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kalikshama -> RE: Are you on food stamps? (8/2/2013 10:18:06 AM)
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What do food stamps buy?
The U.S. public can only guess as the USDA refuses to provide the information.
...There are two categories of information being withheld, each for a different reason.
First is the question of food purchases. What foods are people buying with their SNAP benefits? How much of the SNAP budget is going for fruits and vegetables and how much for soft drinks and snack foods? No one knows. Here, Congress is the culprit: It has not given the USDA the authority to collect product-specific information, even though it would be easy to do so in an era of bar codes and EBT cards.
Second is the question of how much money individual retailers collect from the program. The Agriculture Department routinely collects this information; the agency knows precisely how much SNAP pays each of the nearly 247,000 grocers, gas stations, convenience markets, liquor stores and big-box stores that accept food stamps. But the agency will not reveal the numbers, citing tortured legal arguments that federal law and regulations prohibit such disclosures. In at least two instances (in Oklahoma and Massachusetts), state officials did release this information about vendors, and the USDA later chastised them for it.
In the absence of public information on what SNAP dollars buy and where they are spent, vital decisions are made in darkness. In 2010, the USDA denied New York City's request to ban the purchase of soft drinks with food stamps — all without it having any solid information about the amount and cost of such products sold to SNAP recipients.
In the meantime, another federal agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, is spending billions of dollars to combat childhood obesity, which is affected by diet and disproportionately afflicts children living in poverty. And the American Medical Assn. has weighed in, pledging in June to work for a ban on the use of food stamps to buy sugary drinks.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wielawski-food-stamps-20130802,0,1639589.story
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