Michale Savage asked the question “How did people survive before food stamps?”. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know the answer. I do.
My father was 100% blind. That meant he got a disability check each month from the State of Pennsylvania. It also entitled the family to participate in the “Surplus food program”. [The negative effect of giving free stuff to my parents and his family has a lot to do with my own political views]
Part of the answer was my Uncle, who wasn’t blind and had earned a lot of money would drop off food from time to time. He was looking out for his little brother, and probably would have helped more if our needs had been more serious.
Our church had a program where we donated can goods to “feed the poor”. It wasn’t until I was fairly far along growing up that I realized that we were one of the poor families they were giving food to. Poverty is a state of mind.
But the main answer was the surplus food program – based on your income and number of people in the family, that “entitled” you to a certain level of “free” food. A good portion of it was putrid stuff and ended up being thrown away. The USDA buys up “surplus” food production and factories put it into boxes so it can sit in warehouses in North Dakota for years waiting for a food “emergency”.
So based on your “need”, a person would read from a table…. Give me 3 powdered milks, 2 peanut butters, 4 boxes of cheese, 2 boxes of spam, a can of cooking oil…
But this is your typical circular government “help” program – by giving people free food, they didn’t shop at the supermarket. Without people buying cheese, that creates more of a surplus of excess cheese, which means the government has to buy up more excess cheese, which means they have to give away more free cheese.
Food Stamps was the way to co-opt the supermarket chains. Whatever moral issues a supermarket owner had would immediately go out the window. If you didn’t accept food stamps, you would go out of business trying to compete with the ones that did. With people getting “free” food stamps, they don’t shop carefully for prices so you can bump up the margins on the things people on food stamps buy. Knowing the food stamps come at the first of the month, you raise all the prices that week. By the end of the month when you have only paying customers and empty stores, then you have the sales.
The recent trend has been to ATM-ize the food stamps – instead of books of food stamps, the recipient just swipes an ATM-like card through the card reader. No social stigma of the person behind you in line eyeballing what you bought with their money.