You 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.

> 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.

100B for SNAP vs 850B for defense in 2024. Interest on govt issued debt was 880B.

Imagine 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.

What would be the value of the US dollar if we didn't have a military to back it up?

I’d take that trade any day

Ahaha. Wait, did you mean this as ironic comedy, or are you serious?

Answer the question

Oh 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.

You'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?

Lol. You are just too ignorant to even begin having this conversation

It's quite possible SNAP is doing more harm than good as overeating kills many more Americans (especially poor) than undernourishment.

Yes we should prevent starvation but the program does need some reform. Far too much of it is spent on junk food and soft drinks. Something like 23% of SNAP is spent on junk food.

Restricting SNAP purchases to be more aligned with health would very likely save lives.

The 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.

I 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.

Assuming 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

It’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.

Could 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

That is part of the problem, yes. Not SNAP itself, which is good, but the fact that it can be used to buy garbage.

You should be restricted from buying soft drinks, chips, candy, etc. with SNAP/EBT, just like you can't buy cigarettes and alcohol with it. But nobody is willing to take on BigFood, and are content to let them prey on the poor with taxpayers footing the bill.

The second problem though is that if you restrict SNAP eligible food, you still have to provide healthy alternatives -- fresh veggies, fruit, grains, etc. -- at subsidized prices for SNAP recipients so they can actually survive on it.

It's such a shameful situation, and one that gets very little attention from either party.

Reform is needed, yes, but this is a stupid comment.

By your own argument 75% of SNAP is spent on normal food, mostly by people who need it

So why not reform it? It seems like an easy way to get bipartisan support and compromise. To put the numbers in perspective, the US only had 3000 deaths due to starvation (almost all of which are mental health issues rather than lack of access to food). This is compared to 280k-500k deaths due to overeating.

Cut the 25% and keep the 75% that is spent on normal food. By the other comments you can see that even that seems quite unpopular as it is seen as policing food for poor people?

Do you know how much money SNAP gives people, and how much junk food and soft drinks cost? Like have you actually done the math on anything that would lead you to your opinion?

Jesus christ, what is wrong with the people in this country? Why are you do obsessed with policing what other people eat?

There are a huge number “poor people deserve to be miserable” people in this country, and even here on HN. It is horrifying.

1% 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.

That'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.

Less 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.

Agreed 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

Yeah 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.

Brilliant logical fallacies

Some of those items were about feeding starving kids, others weren’t. Perhaps we shouldn’t pretend that anyone equating them is saying something worth listening to or taking remotely seriously.

Ahem.

SNAP recipients (about 42 million people) receive between $6-$10 per day in food assistance. $42 to $70 per week for groceries doesn't go very far in today's economy.

I'm not sure what you're responding to in my comment, but I think it's the $3/person bit. That's taking the approximately $1 billion and dividing it over all 340+ million people in the US. I'm saying that we have to have an average of $3/person in tax revenue to cover this apparent fraud (I don't trust this administration at all so I won't say anything other than "apparent").

> $3/person in the US

That is averaging across total population (including retirees and kids?)!

It makes more sense to look at the dollars per working person (taxes)

Sure, that would take it to around $6-9/year/taxpayer.

social programs are 60% of the budget, defense is down to 13%.

Who would have thought health care and retirement is more expensive than wars, it seems like that should be telling us something about priorities.

It'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-o...

It's always a wonder to me when people downplay keeping others fed and healthy.

It's an investment. Every dollar spent returns $62 to the economy[0].

[0] 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.

We should just put a trillion dollars into it then, and the returns would pay off the national debt! Right?!

There 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.

Feeding 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.

> 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.

The comment where I started replying claimed that each dollar spent on SNAP yielded a 60x return in terms of productive economic activity... That is a literal braindead comment and I don't have to walk on eggshells to debunk such a preposterous thing.

1.5% fraud is awfully high for such a large program. You can call that take heartless if you want, but what better use could that fraudulently stolen money be put to? My one and only experience with food stamps is that I couldn't get more than like $50 monthly while I was unemployed and in dire need, and that was requiring lots of documentation. (Ghetto people and illegal immigrants are getting thousands these days, lol) Maybe someone like me back then might have gotten something worth my time if there was zero fraud. With the country facing bankruptcy every dollar counts, frankly.

Additionally, requiring people to reapply for food stamps is not going to actually disqualify any people who meet the acceptance criteria, but for a very small number of dumb ones. You either qualify or you don't. If you do then nothing changes. So, my take is actually both compassionate and absolutely right.

> I couldn't get more than like $50 monthly while I was unemployed and in dire need, and that was requiring lots of documentation

why didn't you try fraud if you think it's so easy?

It's mindboggling to see you argue that somehow the rules that made it hard for you to get social support are somehow waived for others.

The country isn't facing bankruptcy because children are getting food. The country is facing bankruptcy because billionaires are getting so much welfare in the form of tax cuts and low wages - their employees can't afford food and rent while working full time jobs to help the leeches amass even more wealth.

>why didn't you try fraud if you think it's so easy?

Because I'm not a criminal? I have too much to lose, and frankly I don't know the system. I know roughly the kinds of things that would get me paid but it's not easy for an honest person. Some of the fraud is also, no doubt, in the form of under-reporting income or not updating the records with your current household status.

>It's mindboggling to see you argue that somehow the rules that made it hard for you to get social support are somehow waived for others.

The rules apply VERY differently based on a large number of factors. Without going too far into it, I am 100% certain that being an "asylum seeker" (aka an economic migrant to those of us who know) will get you paid. I can't fake that, it's not worth it. Also, I'd have needed it 10+ years ago, not today.

>The country isn't facing bankruptcy because children are getting food. The country is facing bankruptcy because billionaires are getting so much welfare in the form of tax cuts and low wages - their employees can't afford food and rent while working full time jobs to help the leeches amass even more wealth.

The rich are getting richer but it's mostly because they know how to work the system. It's NOT because poor people are getting screwed generally, or because they deserve more money in an economic sense. Every productive industry is being outsourced or else flooded with immigrant workers, and this has gone on for decades. The rich don't HAVE enough to pay for the welfare state or higher wages for uncompetitive workers. If you want to be mad about something, be mad that our politicians allowed the country to be hollowed out.

Industry doesn't get flooded - rich people flood it with immigrants so they can pay less. the politicians are bought by the rich.

I mean industry as a sphere of human activity, not industry as a collection of corporate interests. Of course it's all about money, but that doesn't excuse all the plebs who have been brainwashed into supporting infinite immigration.

It's a wonder to me when people think the caps lock key improves their argument.

Who uses the caps lock key to only uppercase a single word?

> $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

> 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.