@Getawaywithit I wouldn’t dream of claiming you were feckless. I’m not wedded to the notion of food stamps either, I just know it seems to be a policy they have in America so presumably it benefits some children somewhere.
I genuinely do not have a strong view here, I’m not a social scientist, and it most certainly not my area of expertise. It just seemed a logical suggestion. Apologies if it was a stupid or ill-thought out one! I’m just as keen to learn around these wider issues as clearly there is a problem.
I will say this though is protecting the ego’s/pride of benefit recipients really of greater significance than getting food in hungry children’s bellies? I would have thought that was the bigger priority here? Again I may have this wrong but isn’t it broadly speaking accepted that people get vouchers towards nursery places up to a certain number of hours? I don’t believe there is any insinuation that people who avail themselves of such are feckless, so I’d challenge that anyone requiring food stamps should any more aggrieved than that.
I’d suggest means testing or whatever to ensure it got into the hands of those who need it, but unfortunately that just adds cost and hassle and takes away from the limited resources we could distribute as a society.
The view I currently hold is I really don’t agree with notions of deserving/undeserving poor. In fact I’d even go so far to say I’d like any social safety net to insulate people even from the worst effects of their own bad decisions.
The sticking point or the issue that worries me is that by sliding too far into pathological altruism, whenever we subsidise something we get more of it. There is something called the tragedy of the commons, which basically states that any shared resource a community has access too can be consumed up to and including to the point of rendering the asset incapable of producing any further benefit in future as people rush to utilise this resource to maximise their own personal benefit. This regrettably produces the effect that the rational action of all individuals is to take as much as they can get before it’s rendered useless. Hastening it’s decline.
Just in closing if you felt I was insinuating you or anyone else was “feckless” I unreservedly apologise. I really don’t know you to be at all placed to judge your personal circumstances. I’m just trying to sniff out whatever policy might work on a macro level to combat the problem of malnourished children.
I’m even open to looking into a universal basic income, if there was some realistic method of making that work without running into the tragedy of the commons issue I outlined above. Really you’ll get no judgement from me you work the system as you need to for your family it’s what 99.99% of the human race would do in your shoes including me.