Food stamps should not be used for soda. That’s a no-brainer. Fact is, if food stamps recipients can afford soda, they must be getting too much money for food.
I agree that food stamps should not be paying for soda.
My first thought was to agree that this was a good thing.
But they find ways to cash in food stamps for cigarettes and alcohol, so this won’t change.
It will just change their stat reporting. And lead to further corruption.
At least our slackards here in Pennsylvania have the ambition to drink the soda before cashing in the cans.
Food stamps should be used for meat, fish, veggies, fruit and dairy products. Period. Actual products of our farms, ranches and fisheries. Not for packaged products.
That would improve recipients’ health and lower healthcare costs immeasurably. Hundreds of billions of bucks, I’ll bet.
I taught healthcare classes for people with chronic conditions in my city. It was just amazing how few people had a clue that their food choices influenced their health.
I remember one summer, when I was a kid, going around with a group of kids asking our neighbors if they had any extra food stamps. We used those food stamps to get sodas. We drank or discarded the sodas (I can't actually drink them, so I mostly poured them out) and took the bottles back for the deposits. Since the deposits were returned in cash even when the sodas were purchased with food stamps, that gave us lots of dimes to play pin-ball with.