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After immersing myself in my classmate's articles in order to complete this week's task, I stumbled upon one in particular which caught my attention. Only referring to himself as SmartAleck, this author discusses the unbelievable strain that our little social program of food stamps has had on our current economy in his aptly named blog "The Cake is a Lie" (a game reference, coined to represent chasing an unattainable goal.) Living in this current era of economic downturn, one would be hard-pressed not to be on food stamps yourself or at the very least know someone who is. Lets face it, if you qualify, you've probably been in that office at least once. It has become a staple in our society. Living in a poorer Austin neighborhood, I often see people using and abusing this program. I can rarely make a visit to my local grocery store without being accosted by someone trying to sell me their food stamps for half price, in order to get some cash, or seeing the privately owned gas stations accepting food stamps on the sly for beer or lotto tickets. At the very least, I see people on food stamps with mountains of preprocessed, low quality, high fat snacks, that I couldn't even begin to afford, while almost completely avoiding any real food (ie. fresh vegetables, meats and cooking ingredients) of substancial nutritional value. SmartAleck brings up a few great points and and some nice statistics that really put this debt into perspective. His argument for welfare reform was compelling and well formed as were most of this author's articles, however this particular article did lack in any concrete solutions. I also wish this author could have spent some time discussing the fact that grocery prices continue to skyrocket, while they offer us lower and lower quality foods, and yet we continue to use our tax money to pay farmers not to grow food. Our system is definitely flawed, but unfortunately this may be one system we just cannot easily fix without starving out a lot of good people who just need a little help.
Stamp Me Foodless (SmartAleck, The Cake is a Lie, March 31 2012)
