During a United Nations General Assembly summit on non-communicable diseases — a discussion that included diet and eating habits — New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said “governments at all levels must make healthy solutions the default social option.”
Bloomberg is a fascist, but we’ve known that for years. He also might be wrong about the certainty of his targets.
Many people concede that we should at least not allow people on food stamps to buy sugary drinks. But, anyone who knows about the food stamp program today, would say that is moot.
• Troy Hutson, the chief of Washington state’s food-stamp program, resigned in April after a Seattle television station revealed that some food-stamp recipients were selling their cards on Craigslist or brazenly cashing them out on street corners (for 50 cents on the dollar) and using the proceeds for illegal drugs and prostitution. Washington state Sen. Mike Carrell complained: “Dozens of workers at DSHS [the Department of Social and Health Services] have reported numerous unpunished cases of fraud to me. They have told me that DSHS management has allowed these things to happen, and in some cases actively restricted fraud investigations.”
• Thirty percent of the inmates in the Polk County, Iowa, jail were collecting food stamps that were being sent to their non-jail mailing addresses in 2009. But Iowa could not prosecute them for fraud because the state’s food-stamp form failed to ask applicants whether they were heading for the slammer. Roger Munns, a spokesman for the Iowa Department of Human Services, told the Des Moines Register last year that asking such questions could make food-stamp applications “unwieldy.” (Many states do make such inquiries.)
Looser federal rules are spurring a bureaucratic crime wave. Last December, two veteran employees for New York City’s Human Resources Administration were busted for concocting 1,500 fake food-stamp cases that netted them $8 million. Nine Milwaukee, Wis., staffers plundered almost $300,000 from the program during the last five years, and a Louisiana state bureaucrat pleaded guilty last year for her role in a scam that snared more than $50,000 in fraudulent food-stamp benefits.
Mayor Bloomberg seems to have a bit more on his plate than he can chew, but I suppose banning soda and salty pretzels is a lot easier than, say, implementing a way of means testing.
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Perhaps if we made the Electronic Benefits Card(EBT) a photo ID, it would cut down (but not eliminate) much of the fraud?
No. A photo on the EBT card would not cut down on the fraud. As reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, card holders offer to purchase $100 in groceries in the store for $50 in cash in the parking lot. The card holder will actually purchase the groceries the purchaser has picker out.
This is why charity is better handled by locals. The folks running the food bank would be plugged into the community enough to know who to trust, and who the scammers are.
That would be the principal of subsidiarity. Unfortunately even the Church has abandoned this principal it seems these days.
This is all a waste of time. If you can’t buy it with EBT, then you can still get it with cash. Stupid Bureaucrats.
Banning everything he thinks is unhealthy is apparently a lot easier than a lot of other things, like say, rebuilding the World Trade Center.
Considering nutritional science is far from being settled and that politicians so often misinterpret and overgeneralize things, the last thing governments should be doing is interfering with what people eat. There is no one size fits all approach. For example, my daughter is tiny for her age and does not have a robust appetite, I only wish I could get her to gain weight. For her I prefer full fat products. Also, different people have different habits. Some people do have an understanding of moderation and I would much prefer butter over margarine and sugar over aspartame (which gives me terrible headaches, I don’t need scientific evidence for this it is just a personal fact). On some occasions I love to indulge in a scrumptously delicious fat and sugar laden cannoli or a whopping portion of deliciously salted to perfection steak or italian specialty. This is my choice and I don’t eat the same thing every day, most often I eat quite healthy. Though I do prefer to stay away from artificial stuff, I tend to follow the Amish rule if they eat it, then I am ok with it, obviously with common sense and moderation. We don’t need beaureaucrats or even scientists dictating our diets, just good old fashioned common sense. Most people know not to eat the poison berries in their backyard, but if some dummy decides one day to eat them, that does not mean we should go cut down all of the poison berry bushes.
I just finished prepping the roast I am cooking for dinner tonight. I thought of Mayor Bloomberg as I rubbed sea salt all over the wonderful chunk of saturated fat and protein that will feed and nourish my family this evening. Along with all the veggies, the meal cost about $10 total to make and we will probably get a dinner and two lunches out of it, certainly cheaper and more nutritious than feeding my family at McDonald’s. Thank you Lord for this blessed meal, and I pray the food Nazis never gain enough power to impose on my kitchen and the nourishment of my family.
Many of us knew years ago that if the criminalization of smoking and smokers were allowed to continue unabated these fascists would turn next to food fascism. Well, right on schedule the liberals are salivating to rule what energy one is allowed to put in one’s body (food) and what energy one is allowed to put into one’s car and other devices. For when liberals can control both, it will be the end of US and Western Civilization.
Wish they’d just roll the food stamp program into WIC— the system of what’s allowable is already in place. (seen the little stickers at the store, WIC approved?)
This has the added bonus of making it a little harder for nanny-staters to decide what is alright to buy, if only because WIC is already limited.
Part of the appeal, to me, is reducing redundancy….
Don’t forget those nanny-staters were going to ban potatoes from WIC. So an ag professor from Idaho ate nothing but potatoes for two months. (He did add a little olive oil and some seasonings.) After two months he had lost 27 pounds and all of his blood work had better numbers than when he had started.
Food stamps started as a way for the Department of Agriculture to get rid of surplus food.