Katie C. Johnson
Mrs. Gillum
AP English
23 April 2018
Should People Be Banned from using Food Stamps to Purchase Junk Food? There are various arguments against the use of food stamps in order to purchase unhealthy foods, despite these arguments, such as increased healthier diet, impact negatively to economy, and even the aspect psychologically these are indisputably biased and not credible. Allowing consumers to apply their own free will and ability to obtain foods produces a more positive result for all involved. To begin, one of the most common claims against food stamps is that by restricting a person’s options to just healthy foods as a result the economy will surplus, this can be proven false. The cost and complicated procedures in
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This conception is purely directed at the poor, thus creating the psychological impact mentioned previously. Food stamp participants as well as nonusers are not quite different, “The U.S.D.A. concluded that both food stamp recipients and other households generally made similar purchases.” (O’Connor) thus making this situation a war on the poor not on unhealthy options. This later has a potential of resulting in the issue of fairness, why restrict those in need of assistance and claim the users as ill-mannered considering their food choices, when all in all those not using food stamps carry out a duplicate life style. This further explains why food stamps should not restrict users from buying junk food, it encourages hypocrisy as well as creating shameful experiences for all involved. This also creates a mentally challenging situation for young children with families’ dependent on food stamps. A child should not have to endure the threat of bullying because their families cannot afford certain foods due to unnecessary restrictions. All in all, despite arguments made, it can be proven indisputably that the psychological impacts are worthy of being noted and considered and thus keeping unlimited food stamp choices
With more and more people becoming unemployed and applying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), it is imperative that we understand the benefits as well as problems this causes. Even while researching this topic and talking to some of my family and friends about it, it surprised me the amount of those who do not understand food stamps. Coming from the SNAP website, “Food stamps offer nutritional assistance to millions of eligible low-income individuals and families and provides economic benefits to communities” (United States). This program helps millions of people per year and gives upwards of $75 billion and rising. With the prices of food increasing due to inflation, beneficiaries are receiving around $400 at most per month. Using the Electronic benefit transfer systems (EBT), beneficiaries can buy goods from a grocery store using a credit-card like transaction, which takes the money off of their card. The benefits are received monthly on a specific date and vary in amounts from person to person. One family may receive $300 per month because they have three kids and need the extra money, while another may receive $100 or less depending on financial status. The application process includes completing and filing an application form, being interviewed, and verifying facts crucial to determining eligibility. In the past, these applications did not require a drug screening to get benefits, but more and more states are adopting this. There are many drawbacks to SNAP as well such as taking money from working people’s paychecks every week and people abusing the system. Talking about a very opinionated subject, we must remove bias and answer whether or not the Food Stamp system should be limited.
People should be able to purchase junk food with food stamps. Others might assume that they have no money so why waste it on junk food? Food stamps help numerous people if they struggle with food at home, or don’t earn enough salary. Moreover, why waste it on junk food?
Many families and people have become too dependent on food stamps. “Critics of food stamps and government spending, however, argue that too many families have become dependent on government aid.”(NoteCard #1) But if they did not have this program people would go hungry. “11.9 million people went hungry in the United States”... “that included nearly 700,000 children, up more than 50% from the year before.”(NoteCard #2, Point 2) The program does good and helps people but it also spends a lot of money to get people food stamps. “..food-stamp recipients has soared to 44 million from 26 million in 2007, and the costa have more than doubled to $77 billion from $33 billion.”(NoteCard #5) But in the end, is it worth it? People need the assistance. It does help people from going hungry and keeps them at least with a little food in their stomach to that keeps them from starving. A lot of people who could not get jobs, were eligible for the program because they did not have a source of income. “Critics of food stamps and government spending, however, argue that too many families have become dependent on government aid.”(NoteCard #1) Since not everyone could get work, the government changed the requirements and it went for the better and for the
The federal Food Stamp Program is an assisted nutrition program that helps millions of eligible, low-income individuals and families (United States Department of Agriculture). This program gives its recipients extra money each month to try to help them have better food security. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is also the largest program in the federal safety net (United States Department of Agriculture). In Ohio’s Appalachian counties, there are 515,300 recipients which is 25.4% of the population (Job and Family Services). The Supplemental Nutrition Program is a good program except for one problem that can be fixed relatively fast and one problem that it will take a little time to solve. The problem that can be fixed right away is that the Supplemental Nutrition Program can be abused by the recipients buying junk food instead of healthy food. The problem that will take some time to fix is that some recipients make unhealthy food choices because they do not have access to a local supermarket. In order to fix these two problems the Food Stamp Program needs to better regulate what can be bought with the Food Stamp card and items in convenient stores need to be better stocked in order to keep accepting Food Stamp cards.
It has been a long time since the first official program has begun in 1939. It has helped millions of people. However it does have several flaws in the system. The system is changing to be more electronic and decreasing fraud. Even though from the report from the Governmental Accountability Organization shows the program to be ineffective, there are people out there that truly have been helped by the program. The work requirements seem like an easy fix, it would weed a lot of frauds out of the system. When the government is just handing out these benefits with simple requirements people are going to take advantage of it and in turn become dependent on it. The problems with program are fixable but from the information on the Food and Nutrition government website basically says they do not want to put the work in to solve some of these issues raised in this essay.
Blue stamps could be used to buy commodity foods, listed in excess supply, and dry beans, flour, corn meal, eggs and fresh vegetables ("The History of SNAP"). The program lasted 4 years, ending in 1943, due to World War II and an economic boom decreasing the number of people living in poverty. The program started again, in 1961, as a pilot program in several states at the behest of President John F. Kennedy. It was not until 1964, with the passage of The Food Stamp Act by President Johnson, that the Food Stamp Program became a national program again ("The History of SNAP"). Feeding the poor was not the only goal of the program, as the program was also used to make “more effective use of agricultural production” and to “strengthen the agricultural economy” ("The History of SNAP"). Thirteen years later, in 1977, major revisions were made the Food Stamp Program. Some of the revisions were “the elimination of the requirement that participants purchase the stamps; the establishment of uniform national standards of eligibility; the expansion of the program to minority communities; more federal support for the implementation of the program at the state level; and restricted access to benefits for students enrolled
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program helps to ensure that the social minimum: bodily health is being achieved. SNAP was created to provide a way that low-income families can afford food and be adequately nourished. Also, in a utilitarianism perspective, SNAP is offered to all people as long as they can meet the eligibility requirements of the program. This ensures that the program is open to all people and that all have a fair chance at obtaining if they meet the requirements. In regards to deontological social justice, the social minimum of bodily health is met by providing people with the funds to purchase notorious foods. Then with the original position argument, SNAP benefits are given to low-income households because they have a greater need for the benefits than households with higher income. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program allows for people to have a chance to meet the social minimums that all people should be able to
In the year 2015, around 40 million U.S. citizens were food insecure (Randall para. 3). Food insecurity can be defined in paragraph 3 by “[having] difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources. This 12.7% of American citizens also contains another group - children. Aged 10-17, 6.8 million adolescents struggle with a food insecurity. There have been several years of cuts to the social programs designed to help these people, along with the Great Recession continuing to leave an impact on the U.S. economy (para. 6). Under the Obama administration, $8.6 billion was cut from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as Food Stamps. From 1993-2001 under the Clinton administration, former President Bill Clinton’s administration “gutted the welfare system” (para. 15). Because of these budget cuts, the families who rely on food assistance from the government have been allotted less throughout the years. From a sociological perspective, the concepts of sociological imagination, class stratification, and social location are in effect when it comes to child hunger in the United States. Being hungry is an issue larger than any one individual can control.
Since the passing of this bill obesity has been on the rise (77.3). Many people on this program will over indulge on food simply because they get a limited amount of money to buy their groceries for the month, and they tend to buy groceries with high sugar and fat. Baum, researched and found that since the food stamp program started, people who were recipients of the benefits became obese. This caused obesity to climb thirty percent, making that a hundred percent increase since 1971
As I stated early, I am against food stamps. I am opposing towards because it creates a toll on the American taxpayers. We are contributing to fraud, the obesity rate and letting people have no incentives to work. The government makes food stamps so easy to access with the qualifications being so low. Even with the working poor getting “free” money for food, they still have no motivation to better their lives and find a job. I care about this matter because I, as a young adult, I pay tax myself. I hope that the government too will consider eliminating or reforming the Supplement Nutrition Assistant Program in a more efficient way that possibly could benefit not only the working poor but as well as American taxpayers.
Poverty is regarded as the major cause of food insecurity. A household food security depends on access to food. America has access to good healthy food. However, a family too poor to buy them do not enjoy food security. Rosenbaum and Neuberger (2005) report that each year the number of people using government food assistance programs grows. “Food stamps are targeted to those with the greatest need for help in purchasing food… [and] helps to lessen the extent and severity of poverty (Rosenbaum and Neuberger 2005)”.
Food insecurity is an issue faced by millions of Americans every day, and the biggest group affected by this is working families with children. Food insecurity is so big that the United States government has now recognized it and provided a definition for it. The United States government has defined food insecurity as “a household level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food” (USDA.gov). Food banks and anti-hunger advocates agree that some of the causes of food insecurity are stagnant wages, increase in housing costs, unemployment, and inflation of the cost of food. These factors have caused food banks to see a change in the groups of people needing assistance. Doug O’Brien, director of public policy and research at Chicago-based Second Harvest says “’we’ve seen a real shift in who we serve. A decade ago, it was almost always homeless, single men and chronic substance abusers. Now we have children and working families at soup kitchens’” (Koch). These families that are feeling the effects of food insecurity will not be only ones affected by it, but all of America. Studies have shown that there is a link between food security, performance in the classroom, and obesity. If this issue is not faced head on, America will have a generation of children not fully prepared for the workforce and high health insurance rates due to obesity health issues.
Food insecurity can be “broadly defined as having limited access to adequate food” (Nguyen, Shuval, Bertmann, & Yaroch, 2015). While one might think that low income individuals who do not know where their next meal is coming from would be thin or underweight, many of those facing food insecurity instead struggle with obesity. This paradox may be a result of the very programs implemented to combat food insecurity in low income families. SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a federal assistance program that gives money to households for food based on income and need. According to a study done by the USDA, “SNAP participants were more likely than income-eligible and higher income nonparticipants to be obese,” with SNAP participants being 40 percent more likely to be obese (2015). The problem is that even though SNAP provides resources to food insecure individuals, the food being provided is not nutritious and is thus contributing to the high rates of obesity in SNAP participants. Healthcare costs and mortality increase as more individuals become obese. Preventing these problems from happening by implementing nutrition education will increase SNAP participants’ health overall and bring down their healthcare costs.
Food Stamp is a government-funded program in the United States. This is a program that helps people buy food for their families; in other words, it is a very important program to families living in poverty. It is the nation’s most important program in the fight against hunger. This program was developed in the 1960’s; it is made to improve the nutrition level and food purchasing power of people with low-income. This program is offered to people who cannot afford to buy groceries for their families, regardless of age, color, sex or religion. Food Stamps can only be used to buy food items not hygiene or household items, and it’s offered only on a monthly basis.
Food stamp organizations help a variety of people from the disabled, single mothers, children and to those who cannot find—or are unable to—work. There are many out there who for some reason are unable to obtain necessary food, and without these programs, these people wouldn’t be able to survive in the money hungry world. Though these programs are put in place to ensure that people are being properly fed, there are people out there that think people use it only to abuse it. Single mothers are just one of the groups that gets a lot of harassment and are looked down upon. These individual’s are looked down upon due to the stereotypes and the overwhelming concern of them ruining the system due to a few. According to Poverty and the Homeless they said only 9 percent of single mothers stayed in there programs for more than seven years and less than 10 percent stayed more than eight years, also saying that most of them were young single mothers with children under the age of three (Williams). Single mothers are not the reason that the economy is going under, people just need an escape goat to blame so they don’t see their own ignorance. Mothers shouldn’t be wrongly accused for needing food stamps, because they could need them for a number of reasons. There are mothers out there that have been divorced and the husbands don’t pay child support. An article online talked about how this mother had recently separated from her husband and she was on food stamps. Her children didn’t know because she didn’t want to burden them with any more than they already had. She said, “I sold everything that wasn’t tied down. I eventually found three part-time jobs that would allow me to be with my sons when they got home from school, trying to keep their lives as structured and normal as possible — plus saving me $100+ a week in childcare, which is substantial when you make