Every few days, some bootlicker will pop up on the internet with a juicy story about how they witnessed someone trying to buy food with food stamps and either pulled out a wad of cash, as well, or they have an iPhone and their nails done. Of course, this always stokes the ire of people who aren’t intelligent enough to think five feet ahead of them and want to blame their ills on someone buying food with government assistance. Or even worse, a steak, or even worse, not a steak, because you should only buy healthy food while on food stamps, but you shouldn’t treat yourself kindly, in a world that probably already doesn’t treat you kindly enough.
It never fails, their image of the Welfare Queen lives on, and more importantly, she’s Black.
The argument is that food stamps should not be used for junk food; anyone with a relatively healthy diet will tell you that food that is healthier is generally more expensive, and of course doesn’t last as long. Many food stamp recipients also live in food deserts or food swamps where fresh produce and fresh meat are not readily accessible.
Many of these reported stories or videos lack context and ironically enough, many of them are at Walmart. The Walmart corporation is one of the largest recipients of subsidies, with half of its employees receiving government assistance. There are people who see no issue with Walmart not paying enough for their employees to be able to shop where they work without government assistance, just as they have a problem with their employees buying a birthday cake on food stamps. The Waltons have more money than the bottom 40% of the country, yet say they can’t afford to pay their employees a living wage.
Have they considered not having Starbucks daily, and budgeting better in order to stay afloat in business?
The problem is that too many people think that poor people should not have something nice because they are under the impression that hard work guarantees prosperity, and poverty is a result of laziness, as if slavery wasn’t hard work, *laughs out loud*. As if there are not countless people working multiple jobs just to still not make ends meet, but god forbid they have a phone that doesn’t flip closed. The ire that some people have about their tax money being used to feed others is insanity, especially since it is rarely, if ever, coupled with the same energy for tax dollars being used to murder children or separate families.
Being more concerned with a mother of five having more groceries than she can eat in a month bothers people who aren’t bothered by Jeff Bezos having a superyacht, which has its own Wikipedia page, and is over 400 feet long (longer than both London’s Big Ben and the Statue of Liberty by over 100 feet, each). The Walton family is worth over $400 billion; Jeff Bezos is worth over $235 billion, and yet someone will think they rightfully earned every penny, even though Walmart has had to pay over $1 billion in wage theft, which is still less money than they stole from their laborers. Amazon employees notoriously have had to endure UTIs because they weren’t granted sufficient bathroom breaks; hell, even his own housekeeper sued him for the same thing. And somehow those who are being worked the hardest are still not viewed as the hardest workers.
If you pay income taxes, then your labor and your money are being used to fund things that you do not like. Feeding people should not be on the top of that list. But the problem is, too many people delicately balance their sense of self and self-worth on the backs of people they think are beneath them, poor people and even worse, poor Black people, who are assumed to be the welfare queens.
Even so, SNAP isn’t where the government money is spent anyway. According to the USDA, SNAP is 1.5% of the federal budget, but that doesn’t fit into the narrative that poor people trying to eat are what’s wrong with our country, and not rich people who are trying to make it harder for everyone else to eat but them.
