This is kind of the point. In all the cases where the person is spending that amount on eligible food regardless, it's already equivalent to cash so it might as well be cash without the administrative overhead. They'll spend the food stamps on food and the cash they would have spent on food on whatever they want.
The only time it matters is when the person wouldn't be spending that much, i.e. they have an alternative source of food that doesn't take food stamps. In which case it only produces inefficiency. If you're content to eat free stale bagels and ugly produce every day so you can use the money for something else, you can't without breaking the law. Nor does it help you to try to stretch the money past the limit of the benefit amount.
So people go to the grocery store and spend all the money, because a fresh bagel tastes better than a stale one if you have to spend the money on that. And if you have a consistent way to get by on $80/month in groceries, accumulating an extra $20/month in food stamp balance every month still doesn't put gas in your car.
The same dynamic plays out in all the other assistance programs. There is money for low income housing assistance, but the natural thing to do there is to get together with multiple other hard off people, pool your resources and share housing. Which is not allowed. The programs generally prohibit methods of improving efficiency or stretching money.
Even if you're dead set on not letting people spend the money on vices, why is there a whitelist instead of a blacklist? You can't spend assistance money on alcohol or cigarettes, fine. But if there is food assistance and housing assistance then why can't you spend excess food money on housing or excess housing money on food? Why is there a ban on business cards and brake pads?
100,000,000,000 / 12 = would feed one person for 8.3B years.
Or a billion people for 8.3 years.
You can see where this is going.
$100B should be able to feed one hundred million people for 83.3 years. Assuming $100 / month could feed a person.
You can buy a lot of lentils, rice, and potatoes with $100.
But you're saying food stamps costs $100B a year.
Where is all this money going?
The latest numbers in Wikipedia say that SNAP costs $70.9B and distributes an average of $125/month to 44.2M people.
That means the cost is $133 to distribute $125, or an overhead of $8 per person per month.
Still not great but not nearly as bad as I was expecting, to be honest.
The average health insurance deductible is $4,358 and the average premium is $321 per month.[3] That means that on average US citizens pay $321 per month for (5237-4358) / 12 = $73.25 of expected value. That's a 4X markup over the expected value of insurance.
Health insurance companies might be reporting single digit overheads but they are providing $1 of value for $4 and are inefficient.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361028/
[2] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/11/05/when-your-shitty-...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/06/23/heres-how-much-the-avera...
Your calculation makes no sense. Healthcare insurance pays out for catastrophic events, hence the deductible, not evenly every year. You need to know the distribution of payouts to get a meaningful result.
I guess it's still a whole number factor sort of thing.
I also wonder if those numbers are accounting for Medicare and Medicaid (which add costs to the private insurance system).
>> To estimate lifetime health care costs, we employ a method based on a current life table, also known as a period life table model.
Thus, these costs are representative of recent costs.
In the next 80 years, both the expected value of insurance and the cost of insurance will change. Health insurance premiums are expected to increase by double-digits in 2019.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/05/26/whos-ready-for-a-1...
$100 billion / 12 months
= $8.3 billion per month
/ $100 per person per month
= 83 million people
so $100 billion per year could give 83 million people $100 per month.
A lot of people don’t realize that “food stamps” are just a debit card that you use to checkout at the supermarket, yes, even Whole Foods. There are some limits to what you can buy, but generally speaking if it’s unprepared food you can pay for it with the food stamp debit card.
I was on food stamps for a short while. While the value of the balance wasn’t literally cash, it was equivalent because I was spending at least that much on groceries anyway. You can also carry a balance forward from month-to-month so there’s never a need to spend it down wastefully. It’s only about $100/person/month so it’s never too much for just food.
Food stamps have low administrative overhead and low levels of fraud. It’s a government program I have very few gripes about, which is indeed saying something.
And it’s not a small program either, around $100B per year (less in the last couple years due to very strong employment numbers).