like the “Florida will be underwater xD” jokes are all cute and funny until you realize all the poor brown and black people, especially immigrants, in (south) Florida who will be battered with hurricanes from global warming and get little to no help from the government…..like these people consistently vote blue but by all means get ur top kek
hell yeah the gutting of public education and deliberate stagnation of wages (as well as demonizing unions, forming of monopolies etc) is an intentional ploy on behalf of the federal gvt and powerful corporations to control the people
but can we PLEASE not rely on the stereotypes of “not graduated/no degree = stupid” or “minimum wage workers aren’t politically active.” Puh-lease. There are many reasons people don’t seek out higher ed (and yeah a lot of them have to do with access). And a lot of the most prominent organizers I know started from nothing, cobbling together grassroots movements from their spare time w/ multiple jobs, no benefits/healthcare, pulling together whole neighborhoods who all started out below the poverty line.
Hell I know dozens of college students and grads who are absolute self-centered morons and drink capitalism’s kool-aid with fervent joy. And middle-class to wealthy folks with PLENTY of free time on their hands who won’t lift a finger for justice.
Acknowledge that institutional/class barriers exist and are set to disenfranchise certain groups of people. That’s real. But also remember that the work for justice is a mindset and a movement- not a GPA or a job title- and unfortunately the people fighting hardest are usually those who are already suffering the most from injustice.
i hate when someone says “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies” and some white 21 year old trying to be ‘woke’ says “haha… go ahead and cry your white tears sweatie (:”
no one thinks it’s a racial issue against white people. that’s not why people say to stop that shit. it’s an issue of classism. because the truth is that the majority of y’all who think you’re amazing activists just REALLY fucking hate appalachian people, and i know that because y’all think it’s funny to say “karma’s a bitch!” when something bad happens to an appalachian state.
you don’t care about the poverty in the appalachia and you don’t care about queer people and/or people of color who live in the appalachia. you don’t care about education in the appalachia and you don’t care that these low rates of education mean higher rates of poverty and child poverty, which persist over the years. rural children are twice as likely to live in areas with persistent poverty. you care that poverty stricken children are statistically less likely to not have timely immunizations, have higher delinquency rates, and have lower academic achievement — but only when we’re talking about urban areas outside of the appalachia.
people in our region die earlier than most. mortality rates are higher in the appalachia, and they’re even higher for people of color that live in the appalachia. suicide rates are higher than anywhere else in the country by 17% — it’s 31% higher in central appalachia, and in rural areas within the appalachia, it’s 27% higher than metro appalachia. cancer morality rate is 10% higher, and it’s 15% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. COPD mortality rate is 27% higher, and 55% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. injury mortality rate is 33% higher, and it’s 47% higher in rural appalachia than in metro appalachia. stroke mortality rate is 14% higher — and you guessed it’s, these rates are higher in rural areas vs metro areas by 8%.
the rate of Years of Potential Life Lost, which measures premmature mortality from all causes of death, is 25% higher in appalachia, and 40% higher in rural vs metro areas.
the appalachia has an opioid epidemic. in 2015, our rate of death with drugs was 65% higher than the national average. 69% of those drug deaths were from opioids. these deaths have a connection to our poverty and education rates. the poorer you are, and the less educated you are, the more likely you are to die from an opioid death.
when i say “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies”, that doesn’t mean i think you’re being racist against white people (and again — the majority of people who claim this also happen to be white 🙄). i say that because you are perpetuating extremely toxic rhetoric about our region, you are promoting stigma, you are encouraging blatant classism, and you are furthering the idea that we somehow “deserve” it because our elected officials vote republican. it’s not cute. stop acting like none of us have the right to call you out on your classist bullshit. like i’m sorry if this comes off as too aggressive but i am sooooo sick of y’all thinking it’s funny that our region is suffering.
and before anyone asks me for resources and links: google exists. i did my research and you can do it too.
I mean, this is an obviously crazy-impractical half-assed undercooked sorta-half-idea that someone threw in there as an “innovation” that couldn’t possibly be enacted (for one thing, grocery chains will have a FIT), but let’s focus on how cartoonishly evil this is:
Under the Trump proposal, which the Agriculture Department has dubbed “America’s Harvest Box,” all households receiving more than $90 per month in benefits — 81 percent of SNAP households overall — would begin receiving about half their benefits in the form of government-purchased, nonperishable food items.
Those foods would include shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruits and vegetables, according to the USDA. The department estimates that it could supply these goods at about half the cost of retail, slashing the cost of SNAP while still feeding the hungry.
No fresh fruit or vegetables for you! No more actually choosing the food you eat, dietary requirements be damned! We hate poor families this much!
You really have to admire the mental gymnastics lefties like OP are capable of pulling off by arguing that literally giving poor people food is the exact same thing as making them starve to death. That type of impressive athletics is something you’d only imagine seeing at the Olympics.
Hi!
I’m a disabled person whose family literally receives SNAP right now. Why we receive it or the circumstances under which we receive it is nobody’s business but ours: the social safety net is here for us because we fell on hard times. One of my disabilities? Celiac disease. And yes, that is an ADA disability.
I cannot simply eat a box of food that someone gives me. Canned foods often use glutenated substances as preservatives, making them literally poison for me. I must very carefully choose my foods. A restricted diet is the only treatment for my life-threatening disease.
So, yes, handing people like me a box of food absolutely is asking us to starve, because most canned meats, canned vegetables, and cereals are not edible by me, nor is it safe for those items to be eaten in a kitchen used to feed me; gluten adheres to porous surfaces such as Tupperware, plastic bowls, and non-stick cookware. That food cannot be eaten in my home without making me sick, so no one in my family can eat it either.
Now that’s leaving aside entirely the fact that I have a hard time, due to my disease, with absorbing nurtients from food, so I must carefully choose what I eat to maximize my nutritional absorption. Hint: canned foods have much lower nutritional value and would not meet my needs either.
The article – had you read it – makes very clear that those proposing this hadn’t considered how to handle people with food allergies or celiac disease. So we could go with this massively-expensive, incredibly invasive, paternalistic, infantilizing and ineffective system that would leave someone like me not only hungry but sicker, making more use of the Medicaid that I currently receive because I am permanently disabled, and thus more expensive…
… or we could keep it the way it is, not waste all that money setting up a ridiculously bad system that will make people sick, and trust poor families to know how best to feed themselves for their specific needs.
Oh, but wait! There’s more! This plan would take money away from small mom-and-pop grocery stores and farms who currently accept EBT and supply a lot of the food stamp needs for rural working poor.
It requires an awful lot of mental gymnastics to justify taking money away from small business owners and also giving poor people food less-nutritional food that a lot of us can’t even eat. It takes absolutely none to say ‘gee, here’s your food money, you know better than we do what your individual needs are, sorry life’s kicking you right now, hopefully things get better, I hope this system is here to help me if I need it.’
But, you know, go off, I guess.
And that’s not even considering that some people on SNAP, given, you know, they are REALLY POOR, happen to be homeless.
“nonperishable food items. Those foods would include shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruits and vegetables, according to the USDA.“
Okay so, even ignoring those with celiac disease or various food allergies (did you know even red meat can be an allergen for people with certain past or current health issues?? Some people are likewise allergic for various reasons to strawberries, melons, apples, citrus, banana, or pineapple, just off the top of my head as list of COMMON “fruits” that I have met or talked to someone with an allergy to it, not to mention peanut or tree nut allergies OMG THEY LITERALLY EVEN SAY “PEANUT BUTTER”, PEANUTS ARE A FAMOUS ALLERGEN HOW CAN YOU NOT NOTICE THAT, plus is that milk the Lactose-free filtered version because many people have dairy allergies/lactose intolerance and can’t eat/drink that etc etc you get the idea)….
How the fuck is a homeless person going to store “shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruit and vegetables”??
SNAP benefits are already hard for homeless people to make useful since they often do not cover, for example, a premade meal and you can’t just literally use them at McD’s, you have to buy mostly “ingredients” or “components” of meals, with them. Just imagine if they had to get a bulk package of dry goods they had to store every fucking month when they already sleep on the street because they can’t afford to rent an apartment with a pantry and fridge in it.
Also, can’t help but point out that they are literally trying to make the program WORSE economically than it currently is: this proposed version forces a nanny state government to purchase your food for you, presumably from some large distant retailer who gave the government enough kickbacks to get the contract, and, it seems, nobody considered how much FUCKING red tape and complications and in fact actual goddamn liability that would cause for the government itself when you take into account medical diets, so there’s that on top of it all.
However, since SNAP benefits, at current, are used like a debit card… that money is, at current, GOING TO LOCAL COMMUNITIES. YOU KNOW. WHERE IT GOES TO LOCAL BUSINESSES IN THE SAME AREA THAT APPARENTLY HAS SOME POVERTY, AND STIMULATES THE LOCAL ECONOMY
I forget the actual numbers and I don’t have the spoons to google it, go do yourself if you’re so huffily disbelieving, but there HAVE been studies that showed that EBT cards actually STIMULATE the economy and effectively every $1 put into the program comes back in terms of economic stimulus as MORE THAN A DOLLAR. Like not a huge amount more, something like $1.07? but like, basically, SNAP benefits the local community by BOTH feeding people, and also stimulating economic growth by allowing purchases that couldn’t otherwise be made, it is LITERALLY the SMARTER way, within a capitalist system, to solve hunger than “just give people food” would be.
Also if the government is so keen on Just Giving Food Away, that’s fine, I like the idea OTHERWISE, but instead of mailing every one of several MILLION SNAP households a fucking individual box of food every month, which would be incredibly fucking expensive anyway, shouldn’t then the idea be like, you give it to charitable organizations that run Food Pantries for their LOCAL communities, and then you also – hell, why don’t we do this part already?? – make sure poor people who apply for SNAP, who therefore have demonstrated “I am super poor and having trouble affording food on top of my other expenses, such as a roof over my head” , KNOW WHERE TO FIND FREE OR CHEAPER FOOD?
Like, there’s places you can text to find who locally provides free meals or whatnot in your area based on your ZIP code, why the fuck doesn’t the government promote those things if it’s really just Concerned With Poor People Getting Food??
Other things that would be smarter, cheaper, and more effective than this proposal if the goal is to Feed More Poor People, Better:
– Free School Lunch, and Breakfast, for literally every child in public school,so we can stop with forcing parents to pay for lunches or go through hoops to ~prove their poverty~ and no longer shame the kids for having the Free lunch which makes many poor kids scared to use it for fear of rejection from their peers (yes, all this happens in the USA). Literally. Just free breakfast and lunch for every school-age child, they’re CHILDREN, let them fucking eat, they need it even more than adults do because they’re growing and guess what, if the parents don’t have to worry as much about feeding their kids, they can worry about feeding themselves a lot less! The whole household benefits! – For that matter, extend free breakfast and lunch at public schools through the summer. And/or do something in the communities to replace it. Many poor kids suffer during summer months when school is out because even if they qualify for subsidized lunch and aren’t too scared to take it, that’s not available for the SEVERAL months that school is not in session; but the kids, obviously, still need to eat, so…
– Make sure poor people are more likely to know how to find food pantries and free meal sources in their area by promoting the information for them obvious benefit is obvious I already mentioned this
– Raising the benefit amount for SNAP even one goddamn penny per person, since, again, it acts as economic stimulus while ALSO only being spendable on food items anyway?? You realize it’s less than $30 PER PERSON PER WHOLE ENTIRE MONTH on average to begin with, right? Yet economically speaking we get more out of it than we put in, so it’s totally logical to raise it even just slightly! Because it definitely would buy more food, would allow more healthy foods (fresh produce is expensive!) to be purchased, etc, and it economically stimulates the local economy.
– Allow SNAP to be used on (select?) “prepared meals”, e.g. a cooked chicken from walmart, which goes a lot further than “ingredients” do, purchasing-wise and feeding-wise, particularly for working poor people (who are in fact the VAST majority of SNAP beneficiaries I might add) who don’t always have much time or energy to cook (this is, btw, PART of why poor people have “bad” diets in many cases; it’s not that none of them WANT to eat well, it’s that junk food and McD’s burgers are a lot cheaper than many healthy alternatives and often can be eaten right away so if you’re falling asleep on your feet after a double shift and know you have to work a ten hour day the next morning for which you have to get up at 5am, uh, yeah, sometimes…that’s the option if you want to not starve but also don’t have much money). Right now you can’t buy a cooked chicken or deli sandwich or whatnot on SNAP, you can only buy the things to make it, which is more time-intensive and energy-intensive. Allowing people to buy like, a rotisserie chicken with it though? Could give the equivalent of multiple meals to a disabled and/or working poor person who would otherwise not be able to cook every night. A single one of those little walmart rotisseries can feed a family at least one if not two or more whole meals, depending on family size, man. It would also be much more beneficial to allow these purchases, for the people on SNAP who are homeless or otherwise do not have a fridge or pantry to store food in.
– Create community food-centered gardens, especially in Food Desert areas, and/or give subsidies for transport in and out food deserts. A “food desert” is a place where there are NO affordable, proper grocery stores or farmer’s markets providing access to things like fresh produce, meat, dairy or fish to poor people. E.g. if your neighborhood only has convenience stores, no proper groceries, within several miles, then it’s a food desert. These communities are hard for poor people to feed themselves healthy diets in, for obvious reasons, and yet they usually cannot afford the expense of moving out of them (moving is fucking expensive, can we NOT pretend that it’s easy for poor people to just up and move to somewhere better??). Make transport to healthy affordable food sources more accessible to poor people or just flat-out help people in the community grow food plants with the explicit intention of it being eaten by locals, and you start to solve the food desert issue, though.
– Buy the “ugly, unwanted” produce off of farmers that grocery stores don’t want, and give it to food pantries or homeless shelters or public schools etc, especially in Food Desert type areas. At least a third or more of our produce goes to WASTE in this country because it has the most minor of blemishes or imperfections, and grocery stores only want the prettiest produce… so they reject it. Farmers don’t fight them on it, because if they did, they’d lose business. But most of that food is PERFECTLY edible! Buy it off the farmers for what’s already a lower cost than grocery chains pay normally and you’d still be giving the farmers far more than they’d get period off that load of fruit or veggies, so the farmers (large-scale or otherwise) would be HAPPY to participate, I’m sure, and LITERAL TONS of food would no longer go to waste, but instead would feed the people too poor to afford being picky about how pretty their pumpkins are.
– Make it illegal to ban feeding the needy/homeless in public. Hell, outright feed them yourself. This is something a number of cities have done and it’s appalling: they make it illegal to do soup kitchen or whatnot in public parks or sometimes practically at all. Do away with these laws or circumvent them with a government-approved soup kitchen event thing, and you’re feeding people! DUH.
Also I’m not sure whether it would be nominally “cheaper” but a MUCH more effective and SMARTER way of providing healthier food options and stability to poor people in a way that LITERALLY benefits everyone, is a Housing First program.
Utah is a US State which has tried this with a startling amount of success: they literally just make sure everyone has housing, period. That’s it. That’s all. They eliminated homelessness, by providing a home (usually an apartment, IIRC?), no requirements other than you need one.
What they found when they did this was, in addition to homelessness itself going away, uh, tons of other problems did too – crime rates dropped, substance abuse rates dropped, etc., because you know, a lot of those are exacerbated by homelessness (people get desperate when homeless, so they commit more crimes on average because of that in an effort to try and support themselves; people are more likely to turn to substance abuse if they’re homeless, due to the stress). Jobless rates would also tend to go down under such a system, because nobody wants to hire somebody with no address who doesn’t have access to a shower, you know?
But the way this would impact FOOD is simple but powerful: most rentals include a pantry, kitchen access of some sort, usually an oven/stove, a fridge…
You know, the things that allow you to STORE and USE food of the type you can get on SNAP, longer-term?? The things that allow you to buy in larger (and therefore usually cheaper) amounts, the things that allow you to store perishable and non-perishable items, the things that allow you to cook and therefore eat them!
And don’t tell me we “can’t afford” to do it, when people have literally calculated that Trumps’ proposed military parade would cost LESS than literally housing every homeless person in America. If we can “afford” that frivolous parade, we can afford to house the homeless, now can’t we. And when you consider that it would benefit the whole of society by getting people off the streets, reducing substance abuse and crime rates, increasing employment, overall creating a more stable environment…why the frick wouldn’t you, really?
Certainly more practical a solution than “Blue Apron, but for the poors, and oops we didn’t consider special diets in that, because why would we ever research anything that effects actual people”.
Like, you want janitors and McDonald fast food workers and cleaners.
You just don’t want them to make a liveable wage and have healthcare and be treated like proper human beings.
People who work in an air conditioned office all day sincerely do believe that those jobs are both less important and not as exhausting.
a job being ‘exhausting’ doesn’t make it important, janitors and fast food workers are paid less bc their job doesn’t take any real skill – like basically anyone can do it
not everyone can be a lawyer or a doctor or run a successful business, those people worked hard and learned new skills and gained useful knowledge so their end job would pay more and not be physically exhausting
stop shitting on people who earned a good life because you aren’t being given one for free
ugh
I work in a hospital. It’s also the worst flu season in recent years in my hospital. You know whose job is one of the most crucial for EVERYONE, doctors and medical staff included? Janitors. Go ahead and try to have a safe working environment, ESPECIALLY in the medical field, without them.
Tell me, do you know how to best create a medically safe work environment? Because I sure as fuck don’t, but the janitors do, and they know this while being on their feet and performing manually exhausting tasks for 8+ hours straight surrounded by caustic chemicals.
Same goes for fast food workers. Do you have any idea how much knowledge and physical work goes into working in a kitchen? Wanna tell me you put out grease fires, what temperatures different foods are stored in, and how to keep a safe working environment for both customers and workers in a job surrounded by hot oil, ovens and chemicals? Not to mention, again, being on your feet for 8+ hours in a hot kitchen being yelled at by customers constantly.
I promise you that these people do a more difficult and oftentimes more important job than a large portion of office jobs I’ve been in.
Fun fact: In my neck of the woods, hospital janitorial staff union wanted a pay raise. Their workers were struggling. The hospitals laughed at them, so they went on full strike.
The hospitals were in crisis mode within an HOUR.
Surgical rooms were not being cleaned, toilets and patient rooms were not cleaned, garbage was not picked up, instruments that get reused were not being cleaned (i.e. scalpels, patient beds), laundry wasn’t done, floors were not clean, biohazard waste wasn’t collected.
The hospitals folded the next day and the union got EVERYTHING they asked for.
Now, you may not work in a hospital @purest-rain but wherever you do work, just imagine what might happen if… suddenly no one cleaned. No one picks up the trash in that fancy office. No one vacuums or sweeps, or cleans anything. Nothing. Not the toilets, not the offices. It might take a little longer, but pretty soon, those fancy law-offices look pretty gross, don’t they? Especially the bathrooms. I’ve cleaned bathrooms, I know exactly how disgusting people are when they use a toilet they don’t have to clean.
Stop shitting on low-wage workers just because you don’t understand how important their job actually is. You cannot simultaneously demand a service, while dehumanizing the person who provides you with it, and demanding they not be compensated fairly.
Pfft. Office folk who’ve never had to do a custodian’s job have no fucking clue how much goes into it. We not only have to clean and know how to clean, from mixing chemicals to different types of floor care (of which there are many), to sanitation protocol, but in addition, those of us who work around people have to be good at customer service, time management, assertiveness and discipline.
So, while the office person is sitting in a cubical trying not to get caught surfing the internet and having x-amount of access to a building, I have the master keys to an entire steel mill, all of the offices, everything. I interact with everyone from the plant manager to the new hire. I have to coordinate around heavy machinery, tons of overhead hazards, tons of ground hazards, coordinate around three shifts of blue-collar folk, keep the white collar folk happy and gosh, that’s not even counting the actual, physical labor of my job. (And it is very hard work, too.)
No, I don’t have a degree. What I have is experience. Confidence. The ability to clean a sanded-floored lockerroom regularly trooped through by dudes in greasy boots in about an hour and a half on a bad night. The ability to take one look at a steelworker and have them freeze in the door before they’ll even consider walking on a newly mopped floor. (Don’t worry, I don’t beat them up. It’s a loving threat.) The respect and trust of not only the owner of the business I work for, but the respect and trust of the company I’m subcontracted to, in its entirety, from the top on down.
Like gosh, person above, when was the last time anyone ever trusted you to that degree? I don’t see my boss for months at a time. I train new people who come in. I know the operation I work for from the coil truck to the truck’s weigh out, enough that they’ve actively headhunted me to get hired in. No one breathes down my neck, schedules meetings about productivity, questions my skills, abilities or education; at least, among the people I work for and with, I’m considered every bit as important as the people who have degrees framed on the wall, and I– am pretty sure most office workers can’t actually say the same.
Admittedly, I really love where I work and this experience isn’t universal, but man, don’t make assumptions about how much a custodian has to know and do in a shift. Some things go well beyond classical schooling. And really, if there was a zombie outbreak, I’d rather have ten people who work my job beside me than a thousand office staff. XD
I think it sounds like an awesome idea. We do not need more people in the world, we don’t need people who are so poor that they counterfeit checks to have children that they also can’t afford, and anyone who does want children after this can just adopt. It’s a pretty excellent solution.
If everyone who shared your opinion just dropped dead you wouldn’t be missed.
If you can recognize that people who are poor can’t come up and you think the solution is to sterilize them in exchange for their freedom instead of I don’t know creating more job opportunities by cutting hours while paying better and continuously adjusting your pay to inflation then I really don’t think there is a single reason for you to be wasting air like this.
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