Posted on 04/03/2015 11:04:07 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
In 2013, Fox News proudly broadcast an interview with a young food stamp recipient who claimed to be using the government benefit to purchase lobster and sushi.
"This is the way I want to live and I don’t really see anything changing," Greenslate explained to Fox. “It’s free food; it’s awesome."
That story fit a longtime conservative suspicion that poor people use food stamps to purchase luxury items. Now, a Republican state lawmaker in Missouri is pushing for legislation that would stop people like Greenslate and severely limit what food stamp recipients can buy. The bill being proposed would ban the purchase with food stamps of "cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak."
"The intention of the bill is to get the food stamp program back to it's original intent, which is nutrition assistance," said Rick Brattin, the representative who is sponsoring the proposed legislation.
Curbing food stamp purchases of cookies, chips, energy drinks, and soft drinks at least falls in line with the food stamp program's mission to provide nutrition. Nutrition experts are already discussing whether to remove unhealthy items from the list of foods participants can buy.
But seafood and steak? Seafood has been shown, time and again, to be a healthy part of any diet. And steak is such a broad category that it's essentially banning people from buying any flat cuts of beef, from porterhouse to flank.
"It just seems really repressive," said Mark Rank, a professor at...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Hey I have an idea, take the money from the EBT cards, buy a whole bunch of MREs and distribute the MREs instead.
Most do. But of course, gotta have the steak for fajitas to go with the beans...
Good Luck with that!! Stood behind a person in the checkout line at Walmart with a cart full of spare ribs and steaks he pulled out the link card to pay for it all and I paid cash for my hot dogs and frozen pizza.
Remove caviar, lobster and filet mignon
And weed and Cadillac cars and cigarettes and cable TV and smart phones....
It won’t fly. All the media will do is make conservatives look silly and hateful.
The thing to do is significantly reduce the amount to where they cannot buy steak and lobster. Motivate them to work if they want that.
Sooner or later, they won’t be buying steak and lobster. The welfare system is going to crash with our broke government.
Those are already excluded from being purchased with EBT (Eat Better Tonight). The cash assistance, on the other hand, is what covers these items.
if they stop them from using food stamps to buy steak then they’ll just use money from the EBT cards to buy it..
food stamps are one thing but letting g them have all that money to spend on beer and cigarettes and drugs is crazy
Hey I have an idea, take the money from the EBT cards, buy a whole bunch of MREs and distribute the MREs instead.
I like that idea better. And let Moosechelle Obama do the meal planning like she does for school lunches.
This is so stupid. I don’t want those on the left or right micromanaging what people eat - even if they are on food stamps. Make food stamps rare and focused on the truly needy and spent on food. Then if they want to squander the whole amount on expensive or inexpensive foods that is their choice.
I hate that. Can't even tell you how many times I've been in a line, watching welfare recipients buy those items, and I've got ramen noodles in my cart. Of course, both your cash and mine pays for their steaks and such.
Yes I know they can't buy those with the EBT card but having all of those should exclude one from qualifying for EBT. Smartphones are about $1000 a year it seems and they serve no purpose but to play.
Of course they also have the time to slow cook those ribs all day unlike the rest of us who are at work all day and only have time to throw in a frozen pizza when you get home before carting the kids off to school events and such.
That story fit a longtime conservative suspicion that poor people use food stamps to purchase luxury items.
So, the implication here is that it is just a “conservative suspicion”, and therefore not really happening.
So, logically, passing this law would have no effect on EBT users, and the left doesn’t have a reason to oppose it, right?
Why do some on here always assume that because a person receives food stamps that they are boozers or druggies? I know several people who get them and do NOT fit into this category. I think some of you on here would fit in nicely with the tyranny crowd.
Yeah.
But the thing is that this proposal is exactly like the liberal left nanny state laws and proposals.
Liberals are usually perfectly happy with the government telling people what to eat and how to spend their money.
What they need to do is get this as part of Obama’s healthy eating initiative. Then the liberals have to love it n
The stories abound of welfare kings and queens loading up their carts with all the food that people who work for a living can only afford once in a while.
The left really ticks me off when they say this doesn’t happen. They try to pull their typical moral superiority when this is brought up, because they “care more than you” about “the poor”.
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