Plan B Forum

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. ~ Anne Frank

Poor Anne didn't live long enough to know that her belief was mistaken. Maybe that's a blessing of a kind.

Or maybe it is just all cyclical and the wheel turns again. Ann Frank had her moment of posthumous glory, as did MLK Jr, and the wheel turns and now the leader of Israel dodges international war crimes arrest as he shares counsel with the leader of Hungary. The names change, the roles and script remain. The wheel turns. The days of passover approach and Benjamin Netanyahu faithlessly takes upon himself responsibilities of divine retrubution.

snailgate.

USDA Threatens Stores Giving Discounts to People on Food Stamps

The Trump administration’s freeze on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds during the government shutdown is forcing many struggling Americans to make hard decisions about feeding themselves and their families. Now the administration is even restricting how much grocery stories can help.

After several food delivery apps and grocery store chains sought to offer discounts to those whose SNAP benefits were interrupted or delayed, the Department of Agriculture sent an email to stores across the country warning them that they weren’t allowed to offer discounts to people hurt by the cuts to the food stamp program.

MSNBC anchor Catherine Rampell posted a screenshot of the email on X Sunday, and reported that at least two stores withdrew their discounts after receiving the email. At issue is SNAP’s “Equal Treatment Rule,” which bars stores from either discriminating against people in the program or offering them favorable treatment.



On Friday, two federal courts ruled that the Trump administration has to use contingency funds to pay for SNAP, but the government has yet to respond with how it intends to comply, leaving the program’s 41 million recipients in limbo as assistance ended on Saturday, the first day of November. And food retailers in low-income areas may themselves be hurt, as much of their customer base now can’t afford to shop.

In the meantime, the government shutdown has now lasted more than a month and is nearing the 35-day record set by the first Trump administration from December 2018 to January 2019. Not only are many federal workers furloughed or in danger of losing their jobs but health care subsidies are also on the chopping block. It seems that Republicans are not concerned about the survival of much of America.

I would have thought that it would be a traditionally Republican philosophy that replacing government welfare with private charity is a good thing. And that the response of the administration to this initiative of grocery stores should have been to say, "Hey, it's a great thing that you are doing to help people get over this hump. Even though it's against SNAP rules to offer these discounts, we're going to give you all a waiver to do this so long as SNAP benefits are suspended or reduced."

But this is no longer the traditional Republican Party. And this government WANTS people to suffer, as many and as much as possible.

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Time to reduce the surplus population!

Threatening grocers with this "rule violation" is bullshit because with benefits suspended there simply are no SNAP-EBT customers. Everyone is now paying cash. If you can offer "senior discounts" or cash discounts you can logically also offer "poor folk" discounts. No one is "abusing the system" in any way.

The USDA notice is just an effort to frighten everyone into compliance with the Administration's policy of making life as awful as possible for poor and marginalized people. This is what "weaponizing government" looks like.

Exactly; it's kind of like people using medicare drug coverage --when they use their insurance they cannot use discount cards (like good Rx), but if they are paying on their own, they are the same as any other customer; just like people not using their SNAP-EBT card are. Conjuring Welch's comments to Joe McCarthy I say to the entire administration, Have you no sense of decency?

I'm sure this is happening throughout the country, but locally, many small businesses and restaurants are offering "snap days" and rotating it around the community among the other restaurants. Things like, "free pizza, fries and fountain drinks" for anyone with a valid SNAP card and ID on Tuesdays or something similar. It's heartening to see that community pick up the slack (which honestly, we should be doing anyway).

The frustrating thing, though, is that SNAP *is* the community picking up the slack - that’s my money and your money and via our electeds we have decided over many decades to feed the disadvantaged through OUR money. But now our electeds are playing games with OUR money, and refusing to do OUR bidding with it.

It makes me crazy to see so many comments on the socials these last few weeks where people say poor folks shouldn’t rely on the government and the community should be responsible for such charity. It makes me want to bang my head against a brick wall.

Excellent point, BSG. While it certainly is our money collected from our taxes, what I'm seeing is additional voluntary contributions just to help people who need it.

Yes; and that charitable impulse should be lauded.

But I would point out that we have always had soup kitchens and food pantries to supplement the food supply for impoverished people who qualify for SNAP, because SNAP provides only $2/person/meal which isn’t enough to fully nourish many families. And of course there are poor people out there who are afraid to even apply for WIC and SNAP because they are afraid to be engaged with the government, or they don’t qualify because of their undocumented status.

The other comments that have been driving me nuts are the ones where people complain that SNAP recipients are using their benefits to buy steak and caviar (yes somebody actually posted that!) and junk foods too. Again, the monthly allowance provides for $2/person/meal. Beef steak is running ~$15+/lb and caviar ~$200/lb for the cheap stuff.

Lots of folks on SNAP allotment live on canned tuna and grilled cheese and ramen noodles etc. I’ve worked with these folks and shopped for them when they were too elderly or disabled to shop for themselves. It’s hard for them to eat healthy on the monthly allotment.

All of this makes me so crazy angry. In the richest country that has ever existed in all of human history.

In the spring of 1972 I was working full time at DuPont for minimum wage as a temporary worker living in Maryland with my wife, two toddler and two dogs, and collecting food stamps. Delaware was 6 miles away and did not charge sales tax on groceries. My wife carpooled with others on food stamps and shopped at the Acme in Newark DE. They bought ground beef with food stamps. While in line they heard frequently remarks "Look at that--buying 'ground beef ' with food stamps and I can't afford ground beef; I have to get hamburger." Ground beef was priced significantly more than hamburger. BUT one could not buy it with food stamps because it was imported from Argentina and New Zealand, while 'ground beef' a domestic product. One was not supposed to buy anything imported, not even olive oil, or Ketchup from Canada, with food stamps.

The social media never has 'the rest of the story'.

snailgate

We had WIC (women infant children) assistance when my oldest was born. We received a handful of checks each month for very specific items (4 gallons of milk, jar of creamy peanut butter, non sugary cereal, etc.). Never included bread so I always wondered what they expected us to put the peanut butter on, but then also, it wasn't designed to give us everything we needed, it was a supplement. We appreciated it to no end. We were nursing, so we didn't get formula (which is why we got so much milk offered). If we had said we were using formula, we'd have been allotted a certain amount of a specific formula and less milk. At least the grocery store had little shelf-edge signs indicating if an item was WIC approved so that made it easier.

When we would be checking out, we'd usually tell the person behind us, "We have WIC checks if you want to go first". That gave them the opportunity to either go first and be done before we held up the line a little, OR stand there and keep quiet about it.

My mom used to make the same complaints about someone buying steak with food stamps when she and dad were first married and lived off base. All people see are the (perceived) abuses and not the regular everyday folks just trying to put food on the tables while working their asses off. Everyone has an opinion about "those welfare folks" but most of us are just a bad month away from being there.

To quote Ted Lasso - "Be curious - not judgmental".

I used food stamps (when they still came in the book of stamps you had to tear out in front of the cashier) when I was in the last year of college and then in graduate school as well. Some folks were fine about it, but I definitely got nasty looks from some in the line and some cashiers as well.

I wish I’d known I’d qualify for food stamps in the years before then, but I came from a family that denigrated users of safety net programs, so it wasn’t until a friend told me that I even considered it and then was able to eat more than just popcorn, English muffins, peanut butter and mac & cheese for the last few years of university.

When I (stupidly) told my mother I’d been approved and now had the ability to eat protein other than peanut butter, she actually gasped and then started lecturing me and then eventually said she ‘guessed’ it was okay for me to get them - and that’s when I told her I didn’t give a shit what she thought, especially while she and my father were feeding and providing housing free to my older brother who got GI Bill for his schooling and worked as well, but drank up most all of his wages. I hung up on her and didn’t return a call from her for at least a month after that.

It was a long slow process of breaking free from my very conservative, misogynistic parents who made me the scapegoat of our diseased family system - which ultimately resulted in total estrangement about six years later.

People who need safety net programs and qualify for them should use them. A body needs decent nutrition to function optimally. It makes me so angry to think about hungry kids trying to pay attention and learn and regulate their emotions in school. When I worked at the YMCA before and after school program I was always giving extra snacks to the kids I knew weren’t getting enough at home.

In the richest country that has ever existed in human history, with multi billionaires who could never need all the money they hoard.

It makes me so angry to think about hungry kids trying to pay attention and learn and regulate their emotions in school.

I agree, but the sad part is that the school breakfast and lunch programs do not (or at least did not when my kids were small) provide nutritious meals that the kids would eat. When my kids were small we were lucky enough not to need these programs, but my daughters knew a number of kids who did, and the food was either high starch/high sugar, or overcooked canned greens the kids routinely threw away. My younger daughter told me one of her friends showed her a (presumably canned) hard boiled egg with a green yolk. I hope they have gotten better (and concede I haven't looked much into it), but I do recall when the Reagan response to this was to classify ketchup as a vegetable because the kids would eat it.

It kind of reminds me like the school lunches we had when i was in school in NY; these were paid, but subsidized (I'm pretty sure, I think they were a dime or 15 cents a day) and they were horrible; most of us avoided them and brought something in (but for some I am pretty sure this was not an option). FWIW, when I was in army field exercises we got 30 year old C rations and, as bad as they were, they were still better than those school lunches.