How to Fix Food Stamps

 When my wife was a kid, her dad cheated on her mom.  For the sake of this story, we’ll call her parents Dick and Jane.

Things spiraled out of control from there, and Dick and Jane ended up getting a divorce.  Her mom’s finances held together for a bit, but a “family friend” and fellow LDS churchgoer named Tom talked Jane into releasing Dick from child support.  Tom said Dick couldn’t handle it.  Tom said Dick needed a break.  And Dick would pay them back when he could.

And that was the last Jane saw of any child support from Dick.

She thus began working herself to death: two jobs and no time with the kids.  So my future wife became a feral latchkey kid.  The bills became too much, and Jane ended up losing the house.  Eventually their cupboards went bare, too.

It was at this point that Jane reached out for help to the government and got food stamps.  The food stamps lasted a few months, and she was so embarrassed to be on them that she spent what little money she had driving forty minutes away so nobody would see her using them.

I bring this up because when I criticize the food stamp program, I’m not talking about people like this.  I know there are good people in serious trouble, and I want them to have help when they need it.  (In this country, where the medical system is so backward and stupidly priced that medical bankruptcy is one of the top reasons for losing a home, for now I’m also in favor of Medicaid.)

What I have a problem with is that time I was in line at a grocery store, and a morbidly obese pair of women bought two heaping carts of garbage groceries.  I mean Pepsi, Doritos, Hot Pockets — a whole mountain of pure Frankenfood.  And then, when they realized they had put too much in the carts, they held everybody back ten minutes, picking which things they wanted to put back on the shelves.  The cashier was getting desperate and started pointing out which items they could do without.  He said, “What about these salmon bites?” about one of the only nutritious items in the whole slew.  “No,” she said back.  “Those are for the dogs.”

Then they proceeded to pay for the whole thing with EBT.  It was well over $600.

All I’m saying is, there has to be a line.  According to Senator Rand Paul, federal spending on SNAP has more than doubled in the past five years, and we all know that many of the people don’t deserve it.  And they certainly don't need it.  So in order to have a functioning, healthy, moral society, I propose that the following people should eat dirt.

1. Anybody who's under 6’2” and weighs more than 220 lbs.  For obvious reasons.
2. Anybody who refuses to work for more than a year.
3. Anybody who has more than two living baby-daddies.  Find a way to make the dads pay for it, and if they can’t, put the kids in an orphanage.
4. Anybody who moves to this country for any reason other than a refugee resettlement program.  And the program, which requires mandatory participation and adequate scoring in "English as a Second Language” programs, should last only one year.

This would cover most of the abuses.

I propose that all food stamp programs should be eliminated at the federal level and resumed by the individual states.  This would force states, who can’t print money, to actually budget — and thus to tailor policy according to their particular standards.

I propose that “anchor babies” should not allow any foreign citizen to collect food stamps on their behalf.

And finally, I propose that food stamps should be like the Women with Infants and Children program — that is, it would allow them to buy only staple items such as bread, milk, eggs, cheese, meat, beans, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and butter.

This being said, I have a good friend who sees things differently.  He draws the line in the sand not at adults, but at kids.  He says that starving a kid because of bad parents is cruel and that able-bodied, childless adults can kick rocks — but that no kid should ever go hungry on his watch.

I believe that this policy screws kids over worse in the long run.  First thing is, this is how we got the American ghetto in the first place — and probably every other ghetto in the West.  We said, “Make kids, and we’ll clean up after you.”

Once we created bad incentives, people realized that it was cheaper to not get married.  They found that it was easier not to work.  They decided, Hey, I’m not smart or good-looking or dignified enough to climb any social ladders.  But they had a kid as a hostage.  And you wouldn’t want poor little Timmy to starve, would you?

This led to a breakdown in marriage.  A lack of income became a dedicated lack of fathers.  Chastity became seen as prudishness instead of prudence.  A work ethic became naïveté instead of a point of honor.  Children became the means of slacking off instead of the means of working harder.  And what followed was more children, born to the worst part of the gene pool imaginable, with zero reason or ability to climb out of the trash heap.

It’s needless to even mention that places without dignity and hope are places without love and safety.  The food stamp ghetto is where the gangs live.  And where the rape and murder happen.  I’m using data from The Census Bureau, left-wing PolitiFact, and The Institute for Family Studies.  You can draw your own politically incorrect conclusions.

The plain truth is, it is never safe to make any group too secure by policy.  Except in cases of disability, it's never safe to give them everything they need.  In any system of welfare and government, somebody has to slip through the cracks, or whole neighborhoods end up on crack.  It is drowning, and the fear of it, that teaches people to swim.

The problem with our government today is, we prefer people who make problems to people who solve problems.  And we value ourselves based not on whether we defend the best of us, but how far we make the best of us go for the worst.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/11/how_to_fix_food_stamps.html