Soda for Food StampsFollow

We've already established you have no concept of "poor".

Try to get through your thick ******* skull that sometimes life is grossly unfair to people and they don't have the resources to continue after a loss, be it a job or spouse or home. They need to eat. Who the **** are you to:

A: Deny them food;

B. Chose what they eat.

Go **** yourself.

Better yet, get in a terrible auto accident, be refused by the insurance companies and lose your job. Oh, and have your house foreclosed on. And your bank fail.

But if someone does those things because they can't afford a color TV, or new pants, then it is a decent way to determine whether someone was "pretty poor".

If we can't define levels of poverty based on what sorts of things people can afford to obtain, then we don't really have any meaningful standard at all. While I'm sure that some middle class kids shopped at the goodwill store to buy cheap stuff out of a sense of frugality or something, for my family it was a necessity. We could not afford brand new clothes. Period. We were able to afford the most important basics, but had to scrimp and save wherever we could in order to make ends meet.

If that doesn't qualify as "pretty poor", then what does? I see it as being just above poverty. You're not desperate. You're capable of getting by without help. But just barely. What other definition would you suggest for "pretty poor"?

One of my mother's friends was a single mom - divorced from an abusive husband. She and her daughter, who was my age and a class mate in middle school, lived in the trailer park a mile up the road from us. The trailer was missing all the interior doors so they had hung sheets up for privacy. I was scared to go in it. She had a car, but it was ancient and frequently broke down and she'd have my mother come pick her up to go to work on those days.

Oh, she was the very definition of working poor, all right. I don't think they had any television, not even a black and white one.

And yeah, they also volunteered at the food bank, now that I think about it, in addition to being on food stamps. What little cash the mother had at the end of the month went to things to help the daughter do better in life - she was in my Girl Scout troop and our school's drama club.

Not really, but if it makes you feel better about yourself.



I've never said that wasn't the case.



Yes. Can we also agree that they don't need to drink soda?



I'm not. Assuming we both agree that soda is not food they require in order to avoid starvation.



I think that if I'm paying for someone else's food, then I do get to choose what they eat. At the very least, I ought to be able to say what I'm not willing to pay for them. More directly, if someone can afford to buy and is choosing to buy soda, then they are not so poor that they require food stamps.


It's just strange that you went on this huge diatribe about how someone who went without a bunch of stuff wasn't really "pretty poor", but apparently being able to afford to buy soda doesn't preclude one from the same analysis. You have a very very odd means of determining such things.




If, after all of that, I'm stocking my fridge with soda, then by all means deny me food stamps. Why is this a hard concept to grasp? If you can afford to buy soda, then you can afford to buy food and you don't need other people's help. If you're choosing to spend other people's help buying soda instead of (or in addition to) food, then you're getting too much in food stamps. In either case, the dollars spent buying soda are dollars that could be reduced from the amount other people are paying to help you without hurting you in any way at all.

Get it?

How the hell would I know? I was 10. We're talking late 1970s here, so unless you happen to have the inflation tables handy, it wouldn't tell you much anyway. Certainly would be something you could compare directly.

And it wasn't at that time. It was later, when we were living with my mom. Mostly when I was in middle school and high school. My mom was working two jobs and putting herself through school during that time period. Classic tale of divorced woman who set aside her education to have children and then found life very hard to get going afterward.



Yup. Most people grossly underestimate what "middle class" means.



Kinda depends on how many dependents you have though. 20 year old making $18k/year with no dependents is "poor as hell" but is in no real need of assistance (cause you can live on that much when you're that age). Single mom with 3 kids making the same money wont be able to make ends meet.




How do you know? I don't recall you being there. I just find it strange (yes, I'm saying this for the 3rd time) that you are so quick to insist that my mother could not have been poor enough to have qualified for food stamps (or even to be considered "pretty poor"), yet are equally quick to defend the need for food stamps for people who can afford to have soda in their fridge. That really seems to be inconsistent. I'd think you'd be yelling at them that they aren't really poor and don't really need food stamps.

High sugar, mass produced, unhealthy food isn't exactly super expensive. That's part of the reason why it's used so often and why there is the obesity "epidemic".

It's not like drinking a gallon of Orange Juice instead of a gallon of Pepsi is really much better for you. I think the Pepsi actually has fewer calories, and beyond the Vitamin C from the OJ, (which is not really that big of a vitamin since it has to be one of the easiest to get through any other foods), the OJ doesn't provide anything good for you since juicing it removes the part that makes the fruit 'good' for you (filling, with few calories). You are left with all the sugar and calories, and none of the 'filling'.

Actual poor people drink water and take vitamin C tablets (or actually eat oranges when possible instead of drinking juice). May I mention for the record that we never had juice in the fridge either. We did occasionally have apples and oranges though.

That's not the point (and HA, vitamin tablets?)

The point is you are making a big deal about the "expense" of Soda, and how the Food Stamps being spent on it means they have too much. Soda is cheaper than other non-water beverages, and the other non-water beverages are just as unhealthy in terms of "nothing but empty calories from sugar".

Oh. And I think I can end the debate right here. We also drank powdered milk. Done. I win.

I suspect that it indicates that our definition of poverty has changed dramatically since I was a kid. The idea that poor means you feed your kids soda because it's filling and sugary shows how completely out of whack our priorities have become.


To be fair, the definition and conditions had changed by the time I was a kid too. My dad grew up poor. Really poor. As in, lived with his mom on the edge of someone's property in Missouri, in an old broken down wagon (as in pulled by horses kind of wagon). A typical dinner for him was a can of WW2 surplus soybean soup heated over a steno stove. On the day he finished high school, he walked home diploma in hand, to find his mother standing out front of the wagon with a couple of bags packed with all of his belongings. She gave him a hug and told him he was a man now and sent him off into the world to find his own way.

So please don't try to tell me what poverty is. You honestly have no clue what you are talking about. I suspect that each generation in the US knows less and less about what "real" poverty is. Our standards change. But I do think that the point at which people are making regular purchasing decisions which include things which by any definition are complete luxury items, we've moved so far past "poverty" that the definition becomes meaningless. Are there people who are in such dire conditions that they would go seriously hungry without assistance? Absolutely. But those people would never fill their fridges with soda. Which is the most relevant point here IMO.

yes. What was your point? One of the items that was commonly in the food boxes when I was a kid were bottles of various vitamins. I assume because most of the stuff in there was non-perishable, so you usually didn't get fruits and vegetables (except the occasional canned variety of course).



I am not singling out "soda", but any non-necessary item. Soda happens to be something I include in that list. I also include pre-made bottles of fruit juice, especially any that aren't "all natural". Those which are all natural are expensive (a lot more expensive). It's much more economical to simply buy oranges and eat them then to buy orange juice from the store and keep it in the fridge.

And unless you don't have access to a tap, anything other than the gallon or larger jugs of basic water is also a luxury item. You don't need to drink any of them. You can drink water. As I mentioned earlier, if you really need some flavoring, instant tea is relatively inexpensive. My point is that if you are really struggling to feed yourself and your children, you are not going to be buying any of those things. Water is free (more or less). It's what you actually need to hydrate yourself. Actual food should be purchased with food stamps, not yummy treats. It's surprising to me how much resistance this somewhat simple idea is receiving.

Key word: Sometimes. Replace that with "always" and you're in the ballpark.



Given that a hour ago you were insisting that this was lower middle class, forgive me if I just assume you don't know what you're talking about. How do you know you weren't poor? If you didn't have those things, and couldn't have them because you couldn't afford them, perhaps you were poor. But in your case, your parents lied to you and told you that they were middle class or something? I don't know.



He was an insurance investigator for Equifax. Not what you think though. I mean, he was the guy who would drive around to people's addresses and take pictures of them through their back fences not being as disabled as they claimed. The point is that this is irrelevant. We lived relatively well with my dad. He remarried and moved up north (and we lived with them for several years). My stepmom worked in the welfare department in Santa Cruz at the time. They were not "lower middle class", but comfortably working class. It was my mom who struggled financially. She was the single/divorced mom trying to make ends meet. I'm sure she received some amount of child support from my dad when we were there, but it was still quite a struggle.



There's a huge difference between paying less taxes out of the money you earned, and receiving money you didn't earn in the first place. You want to debate the mortgage tax deduction, by all means start a thread on that. But that has no bearing on whether or not I should be ok with my tax dollars paying for someone to buy things that are not necessities.




Given that the IRS not only did not charge me with any crime, but instead paid me back for all the extra money I paid them, I don't think your opinion really counts.