Its a broken system that promotes unproductive behavior.
I know of a case where my buddy wanted to hire a young man (say 18ish). He was going to send him to trade school to be a bike mechanic and then employ him in his shop.
The kid turned down this offer ... because .... he just got approved for food stamps and could live off that.
BTW, he was from a family where 2 (now 3) generations were on gov't aid.
i think we all agree that this sort of thing is where we should focus our efforts, rather than throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
questions:
1) how would you modify the system to identify these situations without the threat of discrimination / profiling which gets the ACLU's panties in a wad
2) is there a means to quantify how much of this is actually happening? if it's less than 5% of the total program (which is still probably a couple billion dollasr), is it worth spending a boatload of resources to combat it?
it is nice to see they did put an end to college students collecting SNAP benefits when they're parents are already paying for everything
