Soda for Food StampsFollow

No, we can do this here. See, your tax deduction is supported by my taxes and I think that's ********* You don't need that deduction and others are subsidising it. Get it now?




You screwed up ( or deliberately were fraudulent ) with your taxes. The fact that you wiggled out of it is irrelevant.

If Mencia was that funny he'd still have a show.

Carbonated water does the filling part better and the sugar gives the feeling of actually being fed something...just sayin'

There's a nearly infinite number of variations on this though. I pay a higher tax rate than you do, which subsidizes your lower rate. That's BS! Wait you say! It's fair because if I made more money, I'd pay that higher rate too! Sure. And if you owned a home, you'd get the mortgage deduction. This is a completely pointless exercise. We could discuss the innate unfairness of wheat subsidies if you'd like, but it would also have no bearing on the actual issue at hand.



Do you? The question of "need" is relevant when discussing what one person should give to another. It is not relevant when discussing what should be taken from someone else. At least, not in a free society. You don't "need" free speech to live, yet we still place great value on not taking it from us. Failing to grasp the difference between taking something someone has and giving them something they don't have means you've failed to grasp the most basic concept of a free society.

Good luck! How is he doing, btw?

He still can't walk. Can't even stand up. The combination of him being bedridden for 2.5 weeks, the stroke and the brain surgery has just really done a number on him. But his health is much improved. Hopefully in the next day or two he'll be shipped off to in-house therapy at Vanderbilt. Those people will be better equipped to get him out of bed and back on his feet.

Right now, I'm happy this program exists. I hope I don't have to use it, but it's nice knowing it's there just in case. I guess we should have anticipated this stroke at the age of 42. But since we were lazy and didn't, if I have to, I'll take advantage of this government program.

No more or less so than "drink soda so you're not hungry". Difference is water is cheaper

Well...that...and also the actual caloric content of soda that provides energy to the body and eases hunger. That silly thing where you could drink soda and live unhealthily for years as opposed to drinking water and being dead in weeks..

A 20 ounce bottle of Pepsi has just about the same amount of calories as a simple sandwich made with two slices of bread, cheese, slice of meat, and maybe a condiment or two. But hey, it doesn't make you "feel" any less hungry right?

Yes, because of the bolded part I originally wrote, but you chose not to quote. The point being that if you do that thinking the person will buy the food he claims he absolutely cannot afford, and he buys something else instead, you are the one who took the risk and you are the one who paid for it. No one else pays for your mistake. When the government does it for you, it's taking the risk, but you are paying for it (along with everyone else who pays taxes). My point is that we know that the person will not spend it on what they say they will, so we'll be really suspicious about the request, yet, we just give a blank check out essentially when it's the government doing it on our behalf with our money. Doesn't that strike you as strange?



If the condition in bold is true, and the amount allocated is just enough to make up the difference then they should not have extra money to buy luxuries. What you're committing is the "not that money" fallacy. The idea that money given to someone for something they need, doesn't count towards other things as long as what they need is purchased. The classic example is the teenager who asks his dad for $100 to buy school books for the semester. His father gives him the money. Later he's cleaning his sons room and finds $100 worth of pot. When he confronts his son about using the $100 he gave him to buy drugs, his son says "No. I used the $100 you gave me to buy books. I used my own $100 to buy the pot". The point being that the father gave the money to the son on the assumption that if he didn't, the son would not be able to buy school books for the semester. But since the son could have purchased the books, by giving the son $100 for books, he was really giving the son $100 to buy drugs (or whatever else he wanted).

My point isn't simplistic at all. It requires an understanding of the fungible nature of money. If you give food stamps to someone who could have purchased food but would have to have given up other things to do so, you aren't actually buying them food. You're buying them those other things. Now in some cases, this is fine if the other things are also necessities (like housing, transportation, clothing, etc). But if the person has enough money after all is said and done to buy things they don't need at all, then we can reasonably argue that their food stamp allotment should be reduced by the amount of money they had left over. How to do that is complicated, of course, but I'm just trying to make the point that this is the case in the first place.



I'm not sure how anyone's condition as a child has any bearing on the correctness of their position on any issue anyway. It's another fallacy that somehow if someone isn't or hasn't been poor, they don't understand and thus can't make good decisions about how to deal with poverty. But it's so strong that people will go to great lengths to dismiss one person's experiences in order to maintain their own delusional assumptions.

You are correct that it's complicated. But that does not change the very simple fact that if people on food stamps are able to buy soda, then they are either receiving more money in food stamps than they need, or they are misspending the money and will come up short on things they actually need. Either one is a bad outcome. Also, either one is something we should attempt to minimize. Remember, for me this isn't about soda so much as waste in general. It's about the idea that if our justification for providing some good or service to someone is based on the assumption that they will go without something they really need if we don't, then just like the guy buying beer after claiming to need money for food, we're being taken advantage of. And instead of just throwing our hands up and saying there's nothing we can do, we can at least look at things we could try.


This somewhat comes back to my earlier comments about what we define as "poor". And it seems as though that definition keeps extending. There's a strange disconnect between our perceptions of what poverty means, and the reality of what qualifies as poverty when assessing the need for social spending programs like food stamps. It's part of what I was trying to get across to Bijou. He attacks my position that we should reduce assistance to people who are able to buy things like soda on the assumption that if they can afford such things, they don't need the extra help, but then also attacks my claim of being "pretty poor" because even though I listed off going without far more things than he'd allow in terms of providing food stamps, it's not good enough to be considered "poor" (or even "pretty poor"). That's a huge disconnect. He'll defend a program which provides for "the poor", while insisting that someone who had less than those on the program do wasn't just not "poor", but was not even close to poor.

So what is "poor' then? Is it just a word we sling around to convince people to support social spending programs? Or does it have an actual quantifiable meaning?

We all have friends, Pigtails. No need to boast.

Be a little more considerate, please.

I didn't quote it because it assumes I would say yes to the question, but any moron could figure that out. I am aware that people spend tax dollars on things that are not intended. The catch is I am not getting my panties in a twist about it. Sure some people buy items with the money that isn't the most benificial to their well being. There is the catch. Either you give them freedom and let them choose what they want to get (within reason) or you set up massive walls of what you can buy and waht you cannot buy. Which then raises the question of are the items you are deciding they pick out best for their health or your wallet? On a side note, are you seriously telling us that you want more governmental oversight and a bigger government? Because in order to not only set up but enforce your ideals on the subject we would need both. Rather amusing.



Last I checked they go "ok, you make <x> amount. Here is <y> amount to cover food expenses." They don't look at how you are allocating your budget and determine how much to give you based on how much you spend every week on groceries like they do in Gbaji land. Also I am not making a fallacy with my argument. I am stating that the mother didn't have enough for food, as in the mother and child would starve if they tried to live off what little bit of food they can buy. They get food stamps and they find that they could afford soft drinks with the money she used to spend for food. It isn't like she is going out and buying coke to sniff off her daughters back. She is buying a food item that would be considered a luxury items. Pro tip - instead of looking at the page and guessing what a person wrote it helps to actually read, heaven knows you must know the basics about reading with the walls of text you normally type.



Then may I ask why you tried to use it?



According to merriam-webster it is the condition relating to poverty, which is the following.



I will let people who are experts on the matter determine what would be the best way to give things like food stamps to the poor than some guy who thinks a person that has a 2 bath home, pool and a lexus as a lower middle class person.

I wonder how many people actually read the things gbaji posts?