Onetime potato chip salesperson wants to make FoodShare recipients buy nutritious food

By KAREN PARKER | County Line Publisher

It’s hard to imagine what state Rep. Dean Kaufert (R-Neenah) was thinking about when he introduced a bill in the legislature to require FoodShare recipients to use their taxpayer-funded benefits to buy more nutritious food.

A former potato chip salesman, Kaufert perhaps thinks the bill will assuage his own guilt over the time he spent pushing a product that every nutritionist would call junk food. Or perhaps he was his own best customer and his brain has gone fuzzy from overdosing on fat and carbohydrates.

And it’s astounding that Kaufert freely admits that his sponsorship of the bill hinges on rumor and anecdotal evidence. Gee, “somebody said” sure sounds like a great reason to create a law.

Kaufert acknowledges that he hasn’t seen figures on what portion of FoodShare goes for unhealthy purchases and that he can’t be sure his proposal as written would increase the amount of nutritious food purchased.

Meanwhile,the grocers in the great cheese state are in a bit of a swoon. This is just what they wanted to do: be the police officer at the checkout counter.

They expect it would cost them millions. Brandon Scholz, president of the Wisconsin Grocers Association, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that both the state and the grocery stores wouldneed to make significant computer-system changes to comply. Grocers also would need to code new food products by hand to fit into that system, he said.

To make it even more fun, the legislature added a caveat: Only 66 percent of the food stamps must be spent on nutritious food; after that, the food stamp recipient can load up the cart with caviar and imported stuffed olives. Who’s going to keep track of that?

The average food stamp allotment is $33.35 a week per person, which would allow $11.22 to be spent in the gourmet aisle. Oh, my, watch out for those big spenders scrapping over the last lobster in the tank.

And who do you think will pay for the increased overhead incurred by the grocery stores? Oh, just guess. Hint: The same poor schmuck (you) standing in line for a half an hour to buy a loaf of bread while the beleaguered clerk tries to determine if his or her current customer’s crab salad with veggies counts as nutritious or junk food.

We had better hope the food stamp customers and the clerk, who may be so poorly paid that he or she also qualifies for food stamps, don’t take too much time to complete the transaction. They may have an appointment for their drug testing, another one of the legislature’s goofy ideas.

Never mind that statistics show drug use among those taking public benefits is only slightly higher than that of the general population.

Slate magazine looked at drug testing in Utah and Florida and how much it cost. In Utah, 12 out of 466 people (2.5 percent) didn’t screen clean and the cost was $25,000; in Florida, 108 out of 4,000 (2.7 percent) screened the same and the cost was $45,780. In both cases, the cost of the drug tests far outweighed the costs of providing benefits to those people.

And Arizona passed drug testing in 2009. In 2012, the results from the past three years were tallied up, and only one person out of 87,000 screenings was found to have used drugs. The state spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the drug tests and ended up saving $560. That’s quite a return on investment.

Meanwhile, according to the Oshkosh Northwestern, former state legislator and now U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman told a town hall meeting recently that “(he) hears stories about seemingly able-bodied people receiving disability payments, Social Security payments and Food Share benefits. He told the people in attendance to keep an eye on the types of things people on Food Share buy at the grocery store or ask people for more information if they boast about being on disability.”

So get out there and peer into your neighbor’s cart and be sure and send a report to Glenn Grothman. I would give you his email address, but he hides it well and I ran out of time searching for it.

Oddly enough, while the legislature is wasting time dreaming up bills that likely will never get the federal approval required to go forward, the number of food stamp recipients in Wisconsin declined by almost 5 percent last year, to about 820,000.

In addition,over a quarter-million low-income households saw their benefits reduced under Wisconsin’s Food Share program. Milwaukee’s Hunger Task Force blames most of the decline on changes in the federal food stamp program. Hunger Task force director Sherri Tussler told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that hundreds of elderly and disabled people were among those who lost most of their monthly allocations and were never told why. The cuts began in late 2013, when the last of the federal stimulus funds ran out.

I guess we don’t need to worry about the local food pantries running out of customers any time soon. Isn’t that ever so comforting?

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