• WafflesTasteGood [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1081·
    1 year ago

    Unfortunately they’ll never realize the actual solution to this alleged abuse is to just give everyone like $300/month in food stamps.

    If everyone is food secure, selling the food at a discount for cash becomes very difficult.

      • JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        35·
        1 year ago

        That would allow people to buy food from where ever, instead of using agricultural subsidies to allow American agriculture to have unearned advantages in the global food market and suppress the development of food independence worldwide.

      • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        honestly, that used to be the deal pre-nixon i want to say. to placate two constiuencies (farmers and low income families) the government purchased “commodities” (as defined by USDA title… raw/minimally processed agricultural goods flourmeal, cornmeal, milk, butter, eggs, probably some vegetables even) to institute a “price floor” and guarantee a certain income to the farming households even if markets/futures were volatile. those commodities were available through literal food stamps, similar to the ration cards found in other countries like cuba today. no cash. just stamps for commodities and stamps were made available depending on the size of the family.

        it was one of those no-brainer elegant public policies that was dismantled to become a massive giveaway to food processors, who get to purchase the raw commodities at below market prices (because now the big agricultural subsidy program is for direct payments based on acres planted), which they add some salt + sugar to and turn into a shelf-stable quickly prepared vehicle for diabetes and heart disease.

  • Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    95·
    1 year ago

    I heard a lady ranting about these same fake anecdotes a few years ago and finally interrupted to tell her, look, I’m on food stamps, and it’s not nearly enough, and the restrictions are so arbitrary and punitive that you can’t even get hot food, and if you wanted to trade SNAP benefits for drugs you wouldn’t get very many drugs at all. She said, “Oh, I wasn’t talking about you, because you’re educated.” Even when they think they’re dialing it back they manage to go in weirder, even more offensive directions. Needless to say, she had no idea how much education I may or may not have had.

    • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      29·
      1 year ago

      Its so frustrating that I can get a hot meal with food stamps. Right now I have a surplus of like 2k because I’m a single adult and I didnt change my spending habits when the covid bonus came in. Its probably mostly because I dont cook for myself most of the time so Im mostly buying like… pasta and cereal lol.

      And apparently they’re planning to just… take people’s surpluses back soon according to one of my disability staff. If I could spend that money on a fucking pizza or something that’d be fucking fantastic, but no. I guess Ill just spend my surplus on a bunch of nonperishables to donate to a food pantry or something? Because just having the gov take it back is not happening lol fuck em.

      • Chapo0114 [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        A rice cooker could be a game changer. We’ve experimentally cooked Aldi’s bagged risotto in ours to good result, so I’d bet any rice-a-roni or other boxed and flavored rice dish would be an easy fire and forget meal. Just add water, turn it on, and come back in 30 minutes.

        Also, Instant Pots make really easy rice and lentils dishes (lentils and white rice cook together perfectly) that can be saved and eaten on for days, or probably even frozen like a DIY tv dinner.

  • betelgeuse [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    80·
    1 year ago

    “I have seen homeless who buy bottled water on SNAP only to dump and resell the bottles so they could get cash for their addictions”

    1. You didn’t see that, you saw a viral video of a black person dumping out water in a parkinglot and everyone told you it was an EBT scam. Just because you see it shared on the internet does not mean it’s common.

    2. Maybe the solution is to help their addictions rather than just throw them cash they can only use to buy ramen and bottled water. You don’t nuke or means test a helpful program just because you fail to address another issue.

    • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      74·
      1 year ago

      Some people really cannot separate the video they’re watching from the text that someone overlaid on the video. If I record someone moving a box from a room, I can put the text “this is a box of unscanned ballots ->” and “the employee is taking them out towards the parking lot” and some people will just unabashedly say they saw the thing happening that they read in my anonymous text.

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        15·
        1 year ago

        You know, it drives me crazy that people fall for deepfakes that are poorly done and even get in arguments defending that they are authentic, but I guess they could be doing worse. Probably old people with bad hearing, anyway.

  • thisonethatone [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    73·
    1 year ago

    “Dump and resell the bottles”

    Dump and resell… bottles… of water.

    How does that even work??? Are they talking about the 10 cent bottle deposit???

    Huh???

    Wouldn’t it be a better idea to buy a pack of water and sell the individual bottles??

    Oh wait homeless people dum dum according to this person.

  • DickFuckarelli [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    66·
    1 year ago

    Getting a new iPhone by selling milk money credits. Dumping water for nickel returns on CRV.

    Of all the things that didn’t happen, these things didn’t happen the most.

      • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        30·
        1 year ago

        Oh, so you can’t see downvotes at all? I thought you just couldn’t downvote things yourself, I didn’t know you couldn’t see them at all.

        Sounds nice tbh. The Lemmygrad struggle session elected to keep the downvote, but I think it is not just pointless, but actively detrimental to online discussion.

  • FnordPrefect [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    58·
    1 year ago

    Principal Skinner and Ms. Krabappel were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me and the baby said, “they sold my milk purchased with EBT for iPhone money”

  • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    53·
    1 year ago

    Attitudes like this is why we can’t have good public aid. No help can be given unconditionally, because someone might take a little bit too much.
    To avoid the horror of someone getting a little bit more than they were supposed to, we will instead make the system worse for everyone involved. We will put in “safeguards” that will cost us more than just letting some people cheat themselves to a slightly larger piece of help.
    Meanwhile we thank the billionaires for the crumbs of tax they deem fitting to pay.

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      22·
      1 year ago

      It’s not even about people getting more than they’re supposed to. If that were the case, none of the examples in the original post would be relevant because they’re simply laundering the same amount of EBT payments into cash. If it was strictly about “more” then it shouldn’t matter whether a poor person uses EBT money for milk or malt whiskey.

      This is really about the idea that poor people should suffer for their sin of being poor. It’s the whole “I work hard, so people who don’t shouldn’t enjoy life” mentality. Of course it ignores the fact that many people on EBT payments are also working jobs but cost of living has outpaced minimum wage to such a comical extent that full time workers are resorting to welfare to just live.

      • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        “They’re shoplifting!” No they’re not, who gives a shit? “It’ll make things more expensive for the rest of us” shoplifting is such a tiny expense to stores, that’s really not what makes things more expensive.

        “This Immigrant Cheated The State By Pretending He Was Three People! He Got Thrice The Amount Of Scraps” and similar stories are common dreg, as if some dude living large on 5k a month or whatever is the reason the state can’t afford to take care of its people.

        Yeah some people are gonna skim the cream, but when it’s small fry who gives a shit? Maybe they’d stop skimming if the fat cats stopped eating all the fucking cream

        • horse_called_proletariat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yeah some people are gonna skim the cream, but when it’s small fry who gives a shit? Maybe they’d stop skimming if the fat cats stopped eating all the fucking cream

          the funny part about is that the scammer, career criminal, etc is actually living the american dream more than these working class people that get heated about it while dreaming about some day owning a small business and being self-employed and continuing to hate on people poorer than them, just even more. the lumpen is emulating the capitalist, but in a much more successful way than the worker that only envies him and in a much more direct and overt manner that the actual capitalist, who is too privileged to actually have to resort to doing crimes, or does them and evades any prosectution, because he can just write the laws that make what he does legal and buy politicians and city hall and control police and while feeding the lie of democracy and capitalist ideology to workers, making them feel that hustling legally is the ultimate goal of society. yes, the crook, scammer, thief, cheat, gangster, sociopathic drug addict, etc, is still behaving in a way that will prevent him from having class consciousness and often refuses to get a job because of myriads of reasons including recidivism, lack of privilege, trauma and anger issues, addictions, etc and is not to be emulated but the worker that bought into the capitalist ideology is only chastizing him because he isn’t “civil” or “proper” enough and would be salivating over them if they did it the “right” way, aka if they had more money and capitalized in accordance to the liberal ideology, even though its really the same drive to get over on workers that motivates both “criminal” and “businessman”

    • SootyChimney [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      The cost of administrating benefits, ie fact checking and means testing and complex rules etc, typically costs 1-2x as much as the benefits themselves. It’s not even about saving money, it’s about making sure that poor people are sufficiently screwed.

  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    51·
    1 year ago

    Gee maybe they wouldn’t be doing that so much if we spent a fraction of the money we do on bank bailouts on a social safety net that’s fully functional instead of the… let’s call them partial… measures that we use now.