Cash is probably better than food stamps. Food stamps prevent you from directly buying what you actually need/want, but it doesn't prevent you from buying groce

Cash is probably better than food stamps. Food stamps prevent you from directly buying what you actually need/want, but it doesn't prevent you from buying groceries for strangers and trading those groceries for less money so you can actually buy what you need/want. The result is that the same amount of money spent on providing assistance as food stamps doesn't provide as much benefit to the recipients as the cash equivalent. And this doesn't even include the costs of maintaining the infrastructure (including time wasted writing laws that restrict what food you can use food stamps for) required to make food stamps work.