Not quite sure how it is where you live, but around here (Germany), getting healthy food if you're on a really tight budget is incredibly hard.
this is true. i mean look at the nutrition info on most (affordable) food items (this includes those value boxed meals too), youre greeted with so many zeros it makes me question why were eating it in the first place. i perfer to actually cook, as opposed to going the boxed meals route (for one i grew up on them and thus hate them, also i can never get them to come out right, they defy the rules of cooking), i buy lots of produce, meat, and raw ingredients without any actual plan of what im going to cook. i never bothered to check to see if anything i make is healthy or not. it also depends on where your at. fresh vegetables are very expensive here, so i buy frozen unless theres a sale. my sister started buying bulk produce and freezing it herself, i wonder if shes on to something. meat is cheap here, which amazes me. and what really irks me is i live in a fishing town, yet we still pay top dollar for fish. you used to be able to buy halibut right at the dock for $4 a pound, but the government put a stop to that, so we have to pay $15-$20 bucks a pound for it now. and that is why i vote republican.
In some states here in the US, people don't pay sales tax on food. In other states they do. And them in some, they have a bastardized mix between the two in order to promote certain foods over others(where the g'ment gets it's right to do this is dubious) and he's asking if it's kosher for folk to buy the taxable stuff with their food stamps, which have no actual monetary value but are accepted as vouchers that the grocery stores turn into the G'ment for money.
My two cents is that there shouldn't be a difference between types of food. It's either taxable or it's not, and anything else is the government playing favorites, which it isn't supposed to do.
i can agree with that. if anything saying that these products get this tax and those products get this other tax, and then there's a sales tax on top of that. keeping all this straight certainly costs the store money which increases the prices at the store. when the stores have to bring in a programmer to tweak the software on the registers because the government put a new tax law on the books (ive seen it happen once), that can get expensive. also it seems un-american to say "were gonna give you these food stamps, but you only get to buy the products on this list". youd probibly save everyone some money if you executed all the food industry lobbyists.
getting food stamps is fairly easy. you give proof of your income and tell em how many people you have to feed and if its below some level, they apply some obscure formula to determine how much you get. they dont care where you get your money, so its not just welfare bums who are on it. usually there are poor people with big families to feed. so when someone buys a couple hundred bucks worth of cola and chips, maybe its because they have a dozen kids and they need to put something to drink in their lunch boxes. still you might get a couple people abusing the **** out of them. i buy quite a bit of cola, i figure its better for the public than if i was hooked on heroin or meth, and stealing their stuff to pay for it. i do the shopping, and we get a couple hundred in food stamps, mom pitches in a hundred, and i pitch in another hundred on top of that, then we spend most of it and buy about 3 weeks worth of groceries. which includes my 4-8 bottles of coke (i buy more when its on sale) and my moms coffee supplies (her coffee usually is loaded with sugar and expensive flavored creamer), and she usually gets a snack, id say about $25 goes to junk. id say thats fair.
but when i was living with my brother and getting my degree, i was receiving my own food stamps. i was working then but was only getting minimum wage and since my schedule was loaded (it went get up, bus, bus, work, bus, bus school, bus, bus, bar (this is where i used to study), bus, sleep) it was necessary to buy my own food and usually eat it on the go. i was never in one spot for more than an hour so id just get me a coke and a bunch of slim jims and that would be my dinner for the day. i only got like a hundred bucks a month, not a lot. but i abused the **** out of those. they mostly went to junk. i lived on fast food (which ate up my cash) and snacks. funny thing was i only weighed 200 back then, i didnt get fat till i started eating more healthy.
from a political standpoint the taxes on junk food (im sure some states and municipalities have had laws like this but nothing at the federal level) came into being around the time obama put in his healthcare plan. they wanted to make sure to recoup the losses from people who abused their health with a sin tax on junk food. in all likelyhood it was added onto the plan as if it was something tacked on at the last minute to get a couple more votes for it. if the government is that desprate for cash, then why doesnt it legalize marijuana, put big taxes on it (much as was done with alcohol and tobacco). it would give the government a lot more money with which to spend wastefully.
