This kind of crap pisses me off. Over at the US Food Policy Blog they’re debating The Thrifty Food Plan Challenge.
What set me off is this:
But here is the hard policy question — hard even to ask without seeming heartless. If the Thrifty Food Plan is adequate for many, but not all, then should the maximum food stamp budget be raised?
People need to understand something. Welfare, unemployment, food stamps and the like are not supposed to make your life comfortable. They’re supposed to stop you from dieing in the gutter with a staph infection. If this program does that then there’s no need to increase it.
And in fact you shouldn’t. The easier you make it for someone to get by with your program the longer they’re going to stay on it. These plans should just barely cover you.
And the general consensus seems to be that if you know how to cook it’s easy to get by on the program, so they lament that poor people can’t cook. Well if you want them to learn the last thing you should do is increase the money they get, that just makes them more likely to never learn.
People need to stop codling mother fuckers. I think we should just start air dropping bags of rice into shitty neighborhoods like we did in Somalia. They’ll figure out how to cook with it real quick.