Gov. David Paterson and New York City MayorMichael Bloomberg have hit on a smart, sensible idea in seeking federal approval to ban the use of food stamps for sugar-sweetened beverages. The only question is whether the U.S. Department of Agriculture can stand up to the all but certain opposition.
The governor and the mayor want USDApermission for New York City to try out their idea for two years. They argue that sugared beverage consumption contributes to obesity and all its associated health problems, and that government assistance shouldn't be used to foster that. And, they argue, it could encourage more people on public assistance to avoid sugared drinks, and save government money in the long run on health care costs.
Their proposal will probably spark something of a repeat of the battle over the governor's attempt to get at the problem in another way and raise money for a cash-strapped state: a tax on sugary beverages. To hear the beverage industry and its allies in the fight tell it, the soda tax was an assault on freedom and a threat to the household budgets of millions of New Yorkers.
What we'll likely be told in this case is that the food stamp program can't handle the bureaucratic burden of such a restriction. As the rules stand now, food stamps can be used for pretty much anything that qualifies as food, with the exception of alcoholic beverages, pet food, hot foods and foods consumed in the store. The New York City experiment would for the first time restrict a food on the basis of its nutritional value, or, more precisely, lack of it.
This actually isn't new. A 2007 USDA report laid out a host of reasons against limiting food stamp choices on the basis of nutritional value: the healthfulness of foods is subjective; the bureaucracy would have to expand to make those judgments and constantly review new products; and more complex rules would confuse and embarrass recipients and slow down checkout lines, particularly in stores without scanners. Most people, the study said, would buy the restricted items with their own cash, so their behavior wouldn't change.
And yet, another federal food program handles this challenge just fine. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, was specifically designed to help people at risk of poor nutrition. It includes a comprehensive list of allowable foods and banned ones. The list of disallowed beverages is easy to understand: fruit drinks, fruit-flavored ades, soda and other beverages that are not 100 percent juice. The $6.4 billion WIC program provided assistance to 9.1 million people last year, with no threat to freedom or a collapse of government that we heard of.
It's one thing to oppose a tax on sweetened drinks because taxes in general are too high. But having the government help people buy "food" that has little or no nutritional value and which leads to health problems down the line? That, as they say in the snack aisle, is nuts.
