8 ms·

That's the point. It should. If we remove the fear of starvation (we can afford to feed everyone twice and barely put a dent in our military budget) a lot of p

That's the point. It should. If we remove the fear of starvation (we can afford to feed everyone twice and barely put a dent in our military budget) a lot of people will have a HUGE improvement in their day-to-day happiness. This is one of those obvious huge moral positives we can do. The only "down side" is there will never be fear of starvation. Edit: The one progress I can see in a society is when we can basically say that certain problems that people may have... those problems just literally won't exist. - basic housing - 3 meals a day - a basic level of health care with the amount of cash flow in the US there shouldn't be a single person who has to worry about one of those 3. edit 2: I mean any person who "struggles with hunger" which is ~40 mil. Also, that is in itself a terrifying number.

Cpoll 7y ago
> If we remove the fear of starvation (we can afford to feed everyone twice and barely put a dent in our military budget) 327,000,000 people * 365 days * $5/person/day = $596,775,000,000 yearly Or $596 billion $693 billion is the Wikipedia number for DoD budget, so that actually checks out. Of course, that's more than "put a dent in the budget," but I'm sure you meant those in need, and not every American (which is the calculation I did).
- thanksgiving 7y ago
  > but I'm sure you meant those in need, and not every American I personally despise means testing. There has been so much hatred spewed over "welfare queen" that I am amazed we still do means testing and we have pulled it forward to things like the New York state Excelsior program (college education for first-time college students) and even for the $1,200 COVID-19 stimulus. It is very sad. We don't less means testing, not more.
  - davinic 7y ago
    I didn't read this comment as promoting means testing. I read it as "Even if they make the meals available to everyone, mostly just the people in need will use it". It was addressing the moral hazard risk that people often associate with these programs. NYC will be able to publish just how many people took advantage of the meals. That's the baseline to price the program out nationwide, not the total number of US citizens.
    - Ericson2314 7y ago
      Think of it like banking reserve rules. The program is officially open to everyone, but how much we cook in a day is based on demand.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - fires10 7y ago
    I despise means testing as well. I also believe the moral hazard argument is over blown most of the time. I would like to see a guaranteed employer of last resort that pays enough for someone to live. This employer (federal agency) could adapt the work that is done to a situation. Provide opportunities for retraining and so forth. This could also provide the psychological safety many are in need of and reduce desperation. Means testing is expensive and causes many to not get the help they need.
    - jcampbell1 7y ago
      I’d rather see a $15 minimum wage, and an EITC run in reverse, where anyone that hires someone who is struggling gets a $10 credit for every hour paid.
      - Kye 7y ago
        This seems to be a difference in philosophy. I see your comment and, if I read you right, see a desire to support people by encouraging them to participate in capitalism by paying companies to hire them. My view is different: public money should go to public good. I don't think that good is served by interfering with markets. If they need $10/hour to justify hiring someone, what is that person going to do for those hours? I think public good is served by training and paying people to deal with collective action problems: failing/at-risk infrastructure, poverty, health care in places with little or no access to it under the private health care and insurance systems, and things like that. Private companies can be part of that, but the initiative has to be led by the public and the people they elect to lead them, not private interests.
    - rapind 7y ago
      Agreed. "Job guarantee" program. There's a write-up here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee I also like the idea of UBI combined with a flat tax (losing progressive taxation) for it's simplicity, but imagine all the tax lawyers and accountants that would be out of a job.
      - 7y ago
  - Cpoll 7y ago
    I agree completely. I wasn't trying to make any judgment in my post though, I was just acknowledging "barely put a dent in our military budget," because my math assumes the extreme case that every American takes the $5/day.
- derefr 7y ago
  I think the suggestion is that we can afford to oversubscribe a program like this, because it'd be a guarantee that you'd be able to eat (i.e. food on demand), not a push-based delivery of the resources (money/food stamps/etc.) required to be able to eat, that people would then feel that they "should" use up, thus using less of their own money. Any American who didn't take advantage of a demand-driven food supply program on a given month, wouldn't be costing the program anything. It just means that they'd be able to instantly access food when in need, without first qualifying into the program. Think less "food cash" (like food stamps essentially are), and more "no-limit food credit card" (with the government as the account holder.) You'd just go into a grocery store and buy whatever, and if you couldn't afford it, you'd pay for it with the food credit card (= the government would pay for it.) But if you don't use the card, it isn't accruing or expiring a balance. It's just there, waiting to be used. One can think of this another way, with a different moral color but the same in-practice effects: imagine if they made shoplifting from grocery stores legal (i.e. every grocery store is now also required to act as a food bank), and the government promised to pay the store back for any shoplifting-related shrinkage. That's essentially what this program would be, except with the store able to track inventory through the till, since the food would still be being "purchased."
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    are you envisioning some mechanism to prevent people from having filet mignon and caviar every night for dinner? I'm not poor, but my grocery purchases would change a lot if I didn't have to pay for it myself.
    - derefr 7y ago
      Nope; just assuming that the number of people taking advantage of this would be a power-law distribution rather than a gaussian, and so the economics would still work out in favor, even with people "abusing the system." That, and perhaps the dollar-cost of your "free" food purchases would be taken into account in calculating your tax bracket.
      - leetcrew 7y ago
- verelo 7y ago
  I wish i could reply to the comment below about means testing. The reality is even if this were means tested, many people wouldnt opt into it...so short story, I agree with you, it would be much cheaper than you're describing.
- gnarlysasquatch 7y ago
  $5/person/day is more than this should require. Feeding America claims to deliver meals at $0.10 each by rescuing food that would've been wasted, and they claim even buying at wholesale would run about $2/meal ($1.67/lb * 1.2lb/meal). https://www.feedingamerica.org/ways-to-give/faq/about-our-claims https://www.feedingamerica.org/ways-to-give/faq/about-our-cl...
  - dmoy 7y ago
    > $2/meal So, $5/day ? Rescuing wasted food doesn't work once you scale it to a hundred million people. Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely in favor of a food/housing program that's available for everyone. I am also a communist though, so it's an easy sell for me.
- davinic 7y ago
  In a couple days, New York will probably release the number of meals served. Divide that by the population of New York and then multiply that by your $596 billion. Even if it's 10% (no way it will be this high), that's $60 billion, or around 9% of the budget, otherwise known as a "dent".
bobwaycott 7y ago
To add to your basics, don’t forget clothing and education. I think those are the 5 basics that are necessary to ensure every person can participate in society without fear or shame.
- atlantacrackers 7y ago
  Cool cool. Are you talking like Nike shoes free for everyone? Because, I would be ashamed to show up at the mall in some ratty sneakers. Definitely should have government pay for that so I am without shame in my sneaks.
karatestomp 7y ago
Maybe it’s because I’ve never been poor enough so I don’t get it, but I’m a lot more worried about losing housing and healthcare than food. Food’s super cheap compared to those (unless you’re a meat-with-every-meal type, and picky about which meat) and there are tons of government and community programs to provide it.
kyuudou 7y ago
It's hard to be like "omg everyone should have food, shelter and sanitation" and "omg climate change from overpopulation"... There's even a national security memorandum from back in the 1960s discussing various population restriction methods. Just throwing that out there.
- kiba 7y ago
  Pollution and inefficient consumption of resources are much more important factors in climate change.
  - kyuudou 7y ago
    Are you suggesting that overpopulation has nothing do with this? To be clear, I am against any attempt at population control. I want to keep awareness on the fact that many others do, though.
    - kiba 7y ago
      If you mean in term of energy and space because of extra mouths to feed, not really. But we do have a great potential to poison our environment if we don't rein in the pollution.
      - kyuudou 7y ago
        I think it's a lesser concern, true, but it's still an issue, particularly with high-consumption wasteful 1st world countries. In my opinion, the US military and the manufacturing industries of China and India by far do the bulk of poisoning the environment and impacting climate change. I'd much rather have, as a US taxpayer, those assets diverted to healthcare and basic subsistence, too. I'd rather that charities do it, though, and wish it was easier for philanthropy to be more efficiently implemented. We can't even get enough masks out, for cryin out loud. But damn if we can precision kill someone on the other side of the planet without due process of law! Or find all your domestic social media traffic in October 2016
pdubs1 7y ago
I understand that you're ready to shell out other peoples' resources/money. The question is: Are you ready to shell out your own to achieve your vision? Otherwise, you're probably not very committed to it, yet expect others to be. Also, how well did this vision work for Mao, Stalin, and Chavez? Providing people the opportunity to eat, without working, and to multiply in free government housing? That sounds like a recipe for a dire population explosion which is unable to support itself, and lives off of an artificial, subsidized welfare system ripe for collapse as soon as people aren't forced to pay into it (those people who work).
sf_rob 7y ago
You're implicitly arguing that SNAP should have fiscal cliffs. Fiscal cliffs are a symptom of a poorly designed welfare program.
gowld 7y ago
The "S" in SNAP means that if you have income, you have to cover some of your food expenses. What's wrong with that? If you have no income/assets, you can get $600+/month for a family of 4. https://aix-xweb1p.state.or.us/caf_xweb/SNAP_Estimate/actCalcEstimate.cfm https://aix-xweb1p.state.or.us/caf_xweb/SNAP_Estimate/actCal... There are logistical complications around ability to complete the red tape, and personal irresponsibility or access to low-cost options when spending the SNAP money, but big-picture SNAP is fine. Should people be entitled to spend all their post-tax income on luxuries and get welfare support for basic needs? That's a more extreme position than supplemental support for people with some wealth.
umvi 7y ago
That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that people should strive to be self-reliant. Not: "how can we meet people's needs?" but "how do we help people meet their own needs?". Like the old proverb about giving a man a fish vs. teaching a man to fish. Everyone always shuts down that second question with "they can't help themselves until their basic needs are met" which is incredibly hand wavy and disingenuous, in my opinion. Half of being poor is in the mind. If poor people are to become middle class people, there needs to be a change in the mind. This change doesn't automatically happen "because money". Changing the mind needs to come from teachers and mentors and the poor person has to want to change and start thinking and acting differently. If you get everyone reliant on a monolithic omnipotent government, then when said monolithic government fails all of helpless leeches will die (and that could be millions). I think it's better if we strive for a minimalistic government where members of society strive to be self-reliant and in terms of "safety nets" the government's goal is to promote and encourage self-reliance.
- jshevek 7y ago
  You are absolutely correct, but it can sound to a reader lacking nuance as if you were arguing that other factors (outside the mind) aren't important. Many people suffer from the prison of two ideas, and wrongly misinterpret this argument as a denial of important social, cultural, historical factors.
- _jal 7y ago
  > If poor people are to become middle class people If this is the goal, you need to be pushing to radically restructure the way society and the economy functions. You cannot have everyone employed at, say, $60K a year in the one we have. Most of the time when people say this, they prefer to focus on individuals rather than systemic issues - "this one person pulled them self up by their own bootstraps - surely others can, too. And "others" can, and do. That leaves people who can't. Now what? > I think it's better if we strive for a minimalistic government The problem is capabilities. Libertarian fantasy-states work in frontiers and sometimes in low-population, high-homogeneity areas. As population increases, many public goods need management[1] and public management means the state necessarily takes on more functions. So you need to work on your plan to massively reduce population or get yourself a new planet if this is your goal. Your desire to drive self-sufficiency by intentionally depriving those in need cannot work in our current world and simply results in performative cruelty. > Half of being poor is in the mind Have you been poor? I have have been very poor. I grew up that way. I know what you're talking about, and I suspect you honestly don't understand how condescending and insulting it is. [1] Growing up in a very rural town in Tennessee, people used to routinely burn their trash. Try that in San Francisco.
munificent 7y ago
I agree with this general goal, but it is much more complex than it seems from the outset. Any program at this scale has to be thoughtful of the larger societal, moral, and cultural consequences it brings with it. Just looking at free food, a fundamental question is: Is this expected to be a baseline that all people receive and then people buy additional/better food, or is supposed to be an option where many/most don't take the free food option at all? If the former, then you risk massive waste. If the free food is mediocre, people will just take it, buy better stuff, and then throw out the crappy stuff. If you solve that with better food, you run into hard questions around the cost and quality ceiling. Food is one of those product areas where you can spend nearly limitless money on it, but it's not feasible for a country to give 100% of its citizens foie gras and cavier every day. But, of course, deliberately drawing the line somewhere lower has connotations that people who use that food are "bad" because otherwise don't they deserve better food? If the latter, then you run into the current problem with welfare that the people in power don't use the system at all, which gives you the principle-agent problem we see in welfare today where many people hate funding it because they don't benefit. Then there are questions of how you manage this logistically. How do you reduce the risk of exploitation? If the government, say, gives out free bags of rice, how do you prevent a restaurant from just grabbing dozens of them and then using them for their food service? But if you spend too much effort on enforcement, then you waste resources on enforcement that could be better spent elsewhere. It is a hard, complex problem. SNAP today is basically our current stab at it. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that could be swept away and easily replaced with something simpler and clearly better. Problems aways seem much easier when you are far away from them.
- uterm 7y ago
  It seems like you are arguing against a couple of straw men here. First off, no one is saying that we should give 100% of citizens foie gras and caviar. While I understand your point about there being some stigma attached to funding and/or receiving food assistance, I think it would be lessened if it were freely available to everyone at their discretion. People (rich and poor alike) have certainly had no qualms about receiving unemployment in the current crisis and I think you will see a similar reaction to this food assistance program in New York. Second, your example of a restaurant taking bags of rice is clearly not an issue with SNAP benefits as they exist in every state, nor is it a possible issue with the program in New York, since they are giving out full meals. In fact, I expect that the system being trialed in New York will actually solve the issue of people selling or trading away their SNAP benefits, since poor folks just above the cutoff for snap, who would still benefit from food assistance, can just go and get a free meal themselves, rather than trading or buying discounted food from someone selling their SNAP benefits.

Cpoll 7y ago

> If we remove the fear of starvation (we can afford to feed everyone twice and barely put a dent in our military budget) 327,000,000 people * 365 days * $5/person/day = $596,775,000,000 yearly Or $596 billion $693 billion is the Wikipedia number for DoD budget, so that actually checks out. Of course, that's more than "put a dent in the budget," but I'm sure you meant those in need, and not every American (which is the calculation I did).

thanksgiving 7y ago
> but I'm sure you meant those in need, and not every American I personally despise means testing. There has been so much hatred spewed over "welfare queen" that I am amazed we still do means testing and we have pulled it forward to things like the New York state Excelsior program (college education for first-time college students) and even for the $1,200 COVID-19 stimulus. It is very sad. We don't less means testing, not more.
- davinic 7y ago
  I didn't read this comment as promoting means testing. I read it as "Even if they make the meals available to everyone, mostly just the people in need will use it". It was addressing the moral hazard risk that people often associate with these programs. NYC will be able to publish just how many people took advantage of the meals. That's the baseline to price the program out nationwide, not the total number of US citizens.
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    Think of it like banking reserve rules. The program is officially open to everyone, but how much we cook in a day is based on demand.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fires10 7y ago
  I despise means testing as well. I also believe the moral hazard argument is over blown most of the time. I would like to see a guaranteed employer of last resort that pays enough for someone to live. This employer (federal agency) could adapt the work that is done to a situation. Provide opportunities for retraining and so forth. This could also provide the psychological safety many are in need of and reduce desperation. Means testing is expensive and causes many to not get the help they need.
  - jcampbell1 7y ago
    I’d rather see a $15 minimum wage, and an EITC run in reverse, where anyone that hires someone who is struggling gets a $10 credit for every hour paid.
    - Kye 7y ago
      This seems to be a difference in philosophy. I see your comment and, if I read you right, see a desire to support people by encouraging them to participate in capitalism by paying companies to hire them. My view is different: public money should go to public good. I don't think that good is served by interfering with markets. If they need $10/hour to justify hiring someone, what is that person going to do for those hours? I think public good is served by training and paying people to deal with collective action problems: failing/at-risk infrastructure, poverty, health care in places with little or no access to it under the private health care and insurance systems, and things like that. Private companies can be part of that, but the initiative has to be led by the public and the people they elect to lead them, not private interests.
  - rapind 7y ago
    Agreed. "Job guarantee" program. There's a write-up here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee I also like the idea of UBI combined with a flat tax (losing progressive taxation) for it's simplicity, but imagine all the tax lawyers and accountants that would be out of a job.
    - 7y ago
- Cpoll 7y ago
  I agree completely. I wasn't trying to make any judgment in my post though, I was just acknowledging "barely put a dent in our military budget," because my math assumes the extreme case that every American takes the $5/day.
derefr 7y ago
I think the suggestion is that we can afford to oversubscribe a program like this, because it'd be a guarantee that you'd be able to eat (i.e. food on demand), not a push-based delivery of the resources (money/food stamps/etc.) required to be able to eat, that people would then feel that they "should" use up, thus using less of their own money. Any American who didn't take advantage of a demand-driven food supply program on a given month, wouldn't be costing the program anything. It just means that they'd be able to instantly access food when in need, without first qualifying into the program. Think less "food cash" (like food stamps essentially are), and more "no-limit food credit card" (with the government as the account holder.) You'd just go into a grocery store and buy whatever, and if you couldn't afford it, you'd pay for it with the food credit card (= the government would pay for it.) But if you don't use the card, it isn't accruing or expiring a balance. It's just there, waiting to be used. One can think of this another way, with a different moral color but the same in-practice effects: imagine if they made shoplifting from grocery stores legal (i.e. every grocery store is now also required to act as a food bank), and the government promised to pay the store back for any shoplifting-related shrinkage. That's essentially what this program would be, except with the store able to track inventory through the till, since the food would still be being "purchased."
- leetcrew 7y ago
  are you envisioning some mechanism to prevent people from having filet mignon and caviar every night for dinner? I'm not poor, but my grocery purchases would change a lot if I didn't have to pay for it myself.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Nope; just assuming that the number of people taking advantage of this would be a power-law distribution rather than a gaussian, and so the economics would still work out in favor, even with people "abusing the system." That, and perhaps the dollar-cost of your "free" food purchases would be taken into account in calculating your tax bracket.
    - leetcrew 7y ago
verelo 7y ago
I wish i could reply to the comment below about means testing. The reality is even if this were means tested, many people wouldnt opt into it...so short story, I agree with you, it would be much cheaper than you're describing.
gnarlysasquatch 7y ago
$5/person/day is more than this should require. Feeding America claims to deliver meals at $0.10 each by rescuing food that would've been wasted, and they claim even buying at wholesale would run about $2/meal ($1.67/lb * 1.2lb/meal). https://www.feedingamerica.org/ways-to-give/faq/about-our-claims https://www.feedingamerica.org/ways-to-give/faq/about-our-cl...
- dmoy 7y ago
  > $2/meal So, $5/day ? Rescuing wasted food doesn't work once you scale it to a hundred million people. Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely in favor of a food/housing program that's available for everyone. I am also a communist though, so it's an easy sell for me.
davinic 7y ago
In a couple days, New York will probably release the number of meals served. Divide that by the population of New York and then multiply that by your $596 billion. Even if it's 10% (no way it will be this high), that's $60 billion, or around 9% of the budget, otherwise known as a "dent".

bobwaycott 7y ago

To add to your basics, don’t forget clothing and education. I think those are the 5 basics that are necessary to ensure every person can participate in society without fear or shame.

atlantacrackers 7y ago
Cool cool. Are you talking like Nike shoes free for everyone? Because, I would be ashamed to show up at the mall in some ratty sneakers. Definitely should have government pay for that so I am without shame in my sneaks.

karatestomp 7y ago

Maybe it’s because I’ve never been poor enough so I don’t get it, but I’m a lot more worried about losing housing and healthcare than food. Food’s super cheap compared to those (unless you’re a meat-with-every-meal type, and picky about which meat) and there are tons of government and community programs to provide it.

kyuudou 7y ago

It's hard to be like "omg everyone should have food, shelter and sanitation" and "omg climate change from overpopulation"... There's even a national security memorandum from back in the 1960s discussing various population restriction methods. Just throwing that out there.

kiba 7y ago
Pollution and inefficient consumption of resources are much more important factors in climate change.
- kyuudou 7y ago
  Are you suggesting that overpopulation has nothing do with this? To be clear, I am against any attempt at population control. I want to keep awareness on the fact that many others do, though.
  - kiba 7y ago
    If you mean in term of energy and space because of extra mouths to feed, not really. But we do have a great potential to poison our environment if we don't rein in the pollution.
    - kyuudou 7y ago
      I think it's a lesser concern, true, but it's still an issue, particularly with high-consumption wasteful 1st world countries. In my opinion, the US military and the manufacturing industries of China and India by far do the bulk of poisoning the environment and impacting climate change. I'd much rather have, as a US taxpayer, those assets diverted to healthcare and basic subsistence, too. I'd rather that charities do it, though, and wish it was easier for philanthropy to be more efficiently implemented. We can't even get enough masks out, for cryin out loud. But damn if we can precision kill someone on the other side of the planet without due process of law! Or find all your domestic social media traffic in October 2016

pdubs1 7y ago

I understand that you're ready to shell out other peoples' resources/money. The question is: Are you ready to shell out your own to achieve your vision? Otherwise, you're probably not very committed to it, yet expect others to be. Also, how well did this vision work for Mao, Stalin, and Chavez? Providing people the opportunity to eat, without working, and to multiply in free government housing? That sounds like a recipe for a dire population explosion which is unable to support itself, and lives off of an artificial, subsidized welfare system ripe for collapse as soon as people aren't forced to pay into it (those people who work).

sf_rob 7y ago

You're implicitly arguing that SNAP should have fiscal cliffs. Fiscal cliffs are a symptom of a poorly designed welfare program.

gowld 7y ago

The "S" in SNAP means that if you have income, you have to cover some of your food expenses. What's wrong with that? If you have no income/assets, you can get $600+/month for a family of 4. https://aix-xweb1p.state.or.us/caf_xweb/SNAP_Estimate/actCalcEstimate.cfm https://aix-xweb1p.state.or.us/caf_xweb/SNAP_Estimate/actCal... There are logistical complications around ability to complete the red tape, and personal irresponsibility or access to low-cost options when spending the SNAP money, but big-picture SNAP is fine. Should people be entitled to spend all their post-tax income on luxuries and get welfare support for basic needs? That's a more extreme position than supplemental support for people with some wealth.

umvi 7y ago

That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that people should strive to be self-reliant. Not: "how can we meet people's needs?" but "how do we help people meet their own needs?". Like the old proverb about giving a man a fish vs. teaching a man to fish. Everyone always shuts down that second question with "they can't help themselves until their basic needs are met" which is incredibly hand wavy and disingenuous, in my opinion. Half of being poor is in the mind. If poor people are to become middle class people, there needs to be a change in the mind. This change doesn't automatically happen "because money". Changing the mind needs to come from teachers and mentors and the poor person has to want to change and start thinking and acting differently. If you get everyone reliant on a monolithic omnipotent government, then when said monolithic government fails all of helpless leeches will die (and that could be millions). I think it's better if we strive for a minimalistic government where members of society strive to be self-reliant and in terms of "safety nets" the government's goal is to promote and encourage self-reliance.

jshevek 7y ago
You are absolutely correct, but it can sound to a reader lacking nuance as if you were arguing that other factors (outside the mind) aren't important. Many people suffer from the prison of two ideas, and wrongly misinterpret this argument as a denial of important social, cultural, historical factors.
_jal 7y ago
> If poor people are to become middle class people If this is the goal, you need to be pushing to radically restructure the way society and the economy functions. You cannot have everyone employed at, say, $60K a year in the one we have. Most of the time when people say this, they prefer to focus on individuals rather than systemic issues - "this one person pulled them self up by their own bootstraps - surely others can, too. And "others" can, and do. That leaves people who can't. Now what? > I think it's better if we strive for a minimalistic government The problem is capabilities. Libertarian fantasy-states work in frontiers and sometimes in low-population, high-homogeneity areas. As population increases, many public goods need management[1] and public management means the state necessarily takes on more functions. So you need to work on your plan to massively reduce population or get yourself a new planet if this is your goal. Your desire to drive self-sufficiency by intentionally depriving those in need cannot work in our current world and simply results in performative cruelty. > Half of being poor is in the mind Have you been poor? I have have been very poor. I grew up that way. I know what you're talking about, and I suspect you honestly don't understand how condescending and insulting it is. [1] Growing up in a very rural town in Tennessee, people used to routinely burn their trash. Try that in San Francisco.

munificent 7y ago

I agree with this general goal, but it is much more complex than it seems from the outset. Any program at this scale has to be thoughtful of the larger societal, moral, and cultural consequences it brings with it. Just looking at free food, a fundamental question is: Is this expected to be a baseline that all people receive and then people buy additional/better food, or is supposed to be an option where many/most don't take the free food option at all? If the former, then you risk massive waste. If the free food is mediocre, people will just take it, buy better stuff, and then throw out the crappy stuff. If you solve that with better food, you run into hard questions around the cost and quality ceiling. Food is one of those product areas where you can spend nearly limitless money on it, but it's not feasible for a country to give 100% of its citizens foie gras and cavier every day. But, of course, deliberately drawing the line somewhere lower has connotations that people who use that food are "bad" because otherwise don't they deserve better food? If the latter, then you run into the current problem with welfare that the people in power don't use the system at all, which gives you the principle-agent problem we see in welfare today where many people hate funding it because they don't benefit. Then there are questions of how you manage this logistically. How do you reduce the risk of exploitation? If the government, say, gives out free bags of rice, how do you prevent a restaurant from just grabbing dozens of them and then using them for their food service? But if you spend too much effort on enforcement, then you waste resources on enforcement that could be better spent elsewhere. It is a hard, complex problem. SNAP today is basically our current stab at it. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that could be swept away and easily replaced with something simpler and clearly better. Problems aways seem much easier when you are far away from them.

uterm 7y ago
It seems like you are arguing against a couple of straw men here. First off, no one is saying that we should give 100% of citizens foie gras and caviar. While I understand your point about there being some stigma attached to funding and/or receiving food assistance, I think it would be lessened if it were freely available to everyone at their discretion. People (rich and poor alike) have certainly had no qualms about receiving unemployment in the current crisis and I think you will see a similar reaction to this food assistance program in New York. Second, your example of a restaurant taking bags of rice is clearly not an issue with SNAP benefits as they exist in every state, nor is it a possible issue with the program in New York, since they are giving out full meals. In fact, I expect that the system being trialed in New York will actually solve the issue of people selling or trading away their SNAP benefits, since poor folks just above the cutoff for snap, who would still benefit from food assistance, can just go and get a free meal themselves, rather than trading or buying discounted food from someone selling their SNAP benefits.