Damn Hippies
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.
Tags: hippy bullshit
June 25th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Wow, I’m glad to see someone else has my point of view on these things. I’m tired of people complaining that they don’t have certain things. It’s not the job of the government to make everyone happy. I’m tired of seeing people at the store pull food stamps out of their $200 purse while talking on their cell phone.
June 26th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Really, Josh? 200 purses? Are they also driving Cadillacs? Man, hyperbole runs rampant on the internet.
Having poor people getting enough food so they don’t die in the “gutter with a staph infection” is not only the humane thing to do it also helps mitigate the rising cost of health care. Anyone that knows anything about nutrition’s role in our overall health wouldn’t be so quick to stop the food stamp program.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Phillip, while I’m sure that everyone on welfare isn’t wasteful as wasteful as my example, there are indeed people who abuse the system. I think the point of the post was that these handouts make people too comfortable and thus encourages them to not do more to contribute to their own well-being.
I really doubt that in general the rising costs of health care are from people not getting enough nourishment. I think you’ll find quite the opposite. Obesity and smoking are an almost guaranteed path to chronic illness. Illness such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are very expensive to treat.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I never stated that the rising cost of health care was attributed to undernutrition. Food stamps and the sustenance they provide lessen the burden on the health care system by reducing the number of people with diseases that result from a lack of resources.
Both undernutrition AND overnutrition can lead to health problems that are burden on the health system. One does not negate the other since both problems can occur simultaneously within a country.