[zdragnar]

I once had a man try to sell me his food stamps at a grocery store while his little kid was running up and down the aisle. He was the second person that day who tried to sell me his stamps (both offered roughly $100 worth for $80 cash, iirc).

I'm not against food stamps at all, and at one point came close to being on them myself. I don't judge people for needing assistance. When you see such flagrant abuses of the system, however, it tends to burn a little empathy out of you.

[dfxm12]

If you were on SNAP, you might have had some understanding around how much of a hassle it is. The list of things you can't buy is mystifying. $100 in raw chicken vs $80 to go towards hot meals, Advil and dog food might be a valid trade off when you have to watch over a kid who runs around a lot.

[zdragnar]

And if he had asked me to buy specific things for him, I might have actually done so. My grandfather (a poor farmer) regularly told a story about how a man asked him for money, and he turned the man down but bought him lunch instead.

Just handing a man $80 in cash and taking his food stamps means potentially enabling behaviors- alcoholism, drug abuse, etc.- that I don't want to enable. Maybe he just though that less hassle would have been worth having $20 less to spend, I dunno. I've been around enough alcoholics, drug addicts and con artists that I'm not going to just hand money out to people.

[doliveira]

Putting in SRE terms, do you know the whole thing that at scale you will inevitably get errors and it can be counterproductive to try to eliminate them instead of setting an error budget? I think the same applies here. Is it productive to try to control every penny people in welfare spend? And that's a question that should be answered statistically: do the benefits outweigh the bad consequences?

Statistics guarantee that there will be a lot of anecdotes like the ones you've told. The question is: how representative they truly are? Again, I can only talk about my own country, but I hear the same speech here as well. Statistically speaking, though, just giving people money was the right way to go: most will spend in what they need and yeah, that's way more than just painstakingly-controlled government-allowed list of items. Birth rates actually dropped even more amongst welfare recipients, etc...