Will Food Stamps Help Make *You* "Look Amazing"?
Via Veronique de Rugy at NRO's Corner comes this amazing ad from the USDA about how food stamps will help you "look amazing"!
In the radio spot, two retired ladies talk about their mutual friend "Margie," who "looks amazing." One asks the other: "What's her secret?" The answer, it turns out, is food stamps.
There are many arguments in favor of the program but good eating habits is not one of them. In fact, there is nothing about the food stamps program that ensures one is "eating right" or living a healthy life….
When the food stamp program was first expanded nationally in the 1970s, just 1 in 50 Americans participated and it was helping truly poor Americans; today that number has reached 1 in 7 Americans. Some 46.4 million people are in the food stamps program — just a little below the record high hit in January. But USDA, obviously, thinks that more Americans should using food stamps.
Indeed, food stamps—technically know as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP—is a welfare program that helps the Department of Agriculture as much as aid recipients. The department doles out subsidies that ensure overproduction and then doles ways to sell off excess goods. About 10 percent of the cost of food stamps goes directly to the administering of the program itself.
Reason's Greg Beato wrote recently that much of the increase in food stamp usage stems not from the crappy economy but from expansions in eligibility that allow people at 200 percent above the poverty line to participate in the program. Read all about it here.