Limiting food choices for people on SNAP isn’t about “nutrition,” it’s about control. It’s about the deeply ingrained right-wing belief that poor people are poor because of some moral failure rather than the normal outcome of the unequal economic and political system we’ve concocted for ourselves. That moral failure, whatever we’re imagining it to be, renders the poor less than fully human in the right wing worldview, and when they seek government assistance to try to keep from, I don’t know, starving to death, the same conservatives who are constantly braying about “small government” feel the obligation to treat them as adult infants, incapable of managing something as basic as deciding what food to eat without strict supervision. It’s offensively demeaning.
Usually these efforts nibble at foods that could reasonably be described as unhealthy — booze, chips, candy, cakes, etc. — so that we can maintain the lie that this is about “nutrition,” but banning SNAP recipients from buying any fish and any steak gives the game away. In a larger sense, though, what business is it of anybody’s how those SNAP benefits are used? If a family on SNAP wants to subsist on a can of soup a day for a week so that they can buy a birthday cake for their kid at the end of the week, why the hell shouldn’t they be allowed to do that? Heck, if that family wants to sell its EBT card to make a payment on a cell phone that could help mom or dad get a job, well, that might not be legal, but maybe the law needs to be changed. This is a program that gives people all of about seven measly dollars a day for food, and some asshole Missouri state legislator wants to actually make that experience worse than it already is? I know the response to this argument is always to point at that one idiot who bought lobster on SNAP that one time, or to talk in the vaguest anecdotal way about how one time you were in line behind Some Lady who was buying Filet Mignon with her EBT card, but you know what? Facts trump anecdotes, and the facts inconveniently tell us that food stamp fraud is pretty damn rare.
The simple solution to this problem has always been to stop pigeon-holing assistance to the poor and just give them cash, but of course our Republican friends have managed to figure out a way to screw people on that front as well. In Kansas, that involves putting welfare benefits on a debit card, whose use can then be monitored and restricted so that poor people don’t try to, say, catch a matinee, like Regular Folk. Of course, you’ll have to slap arbitrary ATM withdrawal limits on that card to keep those poors from taking out cash and spending it at their own discretion. The ancillary benefit of that policy is that big banks can then extract rents on those welfare benefits in the form of ATM fees, so we’re further enriching Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase on the backs of the poorest of the poor. All this because poor people can’t be trusted to manage their own finances, even though the actual evidence says precisely the opposite.
Yeah, it’s not about nutrition, or about making sure that these programs are “used as intended,” or whatever bogus euphemism we’ll be using next week. It’s about control, humiliation, and maybe the chance to make a little profit as a bonus.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 