If people are hungry, give them food. Don't make them jump through hoops for it. My understanding was that this was the previous system. Government run warehou

If people are hungry, give them food. Don't make them jump through hoops for it. My understanding was that this was the previous system. Government run warehouses with quotas, and shops that handed it out. You had to present a ration cards, as there has to be some system to stop you collecting 10 times a day & running a shop. (This would otherwise be more profitable than many people's jobs.) And it didn't work. I forget, but maybe 80% of the wheat went missing? (Officially "eaten by rats" but really sold by officials on the side.) And this food subsidy was quite a large part of the national budget. So that's the scale of the problem which this hoped to solve. If every citizen has a number and a bank account, and you just wire them the money, then you won't lose 80%. The American debate about ID laws is just a much smaller issue. Surely some people cheat, but the current system basically works.