I've taken a lot of flak for saying that food stamps are a program whose time has gone. But I hope we can all agree that it's time for WIC to take the long walk behind the barn. The goal of the program is laudable, and even (gasp!) something I think we should be spending government money on: making sure that poor, er, proto-babies get adequate prenatal nutrition. But as it has been implemented, the thing is a massive handout to dairy farmers.
Put down the "Vegans are evil" picket sign; my problem isn't that we're giving them milk and milk products. The problem is that the list of foods available is weird and not particularly nutritious. Fruit and vegetable juice, but not actual fruit and vegetables. Milk products, but no soy milk or cheese. Hey, I don't like either. But there's no reason to give people dairy products, but not fortified soy milk. And juice is much worse for you than the high fiber plant foods in their original state.
Obesity is a much bigger problem for poor people than undernutrition; there's no reason that we should be pushing fattening foods on poor women, except that the lobbies that produce these foods will not tolerate having any of them removed from the list. Meanwhile, there's no attempt to ensure that pregnant women and young children are getting a really balanced diet, even though new research is showing that the different components of prenatal diet may have a large effect on lifelong predisposition to obesity and disease.
I note that tuna is on the list. Isn't that also on the list of foods pregnant women are NOT supposed to eat because of mercury content?
Ah, our tax dollars at work.
Forgive me the post first, research later but I just checked and tuna is actually advised as OK but not more than two meals (6oz)/week. That's for light tuna. Albacore is only 1/week because of a higher mercury content.
Wouldn't it make more sense to, uhm, reform a program you nominally support rather than flat out abolish it? It would seem the optimal solution to WIC only supporting unhealthy foods isn't to abolish WIC, but to have WIC pay for healthy food.
Wouldn't it make more sense to, uhm, reform a program you nominally support rather than flat out abolish it? It would seem the optimal solution to WIC only supporting unhealthy foods isn't to abolish WIC, but to have WIC pay for healthy food.
There have to be better ways of implementing it too. I was in Chicago a few months ago, working with a few people that ran a soup kitchen. The guy said he used to get his foodstamps and sell like $100 worth for $75 cash, and then go buy drugs and whatever with it. He said this kinda stuff was common.
Well, this is probably the seventeenth time I will ask why you prefer to eliminate a program which has something wrong with it, rather than correct the wrong thing. You might respond "because political pressures and the nature of the bureaucratic beast are such that it'll never be reformed!" but guess what -- political pressures and the nature of the bureaucratic beast are such that it'll never be eliminated, either. You have a better political shot, in the current climate, of convincing people that a program for pregnant women and infant children ought to have healthy things like fruit, vegetables, and soy milk in it, than convincing people of the problem of embedded bureaucratic programs abstractly outliving their usefulness.
And he said he had a Cadillac too! And he didn't pay child support and he was a pimp!
Pull the other one, Ronald Reagan.
WIC also has a pretty horrendous track record for discouraging women from breastfeeding.
http://www.internationalbreastfeedingjournal.com/content/1/1/8
I'd love to see them subsidizing hospital-grade breast pumps for working mothers and offering mediation with employers to provide pumping time. But that wouldn't help the Dept of Agriculture...
A couple of months ago the woman in front of me at the supermarket had her purchases separated into two groups. She used WIC vouchers to pay for the first group. For the second group, which consisted of WIC-ineligible items, she paid with an American Express gold card.
Actually, Leah, WIC does provide hospital-grade breast pumps in several states, including my own. However, it takes a whole lot more than free breast pumps and company-sanctioned pumping time to encourage mothers to exclusively breastfeed for the entire first year of life. Even if WIC participants breastfed at the same rates as the larger population, most of them would still use formula at some point, breast pumps or no.
This reminds me a bit of the article, was it in Commentary, where the female author was suggesting that the pickiness of women re: suitors wasn't an informed good. Not to make that point of view a sine qua non of this discussion, the WIC program compared to what I guess? The WIC program was started after a series of articles came out in the British Medical Journal defining a 'crtical period' for brain development from prebirth to 2 years. Not nourised your brain wold be smaller and could never catch up to its potential. R. Dole (R-nonpc) and others then created this program. I believe peanut butter is on it. A fomerly common pregnancy disease, pre-eclampsia, seems to be less common since the introduction of the WIC program. Better nutrition and a possible reduction in the frequency of pre-eclampsia may have implications for ADHD occurence and incidence.
My wife works in a grocery store. She says it's not uncommon for people to come in with several almost expired WIC checks and buy more food than they are likely to use before it goes bad. At least some of the people in the program need more than financial/nutritional help.
The program is a pain for retailers as well. Only certain sizes and certain foods are eligible, and the retailer has to stock certain amounts of baby formula that don't move. The stores actually get audited. Then they get a certified letter saying that they passed - our tax money at work.
The government employees have a union. The agriculture industry has lobbyists. Taxpayers and the poor can lump it.
Aaron's comment about food stamps is dated. There are no more food stamps, there is now a benefit card that works like a debit card. Yes, some of the stupid restrictions are there (you can't use it to pay for toilet paper), but a lot of the fraud has been reduced.
I'm not sure when this will be happening, but the program reform is supposed to be including whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as soy beverages and tofu. Here's a press release from several months ago to that effect: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS184697+06-Dec-2007+PRN20071206