What Compassionate (and Sane) EBT Would Look Like
From a real economist.
It's simpler than you imagined.
Economists like me are largely to blame for the calamity that is government food welfare. We proved beyond all doubt that a welfare program can deliver more and better food, at lower cost, by simply giving poor people money, so they can buy food in the private market.
The government took our stupid advice and replaced soup kitchens with SNAP and WIC and EBT.
Like most economists' advice, ours was correct, in the sense that it followed logically from our assumptions. And like most economists' advice, it was a disaster in practice.
Economists (I am one) showed you how to deliver high-quality food to poor people at low cost, which solved the exact wrong problem.
The three goals of food welfare should be, in order of urgency:
1. Prevent starvation.
2. Get people off food welfare.
3. Minimize costs.
You don't achieve Goal 2, getting people off food welfare, by giving them great food. I trust I don't need to explain why, though leftists will (as always) pretend they don't understand.
The very premise of SNAP and WIC and EBT is disastrous. Food welfare should not deliver good food at low cost; it should deliver terrible food at low cost.
Amazingly, free government cheese is a BETTER food welfare program than SNAP, EBT, or WIC, because people eventually get tired of eating cheese, especially that orange powdered stuff.
Here is the only government food welfare we need: Unlimited free Power Bars.
Power Bars taste terrible, but they are nutritious. That's our model for food welfare. If you want to improve it, find a way to make Power Bars taste worse, and maybe dry them up a little, so they crumble in our mouth like an aspirin tablet and have to be taken with water.
Why unlimited? Why not restrict the free Power Bars to the poor?
Because we shouldn't force people to prove they are poor. Proving we are poor wastes time, requires us to pay useless bureaucrats, and encourages us to actually BE poor.
So let's just hand Power Bars out for free. Nobody will starve; everyone will be motivated to get off food welfare; and we won't have to watch obese women buy Frito Lay jumbo assortment packs with our money.
"No no," leftists will sputter. "We can just prohibit using vouchers to buy junk food."
That's just them being willfully dense.
As a bonus, unlimited free Power Bars will shut down the secondary market that converts food vouchers into cash, so we can stop paying for obese mothers to buy cigs and malt liquor.
When leftists complain that Power Bars are cruel and strip the poor of their immense dignity, just say this: "Why do you want pregnant welfare moms to drink alcohol and smoke?"
Leftists will pretend they don't understand, but just ignore them and keep repeating it: "Why do you want pregnant welfare moms to drink alcohol and smoke?"
Give them Power Bars instead.
