The soda wars, begun they have:
At both state and federal levels, the Kennedy-led Make America Healthy Again movement is backing efforts to prevent people from spending food-aid benefits on sugary, carbonated beverages.... But the U.S. Agriculture Department, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has rejected the requests for more than 20 years, saying it would be too complicated to implement. This year, deep-red Arkansas may be the first to get a different answer.
The state is preparing to ask the USDA if it can restrict some less-healthy items, including potentially soda, candy and desserts, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in an interview Friday.
I dunno. There's always a strain of moral censoriousness around the kinds of food welfare recipients should be allowed to eat. No Twinkies! No Coke! No T-bone steaks! But aside from the fact that slicing and dicing into ever smaller categories really is impractical for retailers, there's the fact that SNAP spending really isn't that bad:
Something like 70% of all SNAP spending is already on nutritious food, and sweetened beverages are only the #6 spending category. I'm not sure we can do all that much better, or that it's worth trying. Even poor people deserve to eat what they please.
Typical case of moralizing one minute and then looking at the cost of implementing the next. Spawn-of-Huckabee would only try to implement and verify if it came out of SNAP benefit dollars.
The Iowa delegation will bury this.
The Iowa delegation will bury this.
The Iowa delegation will bury this.
The Iowa delegation will bury this.
Where's JD Vance screaming that this is disrespecting salt of the earth folk back in them hollers who just want an old-fashioned Mountain Dew and some Lays now and again?
Also, this is going to kill Dollar Generals, local bodegas, gas stations, and other mom-n-pop stores, mostly in rural and poor areas, that rely on sales of sodas and snack foods for their bottom line. Oh, well. As long as it's not Michelle Obama telling you to eat broccoli or brush your teeth. That would be the real fascism.
w/r/t Vance, it's only ok buy Mountain Dew on your salary if you work for the private sector. Y'know, like as a military journalist, or senator, or vice president.
Those places also rely on sales of cigarettes and beer, not to mention lottery tickets. Are you going to say that all of those should be food stamp eligible to protect the income stream of small businesses?
Sugary, crappy food is also really cheap. Instead of pct of spending, I'd like to see pct of calories consumed or daily totals (in a perfect world).
Food restrictions for the poor and a strategic reserve of funny money for the rich - Sounds about right.
I would support a ban on soda sales with food stamps because it's a widely used scam to turn food stamps into cash. I saw this countless time at a discount grocery store in Baltimore. People (usually young men) would buy cases of Pepsi and the like with food stamps. They could then sell these for cheap to local corner stores and voila! cash in their pockets for booze, smokes, drugs whatever.
Do you approve of money from tax cuts being spent on "booze, smokes, drugs, whatever"?
You can do this with any packaged food that has a long shelf life. Banning sodas won't fix this. It's not even clear we need a fix for this, but this certainly won't do it.
This is entrepreneurial spirit.
That's fairly silly. Nobody lives entirely on SNAP; the benefits just aren't big enough. People can spend their SNAP benefits on food items SNAP approves of, and the remainder of their budget on things SNAP doesn't approve of. A big bag of potatoes paid for by SNAP frees up enough money for a pack of smokes or a bottle of cheap booze. There's no need to go through the rigmarole you describe.
And yet I saw it countless times--I lived in a downscale neighborhood in Baltimore for 14 years after all.
we allow tax write-offs for booze with business lunches consumed at strip joints
And where do sugary drinks taxes fit into all this? We are supposed to not be drinking such things in the first place, yes? Rich or poor.
The data being 8-odd years old aside, I was surprised they were 9% of spending and in sixth place. I guess I naively assumed it would be smaller.
A tax certainly does not mean 'you should not be doing this thing!'
If that was the message being sent, there would be a ban.
There is a cost to driving on the toll road, but a ban on driving the wrong way.
There is a tax on earned income, but a ban on stealing money.
Etc, and so on and so forth....
We don’t have “sin taxes?”
"Sin taxes" are generally misguided because they contain two incompatible goals: to reduce an unwanted consumer behavior and to collect revenue from said behavior. Only if the revenue from the taxes is earmarked for a function directly related to the issues created by the unwanted behavior is this justifiable. For example, tobacco taxes should be dedicated to antismoking programs only.
And what about diet soda? Is that ok?
“The cruelty is the point”
Well, in the scheme of things, this one is pretty trivial.
It's not actually. Implementing this will be complex for retailers and so many will simply stop taking SNAP. Which is the whole point.
No it wouldn't be. All major supermarkets use scanners at the checkout. If you buy a rotisserie chicken it won't go on the SNAP card. If you buy laundry detergent, same thing. They would just be adding one other type of item to the not-on-SNAP list, and some shelf tags in the soda aisle noting the change.
I'm not sure what the "Prepared foods" or "Prepared desserts" on the chart are supposed to be. SNAP would work for a fancy cake from the bakery department, but not from the hot prepared food item counter or case. A frozen or refrigerated entree from Trader Joe's would be OK. But these are also things the register "knows."
I don't see that happening. It would lose the stores business. And it's not that complex to implement. Just recode all sodas to ring up on a a non-SNAP eligible category (there's are food stuffs in that category-- prepared foods notably. And of course non-food items of all sorts). They've had to do this sort of thing in regards to sales taxable items when that has changed.
In the grand scheme of things, Nazis targeted a population that was less than 1% of the population, too.
This is why the slippery slope fallacy exists, because sometimes it's true.
Less than one percent of you limit yourself to Germany. 1.7% if you consider Europe. Circa 1933.
If sodas are bad enough that the poor shouldn't be allowed to purchase them, then perhaps the FDA should ban them outright. Make America Healthy Again and all that.
We tried that with alcoholic beverages-- it was not a raging success.
Sweetened beverages in these charts include cranberry, lemonade, and shelf stable orange juice.
It's stupid.
A few years ago, taking a class, I had to do a report on SNAP. One report that I read said the SNAP recipients were generally ok with not getting soda using SNAP. But no desserts--no cookies with the kid's milk? Also, it is more expensive to limit the purchases. That is why WIC is so difficult to use, as the are so many guidelines/restrictions to usage. But again, cruelty and control is the point.Other interesting things were how much the economy depends on SNAP. Every dollar spent on SNAP gives back more than that initial investment.
Instead of banning what people can buy with their SNAP benefits, we should enable them to purchase good foods in bulk, when possible. The problem for people with SNAP benefits is that they don't have the money to make strategic choices, such as buying a few big bag of beans, which would be really economical and nutritious.
You need to set up people to succeed, not incessantly find ways to punish them.
People always bring up bags of dried beans when talking about the poor, as if the poor today live like 19th century Irish peasants, with mom stirring the family cook pot over the open fire.
People on SNAP often have jobs, and those jobs are rarely 9-5. They also live in crappy apartments and poorly-maintained homes where cooking is often difficult dye to broken or nonexistent appliances.
Convenience foods are the norm, because they are orders of magnitude easier to prepare and eat when you are poor.
You can also buy other things in bulk, e.g. pasta, eggs, cheese, nuts, coffee, etc. The modern version of Irish poverty is surviving on low-nutrition, ultra-processed, ready-made foods.
The argument that people live in crappy apartments where they can't cook a proper meal, and, ,therefore, they must subsist on crap, is not a good argument. In fact, it's cartoonishly bad. This just underscores that this is another problem that must be solved.
People need options that would allow them to make healthy choices. In fact, would incentivize those healthy choices. It's not about punishing people for being poor.
Dude, when I was on food stamps, I bought bags pf beans. They're fucking cheap, and I could make multiple dinners with them.
I already knew this, but my food stamps came with a guide about how to plan out meals, cook beans and rice, and how to match foods for balanced nutrition.
But it's true: You can't save up month to month to buy the big bag o beans (or flour or noodles or cans of chili) at Costco on foodstamps.
Yep, Crissa! Another thing -- and Michael Pollan -- had a good OpEd piece about it -- it would be good to have a universal free lunch in schools, where good, nutritious foods are served. Well, we all know the odds that happening.
PS: I hark back to our days on food stamps in Chicago. I don't know how my mom made it work.
I'm betting that 95% of SNAP recipients live in places with working appliances. In the US an apartment - or a trailer - almost always comes with a stove and refrigerator. A single plug-in burner is $15 and a double is $25.
One limitation: storage space may be pretty minimal in small apartments and trailers. Heck, I moved into a small house in Florida last year and I had to buy a pantry cupboard because there was very little cupboard space.
I've personally got some tepid support for putting a sin tax on this kind of thing, but it's the whole population that drinks too much of this stuff, not people on food stamps in particular. Plus, it likely won't work anyway due to substitution effects. i.e. This usually isn't the only money they have (poor isn't the same as literally zero dollars) and will partly reallocate to keep things about the same.
Just a convenient punching bag.
This is never going to happen, because the big soda companies and the owners of convenience stores absolutely do not want this.
The time and money that will be spent to implement and monitor (police) this will be a big waste of time and money. In California "Food Stamps" are no longer issued as stamps the benefits are placed on a card used similar to a debit card. This makes the old stamps for smokes and booze scam more difficult. People complain about the use of public assistance funds for diapers and premade food, but many folks don't have easy access to stoves, washing machines etc. I saw many people use Public Assistance as a safety net and they rebuild and move on and do well. Some don't and I have always considered that Public Assistance is the price we pay to avoid having even more people and families on the streets.
Yeah, when I was younger, the homeless kids would get food stamps but then not have a kitchen to cook the food in,
And the kids renting a room in a larger house? Well, they didn't get food stamps because the income of the entire house was counted. (That rule changes from time to time)
“In California "Food Stamps" are no longer issued as stamps the benefits are placed on a card used similar to a debit card.”
Food stamps haven’t been issued as actual stamps for many decades. I was a Food Lion cashier in NC in the 90s and food stamps were already just travelers-check-like vouchers back then, for which I think you could actually get under a dollar back as change, and quickly became debit cards shortly thereafter.
The scamming simply evolves: https://sfist.com/2025/02/28/sf-da-charges-five-sf-food-markets-with-ringing-up-4-million-in-fraudulent-food-stamps-charges/
I'm pretty sure that SNAP went from play money to a card nationwide at least three decades ago.
I don't know if this is true in all 50 states, but many states use benefit cards not the old stamps. That's been true for a while.
A cool guide to the length of time it takes the largest companies in America to make the average annual salary of one employee, and how long it takes them to cover all of them,
https://imgur.com/cool-guide-to-length-of-time-takes-largest-companies-america-to-make-average-annual-salary-of-one-employee-LhguAKA
Just give people money.
+ lots
But we still won’t be willing to let them “fail” …
SNAP is not intended to be a recipient's only way to get food; that's what "supplemental" is all about. (Also, the amount of benefits provided by SNAP is simply not enough to pay for all of a recipient's food, unless the recipient is remarkably light eater and a very efficient shopper.) If particular food items are not covered by SNAP, then presumably the recipients will use their SNAP benefits to buy the foods SNAP approves of and the other part of their food budget to buy the things SNAP doesn't approve of.
In short, putting restrictions on SNAP won't accomplish much.
Totally agree!
since R's love means-testing we should means-test business write-offs just to make sure we're only helping struggling businesses rather than the apples and googles sitting on hundreds of billions in cash
Great. Let's also add to the ban:
sugary cereals and granola mixes, fruit juices, processed meats, ground beef with more than 10% fat, butter, margarine, seed oils, peanut butter, jams and jellies, caffeine based drinks, Christmas treats, Easter chocolates, cake mixes, marshmallows, chocolate chips, pudding, flavored gelatins, ice cream, pizzas, pop tarts, potato and other types of chips, beef jerky, everything containing nitrites such as salami, hot dogs, candy, chocolate milk, birthday cakes, pies, bacon, and maple syrup.
Take the advice, leave the cannoli,
https://i.redd.it/c4jm9b0bo4me1.jpeg
Poor people should only be able to buy gruel and water. Anything more would be a luxury they do not deserve. So says prosperity Jesus!
SNAP awards are on a sliding scale derived from calculations including rent and
utilities vs income. The maximum benefit in NY is $292 a month for one person. This is enough to pay for all grocery store food purchases without super careful buying or living on beans and rice. And there are also food banks in most places.
Sugared soda has zero nutrition and a lot of calories and doesn't even require chewing. I'd be OK if it was classed with beer on the no-SNAP list. A lot of things sold in the supermarket like booze in any form, hot prepared food, and detergent are aleady on that list.
But then what about a five pound bag of sugar? What about candy? Or a granola bar vs a protein bar? High sugar granola vs Cheerios? Little Debbie Snack Cakes vs a loaf of bread? The sugared soda thing is simple, but rating food for health past that gets really tricky if not impossible.