Rand Paul on RFK Jr: "One of the things I plan on talking to him about is the idea that food stamps shouldn't cover unhealthy food. I don't think that food stamps should pay for full sugar Coca-Cola, Pepsi, full sugar anything."
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So now they are going to tell poor people exactly what they can and can’t eat or drink? THAT’S FASCISM. There’s NOTHING Libertarian about that. It’s been a LIE all along.
I read somewhere folks monthly benefits average out to like 2.00 dollars a day. I bet everybody is full of tuna already...and he's forever full of shit.
My tax dollars pay for food stamps and I’m more than fine with that because food stamps have one of the highest rates of economic return. I would also like to point out that my tax dollars paid for that taxidermied muskrat Rand Paul wears on his head.
RepubliKlans have always wanted a small government. They just didn't tell you what they meant was they wanted a government small enough to fit in your grocery cart or your uterus.
Good luck implementing a system like this.
Every grocery store in the country would need to filter out the “forbidden-by-the-GOP-cult” foods in their inventory and cash register systems.
God these people are stupid.
Bold of you to assume that the GOP-backing CEOs give a shit about the extra workload their employees would have to take on. After all, anyone who objected could be fired and replaced in less than 72 hours.
I know CEO’s don’t care about their employees’ extra workload.
But that’s not the assumption I’m making.
I’m making the assumption that in order to make this change, which takes 5 seconds to spew to a reporter, they would need to read EVERY food label, & determine if each individual food qualifies.
oh really how about sugar Rand you know the kind you use to BAKE stuff how about honey for your TEA Rand he is such a MORON no wonder his neighbor had at it with him
Reminder that Rand Paul said he was honored to hand deliver a letter from Trump to Putin in 2018, a month after 8 prominent Republicans spent the Fourth Of July in Moscow.
I worked in a small grocery store/convenience store in a poor neighborhood 30+ years ago. A person could buy a microwavable burrito, but if they nuked it in the store microwave they couldn't pay for it with food stamps. I just told people to pay for it first, but that rule seemed foolish to me.
I disagree with limiting what food stamps can be used to purchase, but perhaps fruits and vegetables can be purchased at a reduced cost when using food stamps.
Many states already have a double SNAP dollars at farmer's markets program (+ ensuring markets have card readers) to help subsidize this (IL, OK, MT, probably others, I haven't checked). Not a perfect solution but it helps some folks (and local farmers). A much more proactive step than gatekeeping!
Here we go again, the gqp telling less fortunate what they can and can't buy while the rich get a tax cut to buy what they want.
Are folks ever going to recognize the insanity of only telling poor folks what they can buy while the rich do whatever.
Has logic left no forwarding address?
“Healthy” food is often expensive, so buying low-cost, energy-dense food is the most efficient use of food stamps. People aren’t being indulgent, they’re being practical. And now he wants to punish them and leave them hungry.
F this 💩. It’s another case of seeing an obese person standing in an ice cream cone line - and the thin folks saying to themselves; What are “they” doing here ?
Poor people don’t deserve treats ? What about tv and news papers, etc ??
😵💫
Costs for Fresh produce & dairy food with short expiration without additives,have risen more than 18% versus grocery stable items that rose 6%.
I’m old enough to remember when Birthers turned MAGA mocked First Lady Obama who suggested salad bars in schools & discount credit on SNAP for fresh foods.
If you’re going to get into the minutiae, what about hot food, Rand? Did you know that you can’t buy hot food like a rotisserie chicken at the supermarket with SNAP benefits? WTF is that about? Or maybe you don’t really care & you just want to vilify poor people.
Nothing like someone who claims to be all about liberty and freedom who wants to limit and control the freedoms of others.
We should have universal basic income instead of SNAP because SNAP already has too many limitations, like no hot prepared food, and no spending it on rent to avoid homelessness
Poor people don't deserve any joy in their life. Every waking hour should be spent delivering labor to a boss who makes a hundred times their wage off their labor. They don't deserve to treat themselves or experience extravagant delights like (check notes) a soft drink.
The logic is that prepared foods includes the cost of prep and thus something that taxpayers shouldn't be paying for. Cook your own chicken is the logic. Who cares if that assumes it's physically possible?
It’s ok if RFK JR kills vaccines for diseases like polio, but damn those sugary drinks. You won’t find me drinking soda in MY iron lung. They’re not healthy for you.
If you look at anyone who is obese, I can guarantee you will see them with Diet Coke or or diet drinks. It’s not the sugar. It’s the ultra processed filth that passes for food these days.
They’ve been lying alright, but not about the sugar. Go to Thailand, rural China, Japan and see people eating plenty of sugars and carbs and I bet they are leaner and happier than Westerners.
Just one more question tho; are they eating sugar or HFCS and Stevia and Aspartame "sugars"? Cuz I know what they are eating Stateside where poison is legal.
They won’t be eating mass produced high fructose corn syrup. They will be eating an abundance of rice, fruit, real sugar in their sauces. In Thailand you can buy cane sugar water at the road side. They certainly don’t have a sickness and obesity problem.
Well, that would be fine if many poor people did not live in food deserts where they only have access to highly processed and junk foods. Better to tax high sugar, salt foods because of health reasons. Why penalize the poor when the affluent are far bigger consumers of unhealthy food. And have optio
Yes, and it literally makes no sense. Because Bush right before had a healthy lunch option for free in the middle school and high schools. All they could eat fruit and salad bar. I'm not sure what they did in the elementary..
It won't - they will just define what makes a "healthy" food based on who pay those lobbyists. They did it for half a century on behalf of the sugar industries, putting blame on fat.
This. Would I rather feed my child 1800 calories of mixed healthy and unhealthy food or 800 calories of only healthy food ensuring that they will not be getting enough nutrition?
My issue is not the move to healthy choices & better education, but to have rich elitist politicians who can afford to eat out whenever, or you see them with cola’s and expensive starbuck cups at hearings, disparaging the low income who also like a can of cola on the job like senators drink
Saying health food is expansive is misleading, but one changing from unhealthy to health food will have to cooking in home more often. By doing so, good food is cheap.
The issue of the truth to the poor is
1. The shelf life is shorter on fresh,&18% higher rise in prices for fresh & dairy items vs shelf stable items of 1 year expiration
2. Grocery store desserts exist in poor communities.
So fresh isn’t even readily available to all in tiny convenient stores
All the fresh produce items mentioned are staples in most families, but even apples & bananas are double in price since 2018.
Buying a bag of frozen chicken tenders is cheaper than fresh cut chicken & last longer for poor kids.
$22 a month SNAP on $14 an hour wages or $18k a year doesn’t go far.
Those are mostly basic shelf stable foods that even the poor eat. Beans & Rice without much meat at all is eaten a lot when one is low income.Chicken breasts for a family of 2 or 4 are about double that price in the article.
Bananas are .79 a pound versus .29 in 2018.
Ideally, people would be able to do that. But most people on SNAP are not be able to. Sometimes people don't even have electricity, or they have their water shut off. Maybe they don't have cookware. Snap doesn't buy that. Maybe they work 2 jobs.
You are looking at it from a food secure viewpoint.
Pasta in home is very cheap and good food, cooked supermarket food is expansive is not healthy. Soda is even food?
Oak is cheap, one fruit per day is enough for health, bread not expansive, there are many good food to cooking in home that is cheaper than McDonald's.
I cook from home every night. I can feed my family with a pack of hot dogs and a box of Mac for $10. If I want to serve real meat and fresh vegetables, that cost more than doubles. Healthy food costs more.
You're deliberately ignoring multiple scenarios that highlight how wrong you are and keep posting the same article over and over as if that's even the discussion at this point. Sit down.
Of course they do. Some store brands are shit. Sometimes they're sold out, or have allergens, or have been recalled. Why are we spending money to keep people from spending money "wrong"? Save the taxpayer dollars and let people eat what they want.
2/ food deserts, where big grocery stores that carry their own brands are not easy to get to for most people. So any prohibition on name brand products would have to take that into account)
While wholeheartedly agree how awful sugar & other foods can be who tf is Rand Paul a “libertarian” to stick his big disgusting opinion down anyone’s throat. F him.
This is one of those ideas that sounds good in theory. Even none crazies might think, "yeah, if people are using government benefits for food we should make sure they are using it on higher quality food." But that's not really feasible in reality because good v. bad is relative.
I think that I would be ok with some of what he's saying. As long as food stamps pay for healthy foods. The reason people buy junk is it's cheap. Food stamps should cover all the costs of healthy food.
If you want people to eat healthier than you need to give them more money. Or set it up the way Wic is. It would be a pain in the ass. it could work. Give them vouchers for all the food groups, condomind staples, etc. An allowance for misc. That way, it would be based on items, not cost.
You want to cut down on government waste, how about stop paying multiple generations of elected officials who think it's immoral for the government to help people.
Ok fucking clown, how does this get enforced? You gonna hire a healthy food deep state? All Michelle Obama did was, “hey maybe kids shouldn’t eat junk food” and dumbfucks like Rand Paul lost their shit.
I’m in favor of this if the FDA would also set limits on sodium and sugar content levels in food, ban oils, and oil based products from foods and stop filling everything with corn syrup… but we all know that they won’t they’ll just limit what the poor can buy.
Food stamps should not cover meat, which expensive, catastrophic to the environment, and ethically questionable.
At the end of the day, the key question is whether we should restrict the freedom of choice for poor people. I’m unsure whether this governmental control brings anything for the society
Bloomberg banned sugary sodas over a certain size and right wingers pretended it was the worst thing that ever happened in the country.
These people have ZERO principals beyond 'making poor people miserable.'
They are going to concentrate on reasonable sounding ideas like this in the press to get rfk confirmed as a normal choice hoping the public ignores his crazier ideas.
Do they not realize a large percent of snap recipients work, are foster children or active duty/vets? Please tell little Timmy his dad's stationed abroad making 8 and hr and he's not allowed a frigging soda
Wait till Rand Paul realizes that it was the Coca-Cola and other soda company that lobbied the government so that people could use government money to buy sodas with food stamps.
I don’t think billionaires making their fortune off government largesse should then turn around and buy social media companies to influence elections to their benefit. Maybe that’s just me. That bothers me more than a 2-liter of Mountain Dew.
Well, he DOES belong to the political party that thinks that "owning a refrigerator" is a "luxury" that "proves" that someone is "too rich" to get SNAP.
Our political class is so out of touch with the majority of their constituents that they don’t have a clue what real life is like. I’m fortunate enough to have access to healthy food because I’m not forced to shop at dollar stores. Food deserts are a real part of many people’s lives.
Who can afford name brand pop on food stamps??? How much do they think people get? Avg. for 1 person with rent or mortgage is $130.00 here. For a month. WTF groceries can you buy with $130.00 for a month? Soup. Lots of soup. Coca Cola? They can't afford that!!!
I don’t disagree, in general. But does he understand the cost of fresh, healthier, unprocessed food? Does he know how long it doesn’t last in a fridge? Does he know how hard it is for a working mom to grocery shop? Has he ever tried to feed a kid beans when all they’ll eat is chicken nuggets?
Some artificial sweeteners aren’t necessarily good for you. They can cause gastrointestinal problems and possibly DNA damage. Maybe these people should leave it up to actual experts.
I don’t either, but maybe that’s all some kids get. Some people don’t even know how to cook, and unless stamps cover fast food, that might be what they get. That’s why free school meals are also so important.
There's a point to be made here about subsidizing unhealthy foods but food stamps are a meager benefit and people who are food insecure sometimes buy a bag of potato chips instead of ingredients for a healthy meal because they have no choice.
As usual,they want to demonize the poor when the poor have NEVER been the problem in America. It's the billionaires who don't pay their fair share that have been the issue the past 40+yrs! Increasing SNAP benefits the economy more than tax cuts for the rich. #letpeopleeat
People on restricted budgets (SNAP or otherwise) buy unhealthy, overly-processed foods because they’re cheaper. And many concentrations of poverty are effectively in food deserts where fresh, healthy foods aren’t available at any price.
My wife and kids and I went on a trip around the country a few years ago. When we entered a Walmart to buy fresh fruit, we were astonished to find they had no fruit and veggies department. We had never even heard of food deserts, but we learned pretty quickly what it meant.
Well, in return, I am assuming that he’s in the pay of a gun manufacturer and/or oil company &/or pharma that cause far more death than using stamps to buy the odd Coke or two 🙄
Comments
Soda is often cheaper than water… and you don’t want to hear the GOP/Libertarian stance on free, clean water to the public.
https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/flint-michigan-residents-still-fighting-for-safe-water-10-years-after-crisis-209653317811
Every grocery store in the country would need to filter out the “forbidden-by-the-GOP-cult” foods in their inventory and cash register systems.
God these people are stupid.
But that’s not the assumption I’m making.
I’m making the assumption that in order to make this change, which takes 5 seconds to spew to a reporter, they would need to read EVERY food label, & determine if each individual food qualifies.
You can technically be left leaning and a libertarian, but in the U.S., almost every libertarian is hard right and wants total control.
Are folks ever going to recognize the insanity of only telling poor folks what they can buy while the rich do whatever.
Has logic left no forwarding address?
Poor people don’t deserve treats ? What about tv and news papers, etc ??
😵💫
I've been on food stamps and they didn't pay for soda. I could have gotten sugary cereal. That's probably the worst of it.
I’m old enough to remember when Birthers turned MAGA mocked First Lady Obama who suggested salad bars in schools & discount credit on SNAP for fresh foods.
We should have universal basic income instead of SNAP because SNAP already has too many limitations, like no hot prepared food, and no spending it on rent to avoid homelessness
one of my only pleasures in life as it is
Just one more question tho; are they eating sugar or HFCS and Stevia and Aspartame "sugars"? Cuz I know what they are eating Stateside where poison is legal.
And you deserve a follow
Fucking fascists
The right: Well, we didn't see that coming.
The left: Geez, you could see that coming from a mile away.
The cruelty is the point, remember that.
with a glass of vinegar
Let people just fucking eat.
1. The shelf life is shorter on fresh,&18% higher rise in prices for fresh & dairy items vs shelf stable items of 1 year expiration
2. Grocery store desserts exist in poor communities.
So fresh isn’t even readily available to all in tiny convenient stores
Buying a bag of frozen chicken tenders is cheaper than fresh cut chicken & last longer for poor kids.
$22 a month SNAP on $14 an hour wages or $18k a year doesn’t go far.
Bananas are .79 a pound versus .29 in 2018.
You are looking at it from a food secure viewpoint.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/29-cheap-healthy-foods#TOC_TITLE_HDR_3
Oak is cheap, one fruit per day is enough for health, bread not expansive, there are many good food to cooking in home that is cheaper than McDonald's.
And fuck Trump.
Nutritious foods require time and kids who are willing to eat them, which means they have to be in community where nutritious foods are supported.
It's an expensive way to live in a colony.
in fact, diet store brand costs even less.
I love the food stamps program, but IMHO we shouldn't be paying for name brands when there are reasonable "store brand" alternatives.
(the problem is that many areas where food stamps are used are
because "sometimes" something is sold out? That's not a reason.
You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t have boots.
At the end of the day, the key question is whether we should restrict the freedom of choice for poor people. I’m unsure whether this governmental control brings anything for the society
These people have ZERO principals beyond 'making poor people miserable.'
https://www.studlife.com/forum/staff-columnists/2010/10/25/soda-worthy-of-food-stamps
And also, he hasn't been on food stamps so he can shut his entitled face hole.
Joking aside, Both Rand and RFKED are terrible.. but I agree with this, influence healthier options.
Ironically with Rand.. controlling foods is definitely not a libertarian approach.. that he claims to support
give people money and let them choose for themselves
RFK Jr.
Birds of a feather.
Feather-brained idiots.
#SmallGovernment 🤦🏻♂️
This ain’t rocket science.