Beyond junk food: Scrap SNAP altogether

Zooming out to junk food more broadly, the study found that 22.6 percent of a SNAP household’s grocery bill is spent on a combination of sweetened beverages, prepared desserts, salty snacks, candy, and sugar, while non-SNAP households spend 19.7 percent of their grocery budget on these items.

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Doing the math, American taxpayers subsidized junk food purchases to the tune of $26.9 billion in 2022. …

This is where the framing of this entire issue needs to be challenged. The debate people are having is whether SSB restrictions should be put in place. But the debate we need to be having is whether this program should exist at all.

Not only is this robbery on a massive scale, the program also seems to be doing a pretty bad job at promoting nutrition. “One of the great mistakes,” Milton Friedman reminds us, “is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” The fact is, nutrition and health among low-income Americans remain terrible despite decades of food stamps and astronomical levels of funding. While approximately one third of adults are obese in the US overall, that number is 40 percent for Americans on food stamps. In short, SNAP isn’t working.

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