> You didn't at all consider the reason why food stamps might exist in the first place. I don't know anything about them, but I'd assume it has something to do with a correlation between homelessness and life problems that make financial discipline extra hard (eg addictions).

I wouldn't assume that, since food stamps aren't particularly focussed on the homeless.

In fact, the original purpose of the food stamp program was clearing agricultural surpluses (hence why the program was created in the Department of Agriculture and not the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare where you would have expected it to be if it were a welfare program and not an ag industry support program); you originally had to purchase food stamps, and for every dollar you got $1 of unrestricted (but still only for food) stamps, and $0.50 of restrictes-to-items-deemed-to-be-in-surplus stamps.

The exact restrictions and mechanisms changed over time in subsequent iterations of the program (and it's hard to find a clear purpose for many changes because lots were compromises between competing visions with fundamentally opposed goals.)

If your a crack addict, you’ll prob sell your food stamps or the food you bought to get crack.

Unprocessed trauma coping circuits (aka addiction) highjacks intelligence to get the dopamine trigger, it doesn’t nessesarily eliminate intelligence.

You can't sell food stamps so easily anymore. They used to be paper currency, but they are in the form of a debit card now, still possible to sell, just requires some planning

Every few weeks I get a person approaching me in the grocery store offering to buy me $2x of my groceries for an $x cash payment.

Exactly this. More food for less money is a good deal if you are just-over-the-line for getting food stamps or the ones you have don't go far enough to really feed your family.

To be fair, folks will do the same if they need cigarettes or need to fix a car to get to work and back.

I agree. Folks will find a way to get their needs met.

You don’t solve trauma with cash, but you also don’t make it worse and the benefits to others seem to be greater.

A regulated nervous system is a need, and if someone never developed that capability and doesn’t have awareness or resources to develop it as an adult, it’s actually a pretty logical move to use drugs.

> * the original purpose of the food stamp program was clearing agricultural surpluses (hence why the program was created in the Department of Agriculture...*

This!! I am always a little disappointed to see so many people on HN talking about gov't programs as though they are some form of altruism. They (usually) are not.

SNAP/WIC/EBT (what people are referring to as food stamps, which I don't think exist anymore; the 'benefits' are managed and distributed via a card provided by JPMorgan last I read) is a corporate welfare program.

Every time there's political talk about cutting the 'food stamp' program, the lobbyists come out. Whose lobbyists? Kraft, Walmart, JPMorgan, et al. If you use your 'Googles' you should be able to find a few articles about what % of revenue the program(s) account for some of these programs. One year Kraft said it was something like 14% (I have this on paper somewhere in my archive, but the info's available on the interwebs). Because of this, these programs aren't going anywhere.

This is also why, when you look at the food stuffs provided to students via school breakfast and lunch programs, they're often crap. Food nutrition is not the goal, getting Vitamin $ to companies (and maybe a few small farmers) is.

Meats and grains are heavily subsidized by the USG, produce not so much. IIRC this goes back to the doing of Nixon's guy, Earl Butz.

Wow! I didnt know any of that. These clearly-presented, insightful posts are why I love reading your comments. Esp on business or law. Learned a ton from them. :)

Good point and it's an active concern in development economics. Most often giving people cash will lead them to either use it for not-food (incl. things that are outright detrimental to their wellbeing), or to get low-nutrition (and high-energy) food such as snacks or soda. Not quite desirable either way.

Is this true?

I’ve seen a number of studies, reports, NGOs, etc. advocating for giving cash directly vs. inkind donations.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/5416096...

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/we...

https://www.vox.com/2016/1/23/10810978/cash-transfer-givedir...

> I'm not trying to imply that all homeless people are addicts (quite the contrary) but if I'm a crack addict and you give me money I'm not sure I'd be using it to save it up for buying a car one day.

Drug addicts make up a negligible percentage of people getting a helping hand. The statistics show this and it has been born out by the states that introduced drug testing for assistance recipients: they cost more to administer than the money saved by kicking people out of the assistance programs because the numbers are so tiny. Even in SF where it seems like all the crazy homeless people are strung out or tweaked, well, that's a sample problem: indeed many of the crazy ones are, but they are a minuscule, though highly visible, percentage of the people in need.

If you're struggling to make ends meet you don't have time to take drugs.

Whereas if you start out OK, become drug addled and fall out of the system, you probably by that time are too out of it to ask for help.

But if I give you food stamps, you could just sell them and buy crack. Is there any reason to believe food stamps help solve the problem you're describing?

I think the problem is more complex than you're bothering to give it credit.

For example, food stamps may go to a family, where they are dealt with responsibly, in a way that money, which is very easy to grab and walk out to buy cigarettes with when things go badly, is not.

Obviously, it's not a full solution, and a cynical recipient could sell them, true... but we're not talking about individuals acting in isolation for purely selfish reasons; that's a contrived subset of the problem.

What's the alternative you're proposing?

Just hand out cash?

The research shows that people suffer severe difficulty in managing fiscal matters when under financial stress. It's the old 'why do people who are poor buy so many lottery tickets?'?

Money isn't the correct solution; and maybe food stamps aren't either... but they're a better solution, and don't think that's even in doubt.

...but if you have a different one, I'm happy to hear it.

"why do people who are poor buy so many lottery tickets?"

Answer, all people buy lottery tickets at the same rate for tickets which might materially change their life. If you are rich, spending 20 bucks for a 1 in a million chance to win 10k is not going seem worthwhile.

The problem food stamps are solving is to keep a lid on the brow beating from taxpayers toward the poor. It is a mild form of punishment masquerading as help. It would be cheaper, easier, and more effective to just give cash (and because it would be cheaper, you could give more).

The main issue poor people have in managing money, is simply that they do not have enough.

And that they'll do things like spend their last penny to get the latest iPhone, or on buy $400 sneakers.

Or if they inherit 50k, immediately go to Vegas and lose it all.

These are all real examples I've known personally.

The people you're describing exist but it's hard to imagine someone who is great with money staying poor for years and years, considering almost everyone in America moves between income quintiles during their life and most spend time at the top.

If free food is punishment please sign me up to be punished.

Also, I'm interested in the source for your lottery ticket info. It sounds fairly absurd in a world where many jackpots are over 5 million, which is enough to change almost anyone's life. I've never even heard of a lottery for 10k.

I think maybe you missed my point. Everyone is bad with money (mostly), it is just rich people have more. And perhaps they have had more time to form good habits with ever increasing amounts to ride over the rough patches. I have known way more rich people bad with money than poor, it just didn't have the same effect.

That is because you don't buy them I guess. Scratch tickets, poker machines, plus lots of small state lotteries that start at 5-10k and top out at maybe half a mill.

Yeah, just hand out cash, and make it very easy for people with medical problems like addiction to get help without getting arrested or going bankrupt.

I don't know very much about this topic and I'd love to see the research you're talking about. Are poor people worse at managing finances? Intuitively that sounds wrong to me, but intuition is usually useless in economics. Do food stamps result in better health outcomes than cash?

> Just hand out cash?

That's what we do in most (all? I can only find a handful of dated references to a program in the UK) parts of Europe. Seems to work fine.

Most European countries have things like free medical care and maternity leave that we lack in the US.

It isn't really a comparable situation. Acting like it is doesn't do anything constructive for American problems.

Of course you can draw comparisons regarding access to food for the poor between those two continents.

Looking more at other countries is imho benelovant for the states.

I was a military wife for a lot of years. Trying to talk about the differences in compensation and lifestyle between the American military and American civilian jobs is quite challenging. If you want to talk about what works in Europe, you need to talk about all the factors that make it work.

People in this discussion are saying "If you give cash to an addict, they will spend it on drugs." Well, most poor Americans have serious health issues. It is one of the things that makes them poor.

If you need medical care and you have to pay for it and it's very expensive, giving such a person money won't go to food. It will go to medical bills.

If you want to give Americans cash instead if food stamps, first you need to give them free medical care. We really need universal basic health care in the US.

If you need medicine more than you need food, why is it bad that the money is going to medicine? How is it better to give someone medicine + [cost of food] than to give them [cost of medicine + code of food] and then let them buy medicine and food as needed? It's the same number of tax dollars in benefits and fewer in overhead. And more value to the recipient because they get to decide if it's worth $5000 to have a marginally effective surgery or use the money for something else, instead of having a bureaucracy decide they can't have it when they want it or they can have it but not the cash equivalent if they need something else more.

I guess I can see that if say, you have a person with an addiction, if they don't have access to free healthcare to treat that addiction, giving them straight-up cash might be a poor idea.

Of course that's just another reason to implement universal healthcare, not to shame poor people with food stamps.

The whole “food stamp recipients = crack addicts” is a lie created by tax cutting politicians. 44 MILLION people receive food stamps. There are not 44 million crack addicts in America. There aren’t even 4 million.