You can help by purchasing stamps online, www.usps.com
Credit to violetBeauregarde
The question as posed by the free school meals campaign is the creation of an additional benefit, but I was wondering about questions of freedom vs responsibility on their own, so I would be interested in thoughts about schemes which were broadly revenue-neutral. I am assuming, from precedent in the United States and from the steadily decreasing cost of computer support, that it would be practical to distribute something equivalent to food stamps very widely.
Suppose (if only as a thought experiment) that all UK citizens received food stamps sufficient to purchase a nutritionally healthy diet for themselves and for their dependants, favouring cheap but healthy foods, UK-sourced where possible, and benefits and taxes were rearranged to take account of this so as to keep income redistribution broadly constant. Since we managed to introduce rationing during the Second World War without obvious disaster, I presume that we have enough knowledge of nutrition to avoid creating a plague of deficiency diseases. Reasonably healthy luxury foods might be purchased with a combination of food stamps and cash.
Fast food currently raising concerns about obesity would not be covered by food stamps - in the long term this should reduce the cost of providing any given standard of healthcare on the NHS. You can get fat on e.g. porridge oats, potatoes, beetroot, and sausages, but there is going to be less temptation. NASA claim that one reason that they put a lot of effort into providing a variety of meals for astronauts on the ISS is that bland boring food means that even disciplined types like astronauts don't eat enough to keep healthy.
Wikipedia suggests that fraud and abuse of the US food stamp system exists, but only at a few percent of turnover, so not devastating.
The selection of the nation's diet will obviously be a tremendous target of lobbying and special interests - but agricultural policy is already quite political - and we now have freedom to make our own decisions without worrying about the CAP. Will vegetarians complain about the government funding the purchase of meat?
There will be a greatly reduced need for food banks, with everybody guaranteed a ring-fenced basic subsistence diet. Some of the claimed benefits of UBI might apply.
This is obviously a huge government intervention, and paternalist to boot. Is it conceivable that it could improve childhood nutrition and reduce adult lifestyle diseases enough to compensate for that? Do we know how to weigh
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