...no joke here. I housed a welfare mother for a couple of years and was SHOCKED at what her food subsidy amounted to: basically, other than food stamps, which did not even cover bare necessities, she got a lot of coupons for junk food: there were two insults here. The first was that it was junk food; it was not nutritious but it was very expensive. The second insult was that she would get a coupon for say, $5.00 to get Cheerios; but Cheerios are only $3.00. So her choice was either to get two boxes and pay for the diff herself or to get 1 box and lose the diff. But somehow, I'm willing to bet that Cheerios got a tax break for the whole $5.00. Anyway, it was a fucking piece of shit so far as social services were concerned. So far as I could see it was a direct subsidy to the middling class providing the bureaucracy for these services, a direct subsidy to the corporations that bought in, and a very indirect/poor subsidy to the people in need. A grotesque charade. Expletives deleted.
Joanna