[snakeoil]

http://www.businessinsider.com/food-sta ... its-2016-9" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

On Thursday, the Department of Agriculture began asking for companies to join a pilot project to allow SNAP recipients to purchase their groceries online. If successful after a two-year pilot period, the program may be expanded.

"We have an opportunity to be putting pressure on making sure that food stamps are a 21st century program," Gunnar Lovelace, a cofounder of the online healthy grocery store Thrive Market, told CNNMoney

It sounds like the Dept. of Ag is preparing for the permanency of the Food Stamp Program. And here I thought that Food Stamps were a temporary fix. Silly me.

[Dogzilla]

You gotta keep in mind that the people who are administering the program WANT it to continue. If it doesn't continue, they'd be out of a job. If they can expand the program, they would have to hire more people, and then they would get themselves a nice raise for being the overseer of all those new peeps.

[tvd]

Damn Dog....now you said something I really agree with.

That is exactly the mentality within ALL of government. Each little bailiwick, each fiefdom, each large bureaucracy, each area of government....they all try to expand their jobs and influence to grow the organization. They look for all ways possible to get bigger.

An example:
Take the public transportation system....busses. Both in Charlotte, and here in Titusville, they run a public bus system, of course. But one common trait that I have observed is that they are always asking for more routes, and more frequent busses on existing routes. More busses, more riders, more drivers, more maintenance, etc.

And yet, it never fails....at any random given time....any time of the day.....it is very likely that if you look at a passing bus,
IT WILL BE NEARLY EMPTY. Check it out. You will see.

They set up a special route from downtown Charlotte to Mooresville, about a 35 mile trip,...one bus per day, timed around the daily commute hours.
I don't know the cost to the rider, but it was widely reported that the cost to the TAXPAYER was $23.00 per passenger riding on this bus. $23.00 subsidized by the taxpayers. !!!! Per passenger!!! So, then what? They expanded that particular route with more busses.

The trans director for Clt Mecklenburg was paid well over 200,00 per year, and he wanted to keep expanding his little kingdom.....

Just an example.

[johnforbes]

Dog is right about that.

The Dept of Agric has been pushing food stamps as an ongoing thing to improve nutrition, to give constant jobs to bureaucrats administering it, and to usher America more and more into a Euro-style welfare state.

It is no accident that 43 million Americans are now on food stamps.

[RealJustme]

You gotta keep in mind that the people who are administering the program WANT it to continue.

That's true for every government agency, they build them into empires, it they cure the reason they exist, they go away so they never cure anything. The worse is our public education system, it's in the teachers union's interests to produce uneducated students as proof they need more and better paid teachers with smaller classes and more teacher aides. Their moto is "Do it for the kids" and if you don't give them everything they demand, you hate children and want them to stay stupid. This is why private schools out perform public schools and produce better educated children at less costs. The dumbing down of children and their education is in the interests of the public school system. I know, I was on a board of education until I couldn't put up with it any longer, if you can afford to put your children in a private school and aren't doing it, you are abusing your children and setting them up for potential failure.

So as Dog said, those administering the program WANT it to continue. The union status needs to be removed from public agencies and the administers of the public school system need to ALL be replaced and teachers given the chance to educate.

[Dogzilla]

Some good stuff.

Except for "private schools perform better than public schools". I don't believe that to be true. Maybe some of them, but not most. For the better private schools that can hand pick their students, only the best kids are accepted, and their are consequences if the kids don't toe the line. Public schools MUST accept everyone/anyone, and they are hindered in any type actions that don't KEEP all the kids in school. Regardless of motivation, ability, murderous attitude, etc.....ALL of em gotta stay.

[sillydaddy]

Maybe it's time for the government to get out of the education business.....

[RealJustme]

Dog there is merit to what you say, public schools must taken them all and private schools can select, so that factor is there, but...they've shown that poor black children who weren't given an opportunity to attend private schools through vouchers out performed those poor black children who were given that opportunity. There is much more accountability and less of an overhead at private schools and now one can question that they tend to challenge the students more than public schools who just push them through for the digit count. Get me right, I don't blame the teachers, except for allowing themselves to be used as tools by the unions and administration building their empires. I get it though, if they don't play the game, no tenure.

Plus I bet even you would admit, if money was no object and you had school age children, you would get them out of those cesspools and into private schools where they can concentrate on getting an education by teachers who are retained based upon merit, not tenure.

[johnforbes]

I went to public elem and high schools, and students have a decent shot in some of them if they have academic or vocational sub-programs.

It is also true that they must take ALL kids, and today that means illegal immigrant kids or the legal (under 14th one interpretation) kids of illegals who don't pay school taxes.

Many of those kids can't even speak English and often were not even raised in First World nations.

So the task of many public schools is more socialization than reading and writing.

When confronted with kids from the ghetto, with little stable family support, and rap crap "culture"...