Archived Maine Wants Candy, Soda Excluded From Food Stamps (Wall Street Journal) (archive.is)
submitted ago by cpoakes
Posted by: cpoakes
Posting time: 5 years ago on
Last edit time: never edited.
Archived on: 2/12/2017 1:51:00 AM
Views: 2801
SCP: 123
125 upvotes, 2 downvotes (98% upvoted it)
Archived Maine Wants Candy, Soda Excluded From Food Stamps (Wall Street Journal) (archive.is)
submitted ago by cpoakes
view the rest of the comments →
[–] guinness2 1 point 6 points 7 points (+7|-1) ago (edited ago)
Good call!
I work hard for my money and I don't want my income tax being used to by luxury foods for lazy fuckers!
That said, as a Type 1 Diabetic since birth, I hate soda but I use it as a cheap and super-efficient emergency medicine because it's profoundly surgery and it digests far quicker than solids and it's less harsh on my stomach than attempting to mix water and sugar / icing sugar because that literally makes me puke. Perhaps a single exception should be made for Type 1 Diabetics with an Insulin script in their name? Yeah, the exception would allow for potential abuse... but manually regulating your blood chemist is hard enough even on a good day...
[–] 123_456 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
If they really need sweets they can pay out of pocket. Food stamps is only about $125 a month. The program is just to help them out a little when they're struggling.
[–] guinness2 1 point 0 points 1 point (+1|-1) ago (edited ago)
Sorry, I disagree because type 1 diabetics need emergency foods such as soda and it scares me to think that diabetics may be forced cut corners or take risks and try to "make do" in order to pay their electricity bill. I've never been on welfare, however I've always kept large stashes of soda in my house in case of emergency... far more than I'd ever expect to need.. and it has saved my life. Type 1 Diabetics are forced to manually inject insulin and sometimes accidents happen and we inject a days worth of insulin into a small vein without knowing... and when that happens we are forced to consume a day's worth of calories to counteract the insulin within about 15 mins... before we lose consciousness... and eating a day's worth of calories by eating apples is risky business.
Food stamps are intended to help desperately poor people purchase essential foods and for most type 1 diabetics there is nothing more essential than having emergency soda.
[–] Typo 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
I was going to post something about this as well. I worked with someone (not on foodstamps) who kept a candy bar in a cabinet as her emergency medicine. I would think low income people would have a harder time keeping up with medical things so a cheap candy bar or soda might be the best option for Type 1's. I'm not sure if privacy laws would prevent this from being disclosed on food stamp application forms.
When it comes down to function, I'm not sure how they would do it. Maybe all cards can buy certain items and Type 1's get a different card that allows for candy/soda? I don't know if this would be worth it from a cost standpoint (for the government) though.
[–] guinness2 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
You are correct... diabetics can purchase edible glucagon which is 100 time as expensive as conventional sugar and digests twice as fast... however I just eat twice as much sugar in an emergency and profit!!! :-)
Diabetics do need to be registered in order to get medicines and supplies and we are used to that sort of thing, so I agree it wouldn't be a huge issue for diabetics to tick a box when registering for food stamps to receive a special concession for candy or soda... that or they could present an old script for insulin because we have plenty of those too.