6 ms·
It is always a wonder to me when people downplay something that is "just" 1.5% of nearly $7 TRILLION
by weird-eye-issue 1y ago
It is always a wonder to me when people downplay something that is "just" 1.5% of nearly $7 TRILLION
- jeffbee 1y ago[flagged]
- weird-eye-issue 1y agoWho uses the caps lock key to only uppercase a single word?
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoIt's always a wonder to me when people downplay keeping others fed and healthy.
- CodingJeebus 1y agoYou added the "just", not me. But to your point, there are much, much larger and controversial line items in the budget to argue about than feeding the poor. Preventing starvation is important to a functioning society, as widespread hunger has ended many a government throughout history.
- 0_____0 1y ago100B for SNAP vs 850B for defense in 2024. Interest on govt issued debt was 880B.
- phkahler 1y agoImagine if the debt were 1 trillion dollars instead of 38! How hard is it to say "no budget increases this year"? And that wouldn't even eliminate the deficit and they can do it.
- weird-eye-issue 1y agoWhat would be the value of the US dollar if we didn't have a military to back it up?
- esseph 1y agoAhaha. Wait, did you mean this as ironic comedy, or are you serious?
- weird-eye-issue 1y agoAnswer the question
- esseph 1y agoOh at this point, with the way we've treated countries with military action, insane tariffs, masked deportations, embargos/blockades, threatening the sovereignty of a G8 country, threatening to annex another, supporting Israeli genocide, the list goes on... We're on the downward slope now, but it will take awhile. The future requires investments in education, infrastructure, healthcare, and energy generation (in particular, cheap energy), and we're simply not doing it. Being lonely sucks, and the US govt has alienated long standing allies. Economically they doesn't bode well.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoI’d take that trade any day
- 0_____0 11mo agoYou're going to have to explain your premise, because this question doesn't make sense. What would be the value of my car without the pile of tires in my garage?
- weird-eye-issue 11mo agoLol. You are just too ignorant to even begin having this conversation
- Calavar 1y ago> there are much, much larger and controversial line items in the budget to argue about than feeding the poor. For example, the 40 billion dollar bailout of the Argentine economy.
- aeternum 1y ago[flagged]
- CodingJeebus 1y agoThe problem here is that healthier food tends to cost more, so you'd essentially be forcing people to buy less food unless you also simultaneously raised the disbursement. And then a certain wing of the media starts screaming about how the poor are eating organic salads on the backs of taxpayers. Sounds reasonable in theory but has little basis in our current political reality.
- karakot 1y agoI hate this common trope about health food costing more. Beans, lentil, rice, potatos, carrots, onions, cabbage, garlic don't cost a lot, add some additional cheap proteins like chicken and eggs and you're good to go for like $50 or less per week per person. And if you can buy in bulk and freeze, then it can get even cheaper.
- Anonbrit 1y agoAssuming access to a reliable cooker, safe storage, time to food prep and enough education in cooking to be able to cook. Some people on assistance fail all of those boxes, many fail at least one
- insane_dreamer 1y agoIt’s not a tripe. A lot of these aren’t even available in food deserts, whereas soda and garbage is ubiquitous in every corner stores and gas station etc.
- aeternum 11mo agoCould it be because we are subsidizing that soda and garbage via SNAP? Especially in low income areas? As the great Charlie M used to say: "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" but we can't change it because that means we are making poor people miserable
- Jtsummers 1y agoLess than one percent of 1.5% of $7 trillion, around $1 billion. Which is a significant sum, no doubt, but that's also less than $3/person in the US. Given the much larger wasted sums by DOD and other parts of the government, it's an amount I can live with. I'd rather see the real waste and abuse get addressed first, but it won't be. Address this, but address it in a way that doesn't cause undue harm to the 40.8 million people that aren't abusing the system.
- spullara 1y agosocial programs are 60% of the budget, defense is down to 13%.
- SigmundA 1y agoWho would have thought health care and retirement is more expensive than wars, it seems like that should be telling us something about priorities.
- weird-eye-issue 1y agoAgreed with everything you said, but people would say the exact same thing about some of the more wasteful programs that were shutdown. "It is only $50 million" etc got really old... It is not like you can expect to just find massive line items that can be easily removed
- SigmundA 1y agoYeah I mean they could pay for the new ballroom or two and have some money left over by not feeding those scammy undeserving people. Or even better we could give some more money to Argentina.
- weird-eye-issue 1y agoBrilliant logical fallacies
- jmye 1y ago
- exe34 1y agoIt's an investment. Every dollar spent returns $62 to the economy[0]. [0] https://www.cbpp.org/blog/snap-food-assistance-is-a-sound-investment-in-our-nations-health-well-being-and-economy https://www.cbpp.org/blog/snap-food-assistance-is-a-sound-in... There are much bigger wastes of money. Tax cuts for billionaires for example. Even SNAP itself is effectively welfare for billionaires - it means they don't have to pay a fair wage.
- wakawaka28 1y agoWe should just put a trillion dollars into it then, and the returns would pay off the national debt! Right?!
- exe34 1y agoThere are a limited number of children/families in need of this help. Feeding them is great for the economy. There is no need to spend more than that on the program, although there are other social programs that do contribute to making them into more productive individuals in the future, like education and healthcare. May I recommend leaving out the snark in the future - it gives the impression that you are a heartless person who wants others to suffer. Your life is short - go outside and touch the grass, it'll do you some good.
- wakawaka28 11mo agoFeeding families is a nice thing to do but economically speaking, these families are not very productive. I'm not a heartless person, but I'm also not brainless either. I should not need to nod along with a bunch of BS to be considered civil.
- jeremyjh 11mo ago> I'm not a heartless person, but I'm also not brainless either. You aren't making a strong case for either assertion. The fraud is 1% of 1.5% - that was already explained to you, and you are still trying to defend this garbage comment.
- Volundr 1y ago1% of 1.5%, so ~0.015%. I think it's fair to question if the juice is worth the squeeze here. To say nothing of if the most efficient way to go about it is really to make 41 million people reapply and reprocess all those applications.
- derbOac 1y agoThat's the thing. If they've identified some tiny percent of fraud, investigate that. Implement policy or protocol changes to prevent it from happening again in the future. Requiring everyone to reapply on top of whatever else they're doing is probably more costly than any gains. It seems the biggest fraud and waste here is in the administration.
- drweevil 1y agoIt's always a wonder to me that someone can consider spending 1.5% of the federal budget on our own people, so that kids don't go hungry, as excessive (I take that interpretation from those scare quotes), when we spend at least $1 TRILLION of $7 TRILLION on defense spending, which in absolute numbers is greater than 9 of the next most powerful adversaries combined [1]. But where is all the concern over 'fraud and abuse' in that enormous sum? >“Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue state data what we’re going to find?” she asked during a Thursday appearance on Newsmax’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight.” Forcing all SNAP recipients to reapply over such a small discrepancy (> 1% of the 1.5%) is cruel and spiteful. And the comment by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins quoted above is disrespectful and unprofessional at best. But none of this is a surprise, given this administration's past history. [1] https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-9-countries-combined/ https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-o...
- tomhow 1y ago> $7 TRILLION Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.* https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jjav 1y ago> It is always a wonder to me when people downplay something that is "just" 1.5% of nearly $7 TRILLION If (assuming correct) it is 1.5%, then it is 1.5% Which is a tiny percentage. That's how percentages work. Adding that it is a large number out of a huge number doesn't change anything, it is still 1.5% which means not much at all.