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The Republican Party, which professes to believe in vouchers, consumer choice and the free market for all, wants to convert billions of dollars in food stamps — which let low-income Americans shop for what they need, when and where they need it — into a direct-from-the-government box of provisions.
No, really.
The idea, which seems to have gone straight from scrawl on the back of a grocery receipt into President Trump’s budget, is the administration’s way of covering for the fact that it proposes gutting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits by $17 billion next year.
That’s more than a fifth of the program’s total funding.
Who needs to properly fund food stamps, says Trump’s Agriculture Department, when half of every recipient’s allotment can buy a publicly packaged box-o-goodies that saves taxpayers $130 billion over 10 years, what with the feds driving down costs by buying items wholesale?
Except nobody’s thought for a second about how to build the costly and complex infrastructure necessary to assemble all those products for the 16 million households that rely on government nutritional assistance.
Or the logistical systems needed to routinely deliver heavy boxes of shelf-stable milk, juice, cereals, pasta, grains, beans, peanut butter, canned meat, vegetables and canned fruits and vegetables to all those doors, including in remote rural areas.
Our business-friendly government and famously food-picky President seem to have conveniently forgotten the fact that different homes have dramatically different dietary needs.
Some don’t drink milk or eat meat. Some keep kosher or halal kitchens. Some kids are deathly allergic to peanut butter.
Where are homeless people, whose addresses change with frequency, supposed to get their deliveries? And what about the damage done to local supermarkets, which help hold many a small community together? Food stamps drive 7.5% of their sales.
It’s all too easy to mock budget director Mick Mulvaney for likening “America’s Harvest Box” to Blue Apron, the $140-a-week gourmet food delivery service.
But the corporate analogy isn’t just tone-deaf; it’s perverse. The biggest reason the proposal offends is because it cynically abandons years of supposed conservative wisdom about empowering the poor by giving them access to the marketplace , replacing that with old-school, big-government paternalism.
Put that hypocrisy in a box and ship it.