February 15th, 2018 at 11:01 am
Regarding “food deserts”, I took a look at the locations of grocery stores in places like Detroit, Gary, and Compton, and you know what I found? I found that with few exceptions, people had a decent grocery store within a couple of miles of their homes.
Reality here is that, like most Americans, the poor have a taste for sugar and fat, and inexpensive packaged foods work really well when you get a paycheck each month and don’t have much of a savings account. If you want to fix the problem, bringing produce to the hood won’t work–it’s already there. What you do is cut corn and soybean subsidies and let the market sort it out.
February 15th, 2018 at 1:08 pm
BB, I think it depends on what the people doing the counting consider a “food desert”. It would not surprise me in the least if they consider a food desert to be anywhere where there is not a local co-op, Whole Foods, or Trader Joes, within 1/4 mile of public transit. I highly doubt they would consider stores like Cub, HyVee, Krogers, Ralph’s or Von’s as sufficient to overcome the deserty-ness.