How The Conservative Obsession With Policing Poor People's Shopping Carts Got Started | ThinkProgress

In the long run, this is what it boils down too,

The law would also make it harder to buy spaghetti sauces and spices to flavor recipes, a constraint seemingly at odds with conservative rhetoric about what’s wrong with public assistance programs.

“We hear an awful lot in the post-welfare reform era about moving people to self-sufficiency,” Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) legal director Ellen Vollinger told ThinkProgress. “Telling adults they can’t make the same choices within the grocery store that others make, and then prepare the meals they want with the ingredients they want, doesn’t seem at all consistent with the argument that these changes move people to self-sufficiency. I always thought that was a little strange.”

I call it the "complication factor."  Make things complex and confusing, that individuals who honestly need the help will give up in frustration; too many unnecessary hoops to jump through.  Those "gaming-the-system" not so much, it is a game to them; they have nothing to lose.

But most of all, the administrators argued that even a perfectly-designed ban would fix a non-existent problem. “[I]mplementation of this waiver would perpetuate the myth that participants do not make wise food purchasing decisions,” the rejection letter said, when “research has shown [they] are smart shoppers” whose nutrition intake varies little from that of higher-income people.

Instead of focusing on how much soda one drinks, or whether I supplement my protein intake with seafood on occasion (I don't eat beef), finding a workable solution should be paramount.  “It isn’t the case that SNAP clients are less interested in good nutrition than anybody else,” Vollinger said. “They’re very interested in it. They just can’t afford it.”  Instead of cutting budgets, programs that show a promise of working should be encouraged.

The agency’s more recent attempts to incentivize healthy shopping and eating in SNAP are more aggressive than education. Food stamps recipients can swipe their EBT cards at farmers’ markets and get twice as much to spend in market-only voucher tokens, thanks to a $100 million program tucked into the 2014 Farm Bill. (Mississippi rescinded its request for a junk food ban waiver because it decided “to focus on improving SNAP participants’ access to farmers’ markets” instead, a USDA official told ThinkProgress.)

The farmers market policy grew out of a narrowly-targeted pilot program in the mid-2000s, and the USDA has funded other incentive-based pilot programs aimed at promoting nutrition on a SNAP budget. One such program in Massachusetts credited 30 cents back to a SNAP recipient’s EBT card for every dollar they spent on a targeted list of fruits and vegetables. After about two years, the pilot program had demonstrated a significant jump in the intake of fruits and vegetables among participating families as compared to those who were left out.

How The Conservative Obsession With Policing Poor People's Shopping Carts Got Started | ThinkProgress