No one in the United States wants any person to go hungry. And no one in the “land of the free” should be told what he or she should eat. But something is badly amiss. Visit our local CVS in Key West, for example, and you’ll see one large wall banked with refrigerators and freezers full of sweetened beverages, frozen prepared foods, and high-fat dairy and desserts. Recipients of food stamps (SNAP) spend almost $2 billion on “food” items loaded with sugar and Omega-6s, leading to heart disease, obesity and diabetes. From The Federalist:
During President Obama’s tenure, the numbers and percentages of Americans using taxpayer’s money to buy their groceries has drastically increased. SNAP participation has increased 78 percent in the past ten years and remains near its all-time high, which occurred in 2013. Food stamp usage also dramatically increased during President George W. Bush’s tenure, even though it did not see a recession like the one that occurred near the beginning of Obama’s eight years in office. That’s because Bush signed a dramatic expansion of food welfare inside a farm bill. This expansion, among other things, made it easier to sign up and made non-citizens eligible to use U.S. taxpayers’ funds to fund grocery excursions.
The food stamp program was originally intended to give nutritional assistance so those in need don’t starve or become malnourished. The biggest outlay for all families is meat, fish, and poultry. Things go downhill from there. For non-SNAP households, the second largest expenditure was veggies. For SNAP recipients, the second largest expenditure was sweetened beverages.
The bigger, unaddressed problem here is, who is going to pay for the health ramifications from those consuming unhealthy food bought with taxpayers’ money?
